Sam winds up on a ski lift with Teddy the next day, although it takes several pages of character shuffling to get us there. I mean, if the book isn’t going to have a plot I guess it has to be stuffed with something.

They get off on a conversation with Sam going “I have no power, only Bea does” and Teddy going “fuck the what now?” Sam thinks that advocacy work isn’t ‘real power’ because she’s a brat and I hate her, and even when Teddy asks what she’d do given the choice she has no answer.

So Sam…wants power just for the sake of power? She doesn’t even have a goal, she just…is made she doesn’t have policy-making capabilities? Isn’t that the same attitude that (the book says) the monarchy was supposed to prevent?

Blah blah blah and then later Sam and Teddy are alone in the hot tub room. Apparently this place has a hot tub room. Okay. They continue on their ‘responsibilities’ conversation from earlier as if there wasn’t a time skip. They talk about college and friendships and how lonely it is when people want you for your proximity to power. (Which…Sam insists she doesn’t have? But also woe, so lonely.)

Teddy says he likes Bea well enough but doesn’t feel good enough for her because his family is broke and about to lose all their shit. There’s an off-hand line about how they had to lay off hundreds of people because they lose so much money in bad investments, and then the convo just carries on talking about how woeful it is to have expectations placed on you and yeah Teddy is pretty fucking evil, too.

All these bastards need to get got. I hope you’re guarded by people as terrible as Connor and the abolitionists that you clearly pay no attention to murder every last one of you.

Also Sam is no longer mad at him for the whole ‘make out then date sister’ thing. But who cares? They’ll all be dead soon anyway.

I kind of want an antagonist-lead story about a French Revolution style thing, where the monarchists are the main characters but also they’re so unabashedly terrible that you root for them to get murdered.

Oh yeah, then they kiss some. I guess this the part of the book where just absolutely everyone gets minor, short make outs. Doesn’t even feel good for a romance book because it’s so slapdash and there’s so many of these scenes in a row.

Alright, what’s Daphne up to.

Daphne is conning her way into the royal’s New Year’s Eve party, with Ethan’s impromptu help.

In the alternate reality version of this story where everyone gets axed, Daphne would be the one that lets the rebels in not out of altruism but in a bid to keep some level of power and also head-having-ness under the new regime.

Daphne is politely mean to Nina for a bit, then goes to flirt with Jeff. She basically tells him she’ll have sex with him if they get back together, but he tells her point blank that he’s with someone else now. Daphne runs off and winds up next to Sam, who offers her booze. Daphne figures, why keep up the perfect girl routine anymore, so she agrees and accidentally gets blitzed. Hey, things happen when it’s your first time and also your drinking partner is a wealthy disaffected brat.

She has a great time at the party, until Ethan shows up and says he got her a taxi to send her home. I’m not sure why, since she was just dancing. On the dance floor. Along with Sam. And Sam didn’t have to leave. Daphne just out here having a good time, ignoring her machinations, and here comes Ethan to make her feel bad about it and stick her in a cab.

Confirmation that she and Ethan have had some kissing in the past and she still wants to boogy-joogy him, but instead of following up on that she’s like “Nah, I’m gonna push Nina down the stairs and still be a princess.”

I mean, not explicitly, but you know.

Time skip to a week later where Bea is in bed with her guard.

I mean, I can’t complain, I did earlier say that they could do this pretty easily.

Oh, wait, yes I can, because it says they’re not having sex. Which, on the surface of it, is fine. People can share a bed and not sex it up. But we combine this with Nina and Jeff and they’re whole “naked in bed BUT IT TOTES WASN’T SEX, YOU GUYS” thing and it just feels like the book has some rule going where sex = no longer good enough to be a protagonist. Let Bea and Connor bone, you cowards.

The two are lovey-dovey for a little while before Bea gets called to her father’s study. He’s all somber and shit and gives her an old copy of the Constitution that is all full of king stuff because it’s this universe. And then he drops the bomb that he has stage-four lung cancer. (I haven’t mentioned it, but there have been lines about him looking more serious and also tired than usual.) (On the other hand he went jogging like a couple of weeks ago? Also he’s a king? Who jogs every morning? How did this not get caught sooner?)

Anyway, he’s dead soon he says. He’s not going to pursue treatment because it’s too advanced. He doesn’t want to tell anyone, he wants to just ‘enjoy the time he has left.’ Which is less than a year. Dude, you aren’t just some random rich guy, shouldn’t you be preparing for the political change of power? Seems awful rude to the international stage to just be like “urk, bye” when you know in advance this is coming.

But instead of that, they carry on talking about the monarchy in vague and flowery terms as if it’s purely symbolic and has no real meaning but also all of the poetic meaning because why bother grappling with the realities of society-bending levels of power when you can just wax about it instead?

Oh! Oh! Slavery is finally mentioned!

In one paragraph, where it says that George Washington had ‘known’ slavery was wrong, and as proof they cite the fact that he freed his own slaves after his death. So apparently the great and gracious George I’s only flaw was that he didn’t abolish all of it, not that HE KEPT SLAVES WHILE HE WAS ALIVE.

IT’S NOT LIKE YOU CAN ONLY FREE THEM IN A WILL YOU CAN DO THAT WHILE STILL ALIVE.

GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS A SHIT HEAD.

Also, no word on Civil War, just that abolishing slavery happened ‘two generations’ later.

Anyway, the king wants her to get married to Teddy lickity-split, because it’ll help her PR-wise when she takes power sine plenty of people are still upset about her being a woman. Also, he’d like to be alive to see her wedding. He lays the guilt on really thick, too, then tries to cover it up with a ‘oh, whatever you decide is fine, tho.’

Gotta ramp up that dramatic tension, I guess.

Except…it doesn’t, really? Because frankly, none of these characters have any teeth besides Daphne. There’s no stakes to their decisions. Well, technically Bea has it with her whole being the first female monarch but that’s so vague that it’s hard to really feel it. We barely ever see anything beyond the main cast, we have no idea what the wider country is doing or what the political situation is. So they can say that her marriage has consequences, and it kind of makes sense that her marriage has consequences, but it doesn’t feel like her marriage has consequences. And since the narrative goes out of its way to make her parents seem so kind and understanding, that doesn’t help much either.

If it had just been about Beatrice, if it had opened with the cancer diagnosis and followed her accepting the role and getting thrown into power struggles and actually dealing with the public fallout of the sexism…all while carrying on a secret romance with her bodyguard, that would have the bones of a decent romance novel. (Still shit royals, but I mean. At least there’s a chance of a plot in there.) Hard to do when there’s three different romances to juggle at once and NOTHING ELSE GOING ON THO.