A few days later, the sky dawned gray and restless beaten by the promise of sun as the clouds finally parted from the ruthless storm's withdrawal. The capital hummed beyond her window—the rattle of carts, the cry of street vendors, the distant clang of drills from the barracks. Somewhere out there, the man who had once held both her heart and her ruin would soon be returning.
"Miss?" Elara's timid voice came from behind as she lay sprawled on the wicker chaise, quietly brushing her hair. "The courier has arrived. A letter from House Celosia." Seraphina's hand stilled on the silver brush in surprise. Slowly, she turned, her dark green silk dress whispering against the cool stone floor as it spilled over the chair's edge. "Bring it."
Elara approached, offering a sealed envelope the color of storm clouds — black wax pressed with the Celosia crest: a sword crossed over a panther's face. The same seal that had once condemned her. Her heart pounded as she broke the seal. The parchment inside smelled faintly of ink and rain. For a long moment, she simply stared at it—at the empty space where her next mistake or salvation would take shape.
To Miss Seraphina Araminta,
I write to confirm my attendance at the Summer Gala as arranged by both our houses. The empire finds itself at peace for the moment, though peace seldom lasts. I trust you remain in good health.
— James Celosia, Commander of Valenfort and Marquess of Celosia.
She was first struck by his choice to identify himself as Commander before Marquess, and a dim disappointment followed at the acknowledgment that he would see her only at the ball—no sooner, no later. The letter was brief, impersonal—the sort expected between two nobles bound by duty. At the bottom corner, almost invisible against the scrap of parchment, a faint line of script had been added in darker ink as if the hand had hesitated:
The roses in Araminta seem to have bloomed early this year.
Seraphina's breath caught. He had never written anything like that before, though she had never sent a letter like hers either. Her hands trembled slightly as she folded the letter, the corners damp where her fingers touched. The past was already shifting beneath her feet. Fate was bending—ever so slightly—toward something new.
"Elara," she called, clutching the letter in her lap. "Prepare the purple gown for the Gala—the one we discussed. And send word to the courier: tell him House Araminta accepts the Marquess's letter." Elara's shoes clicked softly on the floor as she curtsied. "At once, Miss."
When she was alone again, Seraphina laid the letter on her chest and traced the words with her fingertip. The ink seemed almost warm, pulsing faintly as the sun finally weakly broke through the clouds. She drew a finger to her lips, thinking back to the letter she tentatively wrote three days ago the night her brother stormed out.
❀
That night, the ink trembled at the tip of her pen as if guarding against her words escaping beyond the four walls of her estate. Then, as though bewitched, she began to write.
To His Lordship and Commander, Marquess James Celosia,
I suspect this will come as a surprise. Our engagement, after all, was not founded upon the niceties of correspondence, but upon signatures exchanged between families who favor empire over affection. Still, I find that I would rather you hear from me directly, before we meet at the Summer Gala. If duty must bind us, then perhaps honesty might make it bearable.
I know what they say of you—the beast of the border, the soldier who kills for crown and silence. I know the stories whispered over wine and under chandeliers but I have also learned that stories told by courtiers are rarely about the truth.
In my first life—
She paused. The quill's nib dug into the page, bleeding ink like a freshly opened wound. No, she thought sharply, forcing the tremor from her hand. Not that truth. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. She started again, striking the line through like an executioner's blade until it was a simple line of black.
In my experience, reputation and reality seldom share the same blood. I do not seek your favor nor do I expect kindness but if we are to share a name, even briefly, remember this: You will find no meek bride in House Araminta this season.
If we are to be allies, speak plainly when we meet. I am weary of polite lies.
— Miss Seraphina Araminta.
She set the quill down and read the letter once more. It was unwise. Improper. A declaration of war disguised as courtesy. After all, in her first life she had betrayed him and yet still her heart beat in simple response to his name; even if written. The ink shimmered faintly in the candlelight, still drying. Her fingers brushed the edge of the parchment, smearing a line of black across the cream paper. She did not blot it. The imperfection pleased her. It made the words real. "Do you know what you're doing?" she had whispered to the desolate and blackened room.
A draft stirred the curtains in reply like a promise or a warning—she could not tell. Seraphina sealed the letter with her crest—an argent rose pressed into scarlet wax—and summoned Elara. The maid appeared quickly, still pale from the earlier scene with Garrick. "Miss?"
"Deliver this," Seraphina said softly, handing her the envelope. "To Lord Celosia's courier. At once. And tell no one." Elara's eyes widened as she read the name scrawled on the envelope, but she curtsied in response. "Yes, Miss. Right away." When the door closed behind her, Seraphina exhaled for the first time in hours. The echo of her brother's warnings still burned in her ears: The empire doesn't forgive clever women. Perhaps not—but clever women did not ask forgiveness.
