Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

’Why now?’ Seraphina’s thoughts flared, her dark eyes narrowing into suspicious slits, staring at the gray envelope. ’Are they returning because they genuinely miss him? Or are they returning because the Reaper of the North has suddenly shown a vulnerability they can exploit? Do they want to meet me? Or do they want to remove me?’

Seraphina looked up at Kaelus.

The terrifying, invincible warlord looked like a shattered glass doll.

He looked paralyzed, incapable of processing the emotional payload of the letter in his hands.

He was drowning in the ghosts of his past.

Seraphina tightened her grip on his sleeve.

She had just promised herself she wouldn’t let him lock her in a box. She had promised they were a team.

’He protected me from the monsters,’ Seraphina vowed silently, her Supreme Dark Core pulsing with a fierce, protective, terrifying resolve. ’It’s my turn to protect him from the emotional ones. If these siblings think they can waltz back into his life and hurt him again, they have absolutely no idea what kind of daughter he adopted.’

”Papa,” Seraphina said, her voice clear, sharp, and commanding, cutting through the suffocating silence of the study.

Kaelus blinked, pulling his gaze away from the letter, looking down at her with tired, violet eyes.

”We are going to open the letter,” Seraphina instructed him, stepping closer, radiating a warm presence. ”And then, we are going to invite them for tea. Because this is your house, and you are the Archduke, and you are not afraid of anything. Right?”

Kaelus stared at the tiny, fierce, brave little girl standing before him.

The fractured pieces of his soul slowly began to knit back together, anchored by her strength. He let out a long, ragged breath, the panic receding, replaced by the cold, heavy realization that the past could no longer be outrun.

”Right,” Kaelus whispered, his voice gaining a fraction of its usual steel. He reached out, his trembling fingers finally breaking the black wax seal. ”We are not afraid. We are a team.”

As Kaelus unfolded the letter, Alistair stood frozen in the corner, still wearing his neon pigtails, and Sebastian watched with a heavy heart.

The true battle of the Capital had just begun.

The Emperor was a threat, yes.

The spies were an annoyance. But the ghosts of a broken family were infinitely more dangerous, and the Nacht Estate was about to become the epicenter of a war that swords and magic could not win.

But as Seraphina squeezed her father’s hand, her eyes flashing with dark, protective promise, she knew one thing for certain.

The heavy, gray parchment lay open on the mahogany desk, its contents thoroughly underwhelming.

There were no threats wrapped in flowery metaphors, no declarations of war, no demands for the Nacht treasury, and no poisonous family secrets dragged into the light.

It was, infuriatingly, just a polite, political greeting. Kaelus’s estranged siblings, Caspian and Elara, simply stated they had arrived at their country estate outside the Capital and requested an audience to discuss ”matters of regional politics and familial estate lines” ahead of the Emperor’s banquet.

For a man who had spent fifteen years building impenetrable walls of ice around his heart, a simple ”hello” was a terrifying siege weapon.

Duke Kaelus von Nacht stared at the elegantly penned calligraphy, his violet eyes hollow, the ghosts of his abandonment swirling violently in the chilled air of the study.

His broad shoulders were stiff, his jaw locked so tightly the muscles jumped beneath his pale skin. He was spiraling.

He was falling backward into the dark, freezing abyss of his own memories, preparing to lock himself away from the world.

Seraphina was absolutely not going to allow that.

She did not give the brooding warlord a single second to drown in his own melancholy.

With the blunt-force precision of a missile, she launched herself across the desk, completely scattering the remaining piles of classified documents, and tackled his chest.

”Papa! My tummy is making the empty noises!” Seraphina declared loudly, pressing her cheek against his chest, wrapping her tiny arms around his neck. ”And the pink dog tried to eat a rug! You have to come save the rug!”

Kaelus blinked, physically jolted out of his trauma-spiral by the sudden, heavy weight of a demanding six-year-old. He looked down, his haunted eyes slowly refocusing on her dark, messy hair.

”The... the rug?” Kaelus murmured, his voice slightly raspy.

”It was a very expensive rug, Papa! Butt-tolomeow, I mean, Mr. Sebastian said it was an antique!” Seraphina babbled, grabbing his black-gloved hands and pulling with all her might.

She possessed the physical strength of a marshmallow, but Kaelus immediately yielded to the pressure, allowing himself to be dragged up from his chair.

For the next five hours, Seraphina waged an unrelenting campaign of absolute distraction. She did not leave his side for a fraction of a second.

She demanded piggyback rides through the Grand Gallery. She insisted he read her three separate volumes on the migratory patterns of Northern Ice Trolls, forcing him to do different, increasingly ridiculous voices for each troll.

When his eyes inevitably flickered toward the study where the letter lay, she immediately requested a highly complex, braided hairstyle that required his unblinking concentration.

By the time the grandfather clock chimed midnight, Kaelus was thoroughly, completely exhausted, not by emotional trauma, but by the output required to keep up with a hyperactive kid.

He tucked her into bed, his mind entirely emptied of his siblings, replaced only with the pressing necessity of procuring a specific brand of strawberry jam she had requested for the morning.

The crisis had been successfully averted.

*U*

The following morning dawned bright, sunny, and utterly disastrous for the Chief Administrative Aide.

Alistair stood at the front of the estate’s opulent, sunlit library, clutching a piece of chalk with white-knuckled desperation.

He was impeccably dressed in his pristine, dark green scholar’s robes, his magnificent blonde hair tied back in a severe, highly professional braid.