Chapter 223: Just a Child

His arms were still slightly raised, hovering in the empty air where he had expected to catch his daughter.

He slowly, mechanically lowered his arms.

His violet eyes, usually cold and calculating, were currently wide, staring at the space where Seraphina had been, and then tracking her path to where she was currently snuggled deeply, happily, blissfully in the arms of another woman.

The infamous, bottomless vinegar jar inside the Archduke’s soul did not just tip over; it detonated with the force of a magical explosive.

’She... she ran past me,’ Kaelus’s internal monologue whispered, a sensation of profound, staggering heartbreak piercing his chest. ’I held my arms out. I was prepared for impact. And she used evasive maneuvers to bypass my perimeter. She chose the amber silk over the midnight velvet.’

The ambient temperature in the drawing room plummeted by twenty degrees.

A thin, jagged layer of black frost immediately began to crystallize across the surface of Alistair’s chalkboard.

Archduke Leonidas, witnessing the entire interaction, completely failed to suppress a loud, booming bark of feral laughter.

"Ha! Shot down in your own foyer, Kaelus!" Leonidas bellowed, slapping his thigh, his amber eyes dancing with unholy glee. "The Sovereign has spoken! The warmth of the South triumphs over the freezing, miserable misery of the North! Accept your defeat, you brooding icicle! You have been replaced!"

Kaelus slowly turned his head.

The glare he leveled at Leonidas was so dense, radiating with toxic, homicidal jealousy, that the air between them actively warped.

"Leonidas," Kaelus rasped, his voice a lethal, vibrating threat. "If you do not remove your booming voice from my estate within the next ten seconds, I will freeze your vocal cords and use them as violin strings."

"You are just bitter because my wife smells like vanilla and you smell like murder and old parchment!" Leonidas cackled, entirely immune to the threat, walking over to wrap an arm around Lysandra’s shoulders as she stood up, holding Seraphina effortlessly on her hip.

Seraphina rested her head on Lysandra’s shoulder, looking incredibly comfortable, entirely unaware of the catastrophic damage she had just inflicted upon her father’s fragile ego.

"Papa," Seraphina chirped, looking at Kaelus’s frozen, devastated expression. "Why is the chalkboard freezing? Did you forget to turn off your aura again?"

Kaelus’s jaw clenched.

He looked at her innocent, wide eyes. He couldn’t be mad at her. He could only be mad at his own lack of softness.

’I must procure softer garments,’ Kaelus plotted frantically, a desperate, pathetic fatherly panic overriding his military logic. ’I will commission a tunic woven entirely from the down feathers of the Northern Snow-Swan. I will bathe in vanilla extract. I will not be out-cuddled by a Valen.’

"It is merely a draft, Seraphina," Kaelus managed to say, forcing his aura to retract, though his violet eyes continued to glare daggers at the smug Fire Archduke. "Welcome to my home, Lysandra. And Leonidas. To what do I owe the... pleasure of this unannounced intrusion?"

"We are here for the Emperor’s Banquet, obviously!" Leonidas grinned, crossing his arms. "But we arrived in the Capital a few days early. We had to collect our boys from the Academy for the celebration. And naturally, Lysa insisted we visit our favorite tiny terror immediately."

Leonidas stepped aside, gesturing grandly to the doorway behind him.

"Speaking of which! Come in, boys! Don’t dawdle in the hallway!"

***

While the grand reunion unfolded, Alistair remained frozen near the chalkboard, a piece of chalk clutched tightly in his pristine hand.

The Chief Administrative Aide watched Seraphina clinging to Duchess Lysandra.

He watched the tiny, terrifying economic prodigy bury her face in the Duchess’s neck, giggling brightly, acting with the pure, bouncy energy of a perfectly normal, innocent six-year-old.

Alistair’s brilliant mind was currently experiencing a grinding paradox.

’Look at her,’ Alistair thought, his emerald eyes narrowing in deep, conflicted scrutiny. ’She is acting like a child. A genuine, affectionate, emotional child. She is not discussing tariffs. She is not laying psychological traps.’

For the first time since he had met her, Alistair felt a strange, unsettling crack in his rigid, defensive armor.

He had spent the last two weeks convinced that Seraphina was a sociopathic mastermind trapped in a tiny body, a feral, manipulative gremlin who used her cuteness as a weapon to torment him. But seeing her now, seeing the unguarded, desperate affection she showered upon the Duchess, he realized a horrifying truth.

She was a child.

She was a genius, yes.

She was terrifyingly observant.

But beneath the terrifying intellect, she was still just a six-year-old girl who craved love, warmth, and the simple, uncomplicated safety of a mother’s hug.

Alistair felt an inappropriate, and completely unauthorized pang of warmth blossom in his chest.

He violently crushed it.

’No,’ Alistair commanded his own soul, stiffening his posture, raising his chin with haughty, aristocratic defiance. ’I will not fall for this. I will not succumb to the biological imperative to adore small, cute things. My heart was frozen long before His Grace’s aura touched it. I am a scholar. I am an instrument of the Archduke’s will. I evaluate assets based on their utility to the North, not their ability to elicit emotional responses.’

He mentally rebuilt his fortress of ice.

It didn’t matter if she was genuinely a sweet child underneath her terrifying intellect. It only mattered if her intellect could be harnessed to balance the Duchy’s budget and outmaneuver the Emperor.

He would not be charmed. He would absolutely refuse to be charmed.

Even if she did look somewhat adorable when she smiled like that...

’Focus, Alistair,’ he scolded himself, turning his attention to the doorway as Leonidas summoned his sons. ’Analyze the new variables.’

...

Stepping through the grand doorway of the drawing room were two boys. They appeared to be around ten to twelve years old, dressed in the crisp, highly tailored, crimson-and-gold uniforms of the Imperial Academy’s elite magical division.

They were twins, but they were entirely, completely un-identical in both appearance and aura.