She turned back to the window, watching as Elara's small figure disappeared into the night, the letter clutched tightly in her hand.
❀
The winds off the southern cliffs carried the briny scent of steel and the faint tang of blood. They swept through the open windows of the Valenfort stronghold, stirring heavy curtains and setting candle flames trembling in their sconces. The gusts whistled through the cracks, tugging at the tapestries until they billowed like restless ghosts, and the shadows they cast danced like soldiers mid-battle.
Marquess James Celosia stood at the map table, the fire behind him carving sharp planes across his face—shadow and light wrestling along his cheekbones and jaw. Ink-stained maps stretched before him like kingdoms: rivers winding like veins, silver pins marking where blood and strategy had converged. A soldier's mind, he thought, could see war even in stillness. The empire's borders sprawled before him in miniature—inked rivers, faint pencil lines for troop movements, small silver pins glinting where men bled beyond the cartographer's reach. He did not look up when the door opened.
"Your courier from the capital, my lord," the adjutant said, bowing stiffly. A leather satchel rested against his arm, worn and scarred like the hands that carried it. "From House Araminta." James's hand hovered over the desk, a single finger tracing the edge of a silver pin marking a recent skirmish. The name Araminta stirred no outward reaction, but inside, a faint pulse of awareness throbbed like distant drums before a battle."Leave it," he said, his voice a low, controlled hum that seemed to still the flickering candle flames.
When the man withdrew, James reached for the envelope. The seal was unbroken—Araminta's crest, a rose stamped into scarlet wax. He turned it once in his hand, studying its weight, the faint scent of dew clinging to the parchment. Such softness from a woman's felt absurd here.
He bent once more over the map, laying the letter across a marked border, as the fire in the hearth grew into embers. When he was finally sure he was alone, he broke the seal. The wax gave way with a soft, crackling snap. Seraphina's handwriting was precise, elegant—each line measured, each letter tempered before it met the page. Beneath the polish, he sensed the pulse of defiance, a heartbeat hidden in ink. He read the letter once, then again, slower this time.
I do not seek your favor… I am weary of polite lies.
For a long while, there was no sound but the hiss of the hearth. Then a low laugh escaped him—not cruel, but edged with restrained acknowledgment. He cleared his throat quickly, glancing toward the closed door. Discipline, always discipline—even in solitude. James lifted the letter again, noting the faint smudge of ink at her signature—a human imperfection. Even the controlled, deliberate hand of Seraphina could not erase it.
His thumb lingered, a soldier acknowledging an adversary capable of surprise. The candlelight licked across the inked words, breathing life into her defiance. To his mild irritation, he admired the precision of it—the way she wielded language like a duelist testing her blade's weight. Admiration was dangerous.
As he turned the parchment toward the light of the hearth, something faint—almost ghostly—caught his eye. A shadow of letters beneath the surface of a blackened line. Not visible directly… but present when the parchment thinned against firelight. James frowned, angling the page. A single aborted stroke. The beginning of a sentence she had tried to blot out but not fully destroyed.
In my first li—
His breath stilled. Not madness. Not quite. But not normal, either. The words were half-scraped away, the ink lifted, the fibers of the parchment still bruised from where she had tried—too hastily—to conceal it. She had pressed so hard correcting it that the page bore the faint raised ridge of her panic.
"In my first… life?" he murmured under his breath, sounding the phrase silently, testing it. The unfamiliarity of it prickled along his spine like cold steel. Madness? Prophecy? A metaphor abandoned? Or something stranger. Celosia was not a man given to fantasy, but neither was he a fool. People did not nearly write phrases like that unless they carried truth too heavy to speak aloud. He turned the parchment again, studying the angle of the damaged fibers, the pressure of the quill, the speed with which she had attempted to erase it. She had panicked—that he understood.
She believed this scrap could damn her and she was right. To the wrong eyes, it would have. His finger traced the faint ridge of the struck-out word before he forced his hand still. The soldier in him wanted to categorize this—threat or vulnerability? But something colder, older, stirred beneath that instinct. Curiosity sharpened with the edge of unease. He set the parchment flat again, letting the candlelight lick across the visible lines, letting the ghost of that hidden sentence whisper its treason to the room. She wasn't a fool nor careless, but she was reckless as evident in the pointed way she wrote to an enemy of her brother.
This… this was not the mark of a woman fully in command of herself. A flicker of concern—unwelcome, undisciplined—crept beneath his ribs. Had the Araminta household pushed her too far? Court pressures? Political strain? Isolation? The kind that frays even sharp minds until they splinter at the edges? This was a madness bred by power, expectation, and quiet rooms with locked doors. He lowered the parchment, staring at its surface as though it might reveal more.
