Chapter 244: Bitter Chill

"I am going to absolutely destroy his center!"

Seraphina bounded toward the door, fully prepared to go completely devastate the Archduke’s fragile chess ego.

But as she reached for the brass handle, a hand gently, firmly caught her shoulder.

Seraphina paused, looking up.

Roan was standing right behind her.

The playful, sarcastic, easygoing tutor persona had vanished entirely.

His pitch-black eyes were narrow, dark, and utterly serious.

He looked down the hallway through the frosted glass of the study door, his gaze piercing through the barriers of the estate. The air around him felt heavy, crackling with an immense, restrained power that made the hair on Seraphina’s arms stand up.

"I wouldn’t go to the Archduke’s office just yet, little one," Roan said, his voice dropping into a low, smooth, incredibly dangerous whisper.

Seraphina frowned, sensing the immediate shift in the atmosphere. Her Supreme Dark Core hummed in response to his warning. "Why? Is Papa busy? Did Alistair bring him more ledgers?"

Roan let out a soft, dark, utterly humorless chuckle.

"No," Roan murmured, his black eyes glittering with a strange light. He released her shoulder, stepping back, adjusting his silver-wire glasses. "It appears the estate has received some unexpected guests while we were calculating trajectories. The Archduke is currently entertaining them in his study."

"Guests?" Seraphina tilted her head. "Like Uncle Leo? Or the shiny Marquess?"

"Not quite," Roan smiled, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. It was the smile of a predator watching a trap spring shut. "These guests possess a decidedly... different aura. They feel old. And frankly, they feel quite buggy. It seems the pest control has failed to secure the perimeter."

Seraphina’s adult mind instantly went on high alert. ’Buggy guests? Cold? Old?’

She didn’t ask Roan for further clarification. She knew he wouldn’t give it to her. He was a creature of secrets.

"Thank you, Professor," Seraphina said, her childish demeanor melting away, replaced by the cold, calculating focus of the Sovereign.

She turned the handle and slipped out into the hallway, moving with silent precision.

She didn’t run over.

She glided over the blueberry carpets, her tiny boots making no sound. She navigated the grand corridors, heading directly toward the heavy, oak doors of Kaelus’s private study.

As she approached the corridor leading to his office, the ambient temperature plummeted. It wasn’t the clean, sharp, protective cold of Kaelus’s ice magic.

It was a damp, suffocating, bitter chill.

It felt like walking into a crypt that hadn’t been opened in a century.

Standing outside the study doors were not the usual Vanguard guards. Sir Lucas and Sir Boris were absent.

Instead, standing guard were four men Seraphina had never seen before.

They wore heavy armor forged from dull, rusted gray iron, bearing a twisted, mutated version of the Nacht wolf crest. They looked like mercenaries from a bygone era, their faces hard, cruel, and unbothered by the opulence of the Capital Estate.

Seraphina stopped at the corner, pressing her back against the marble wall, completely hidden in the shadows.

She didn’t need to see through the heavy oak doors.

She closed her eyes, tapping into her Supreme Dark Core, expanding her senses outward, slipping her consciousness through the cracks beneath the wood.

Inside the study, the atmosphere was a warzone.

She could feel Kaelus. His aura was a roaring, churning hurricane of pure blinding rage and trauma. The dark mana was so dense it felt as though the room was filling with liquid nitrogen.

But there were other auras in the room.

One smelled of rotting wood, greed and entitlement.

The other two...

The other two auras felt sickeningly familiar. They felt like echoes of Kaelus’s own magic, but twisted, bitter, and lacking any of his protective warmth. They felt like the North, but without the honor.

Voices leaked through the heavy wood.

"...you have redecorated, Kaelus," an older, pompous, incredibly arrogant voice sneered. "Though I suppose the blood-money of the Emperor buys fine mahogany. It is a pity you still lack the refinement to host your own blood properly."

"You are not my blood, Uncle Valerius," Kaelus’s voice responded.

It didn’t sound like the Archduke. It didn’t sound like the Reaper. It sounded like a man standing on the edge of a frozen cliff, struggling not to throw himself off. "You lost the right to that title the day my father died."

"Now, now, brother. There is no need for such hostility," a smooth, velvety, incredibly condescending female voice chimed in. "We have traveled a very long way from the warm, civilized Southern coasts to visit this dreary tomb. We merely came to see the little... acquisition... you brought to the Capital."

"Yes, Kaelus," a younger, sharper, and arrogant male voice echoed. "We heard you picked up a stray from the gutter. We wanted to ensure she wasn’t tracking mud onto the family crest."

Seraphina’s eyes snapped open in the dark hallway.

The pieces fell into place with devastating clarity.

The pompous aura was his Uncle. The man who had likely tried to steal the Duchy when Kaelus was still a boy.

But the smooth, condescending woman, and the arrogant, sharp man...

’His siblings,’ Seraphina realized, her tiny hands balling into fists so tight her knuckles turned white. ’Elara and Caspian, was it? The brother and sister who abandoned him in the freezing dark fifteen years ago. They came back for what?’

They hadn’t come for a reunion or to apologize.

They had come to inspect the new heir, to belittle the brother who had sacrificed his soul to keep their legacy alive. They had come to poke the wounded bear in his own cage.

A cold, utterly terrifying calm washed over Seraphina’s soul.

The playful toddler, the chess prodigy, the sugar-loving child, they all stepped aside.

The Sovereign of the North took the helm.

’You walked away from him when he needed you,’ Seraphina thought, her dark eyes igniting with a violet glow that mirrored Kaelus’s own. The shadows in the hallway began to writhe and twist around her boots.