Cress ’s Reviews > Prince's Gambit > Status Update

He was looking at Laurent’s signet ring.
He felt the hair rise all over his body. The last time he had seen this ring, he’d been at an inn at Nesson, and Laurent had given it over to a messenger. Give him this, and tell him that I will wait for him at Ravenel, he’d said.
He said it as it opened up inside him, ‘They are our reinforcements.’

Laurent and his insane planning... 😶

and instead found his way to the Veretian tents and sought out Auguste to find some common ground. Laurent would have been thirteen but in Damen’s mind’s eye he would have found him a little older, sixteen or seventeen, old enough that Damen’s nineteen-year-old self could have begun, with all the exuberance of youth, to court him.

My man is writing AU in his head.. Damen would've loved Tumbler and AO3

‘Sentiment?’ said Laurent.
‘Something like that.’
‘You should give me the other.’ Damen flushed slowly, heat spreading from his chest over his skin, his heartbeats intrusive. He tried to answer in a normal voice.
‘I can’t imagine you’d wear it.’
‘To keep. I wouldn’t wear it,’ said Laurent, ‘though I don’t believe your imagination is having any difficulty with the idea.’

‘He needs me,’ said Damen. ‘I don’t care if you tell the world.’

This one pleaded for you. Spending, perhaps, the last of his fading currency with the Regent. Not realising how little currency he had left.
Whether his beauty would survive adolescence no one would ever know, for Nicaise would not see fifteen now.


Ohhh Nicaise 😭💔

He was not the headstrong prince he had been in Akielos. The man he had been in Akielos would never have served a Veretian master, or fought alongside Veretians for their cause.
He would never have known Laurent for what he was; never have given Laurent his loyalty or held Laurent’s trust for a moment in his hands.
Guerin moved to strike the gold from his left wrist, and he pulled it back.
'No, Leave that one on'

when Laurent saw who was beside him, he smiled, the expression a little shy but completely genuine. Damen, who hadn’t been expecting it, felt the single painful beat of his heart. He’d never thought Laurent could look like that at anyone. ‘It’s morning,’ said Laurent. ‘We slept?’
‘We slept,’ said Damen.

Im dying here!!!!

One of the veeeeery few sex scenes where I felt like I should not be reading this.. it was soo Intimate!! Chapter 19 was worth the wait.

Although I really hope I'm reading it wrong but I don't think I am and now I want to kill the Regent.

‘He was lying. He wouldn’t take you back. You’re too old.’
‘You don’t know,’ said Aimeric.
'Thick-voiced and rough-cheeked, you’d make him sick.’
'You don’t know anything—’
‘With your ageing body, your overripe attentions, you’re nothing but—’
‘You’re wrong about us! He loves me!’

Wtf.... I'm so disgusting 😶

I kissed him, thought Damen, ....The warm, sweet kiss had been broken in a moment of promise: the first slight parting of lips, the hint that Laurent had been on the cusp of allowing the kiss to deepen, though his body had been singing with tension.
When he closed his eyes, he felt how it might have happened: slowly... He would have been careful, so careful.

He's soooo in love.