"Confused," he muttered under his breath. "Or… overwhelmed." James was not naïve. A line like In my first li— might be dismissed by a sympathetic mind as confusion, fatigue, or the rambling of someone pushed too far. But to The Council? To The Council, it would be branded instability. Instability became liability. Liability became removal—quietly, permanently, with no need for trials or explanations. A single whispered report from him would be enough to summon their attention.
The Council's physicians would speak of "delusion" with polite interest. Their inquisitors would murmur about "compromise." Their strategists would quietly mark her a threat to containment, to alliances, to narratives that needed clean lines. To target her. To end her. The Council had never needed an executioner when they had the Mad Dog who could make people simply vanish.
The Council would expect him to report this if they had seen it; he was sure that the steward had already penned them a message that the house of his potential fiance had sent him a letter on the graying battlefield. They had trained him, shaped him, fed him scraps of power so long as he performed precisely as commanded. He was their blade—obedient, brutal, unflinching.
Their mad dog. Their beast of the battlefield. And yet. He looked at the faint, scraped-out stroke again. The Council did not own this scrap of truth. He did. It lingered beneath his thumb like a secret she had accidentally gifted him—a vulnerability sharp as a knife's edge. Something he could use. Something he should use. Instead, he found himself feeling something unfamiliar, something he did not care to name. He smoothed the parchment flat again, letting the candlelight lick across the visible lines, letting the ghost of that hidden sentence whisper its treason to the room. She wasn't a fool nor careless, but she was reckless—as evident in the pointed way she wrote to an enemy of her brother. Reckless enough to leave a half-buried confession in ink. Reckless enough not to realize how little it took for the Council to justify its suspicions. Reckless enough to tempt him, intentionally or not, into becoming the blade they preferred to wield.
James exhaled through his nose, the sound quiet, controlled. It was the same instinct that made him feared on battlefields and whispered about in council chambers—the instinct to defy his masters the moment they believed him predictable. One more misstep—real or imagined—and they would use her as proof of divided loyalties, of corruption in her brother's ranks. They had been searching for a reason to tighten their hold on the capital, and this scrap of parchment would give them cause. If anyone was going to decide whether Seraphina was a threat, it would be him. A low, humorless sound escaped him—something between a scoff and a growl.
The Council's presence was always somewhere in the room, even when absent, pressing like iron against the back of his neck. Their gaze was a constant expectation—an invisible line he must never cross, a leash he was trained to hold lightly but never loosen. They had made him their instrument, their blade, their sanctioned violence. Every victory he claimed, every border he fortified, every strategy executed—measured, documented, judged. A man of their making. And yet, with this scrap of inked paper from Seraphina, their authority felt suddenly precarious.
He could use it if he chose or he could withhold it, manipulate it, twist it quietly into leverage. No one in the Council would ever know he had glimpsed the faint ridge of her panic, the aborted line that might damn her. They would not suspect. Their expectation of compliance would work to his advantage. A portrait of her, small and unassuming, rested in the corner of his desk sent from when her House had penned him a plea for engagement. He did not look at it as a man would look at a companion, or even a prize. He looked at it as he did maps and reports: an instrument of observation, a point of calibration. She existed in his calculations now, her defiance, her panic, her hidden line of ink—a variable he alone could measure.
The memory came unbidden, as precise as ink on parchment.
The academy courtyard had been silent but for the scrape of boots against cobblestones and the hiss of wind through the training towers. Young Garrick Araminta had stood there, chest heaving, face flushed with anger, a practice blade clenched in his hand. James had been opposite him, calm, measured, eyes cold violet, standing perfectly still in the storm of his adversary's motion.
"You can't command with instinct alone, Garrick," James had said, voice flat, unshakable, each word a scalpel. "You move like a child swinging at shadows. Strategy is discipline. Control. Anticipation. Not brute force." Garrick had laughed, sharp and bitter. "And you, Celosia, you move like a statue! You think the world bends to maps and lines, that men obey pins on paper. You don't see them, you don't feel them! You'll kill everything human in the process!"
James had tilted his head slightly, expression unreadable. "Humans are fragile. They are unreliable. You may value courage, but courage alone does not protect lives. It exposes them." "Better to die with courage than live in fear!" Garrick had shot back, lunging forward with the blade. James had sidestepped with ease, almost bored, letting the wooden sword fall harmlessly to the ground. One measured step, one calculated motion, and the attack was nullified before it could begin. Garrick had spun, fury coiling, only to find James already repositioned, calm, always three moves ahead. "You cannot intimidate what does not respond," James had said softly, almost to himself. "And you cannot protect what you cannot see. That is the lesson you will never learn."
Garrick had stormed off, leaving the courtyard empty but for the wind and James' quiet, measured breathing. Even then, the seeds of their hatred had been planted. Garrick had hated James for the cold superiority, for the unbending control that made every movement predictable and inescapable. James had regarded Garrick with cautious contempt, noting the brilliance in his fire, but also the recklessness that would one day break him—or someone else.
Now, years later, James recalled it as he held Seraphina's letter, the faint ridge of the scraped-out sentence pressing against his thumb. Garrick's instinct to protect, his fiery defiance, his inability to calculate consequences—all of it mirrored in Seraphina's handwriting. The girl's recklessness, the letter's half-erased line, reminded him of Garrick at the academy: brilliant, passionate, and potentially dangerously short-sighted.
His gloved thumb brushed the smudge near her name. It lingered longer than it should have. An imperfection. A human error. It lingered beneath the gaze of his eyes longer than it should have. If she had intended to provoke him, she had succeeded.If she had intended to endanger herself, she had nearly done that too. And the strangest part—the most dangerous part—was that he found himself unwilling to hand that scrap of damning evidence to anyone but the crackling fire beside him. Whatever Seraphina Araminta was facing in the capital, it was not simply defiance. It was pressure—enough to make her slip, even for a breath. Enough to make her write something she did not want anyone to see. Enough to make him uneasy. And James Celosia did not unnerve easily.
He moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back. Below, the stables stirred with restless horses, their breath rising like smoke. Torches guttered in the wind as men hurried through the mud. Small pit fires burned among the tents, their glow reflected in the snaking trenches beyond. The storm wind battered the walls, and the horses shifted below—the same way his thoughts did now. He pulled himself away from the frost glazed window, the aluminum netting clipped to his helmet over his face swaying in movement – of loops strung together as if fishermen's nets catching nothing but the angular bones of his face. Alone, he stood framed by the occasional sea glass tint of arching borosilicate glass windows.
James folded the parchment carefully and slid it into his breast pocket, eyeing the fire as if weighing the possiblity of burning the letter. Not because it mattered—but because it did not. He had not intended to marry and would do so only under the orders of his empire. Marriage, to him, was a leash made of silk. But duty—duty was iron, and the kingdom had long ago forged his chains. The Araminta alliance would bring land, political favor, and a direct line into the capital's labyrinth. And yet, she had written to him. A reply could not betray weakness, nor could it allow indifference. Both would be fatal. He shifted his weight, drawing a scrap of unused paper and a quill from a pile cast aside on a whiskey barrel used for a desk. The feather laid cold and stiff between his fingers, like a blade waiting to be drawn. The first scratch across the parchment was hesitant, a single careful line: disciplined, precise, echoing the restraint that had defined his life.
To Miss Seraphina Araminta,
Even writing her name made the candle flicker, as if the flame itself recognized the danger of it. He paused, then dipped the quill again, tracing each letter with deliberate care, as though the ink could make her words manageable and somehow safe. The quill hovered, suspended like a scalpel over parchment. His hand—steady in battle—trembled slightly now, though he would never allow it to show. This was no battlefield with soldiers to command. This was an exchange of minds—and she had challenged him.
He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head, eyes fixed on the maps, the pins, the faint traces of ink still damp on the letter. Discipline first, loyalty second, curiosity—dangerous and unbidden—last. Yet the thought of her, fragile and defiant, lingered longer than he expected.
Outside, the wind rattled the makeshift walls, carrying the scent of rain and sea spray. Horses stamped in the stables below, their breath fogging in the chill air. Every sound reminded him he was both soldier and marquess, poised between duty and temptation. Inside, James Celosia allowed himself only a brief imperceptible acknowledgment of her presence in his life. A single spark of curiosity. Nothing more.
"Alaric," he called, snapping back into attention as he heard hurried footsteps down the corrider. The adjutant reappeared. "My lord?" He lifted the letter in his direction. "Send word to House Araminta." Alaric hesitated, staring at the envelope as if it was a snake. "And the message?" James's eyes were unreadable, violet-dark beneath the shadow of his hair as he reached forward and placed the letter in his hands. "Tell Lady Seraphina that I accept her request.". "Her request, my lord?". He tilted his head. "I would inform you if it were a soldier's matter."
The adjutant flinched, bowed, and vanished. James turned back to the map table, his hand closing around one of the silver pins. With a soft, decisive motion, he drove it into the heart of the capital. His silver pin pressed firmly into the capital's heart. Shadows stretched long across the room, flickering in tandem with his simple heartbeat. Soldier first, noble second. Every choice weighed. Every action deliberate. The flame beside him guttered, and his shadow stretched long across the room—half soldier, half omen.