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FIFTEEN

SERAPHINE

T he fire had long burned low, but Seraphine hadn’t moved.

She lay still under Cassian’s coat, bones aching from the inside out. Her lungs still didn’t want to draw a full breath. Her soul, if she still had one after the Eidolich ritual, felt scorched. Like she’d given it to the Hollow and only gotten half of it back.

Cassian’s hand had held hers through the night. Steady. Warm. Unmoving.

She pretended not to notice.

When the sun broke over the ruins, he stirred first. She heard the rustle, felt the faint shift in weight as he rose, probably to tend the fire or check the perimeter. Always watchful and shielding. And that was the problem.

She couldn’t afford his closeness.

Not now.

Not when her father’s gaze could stretch this far through blood-inked letters and silent messengers.

She hadn’t heard from him but knew all too well that he had eyes everywhere and could sense the things she tried harder to hide.

Her link to her father only made that vision stronger; another reason that she knew he chose her for this task.

By nightfall, they were moving again. Her glaive was heavier in her grip. Not from weight—but from the cost of what it had taken to wield it. The others didn’t question her silence. Not even Cassian.

But she saw the way his eyes lingered. Like he was waiting for something she wasn’t sure she could give.

The second shard lay in a valley of broken statues—monuments to kings who’d been buried in fire and then forgotten. The Hollowborn here had grown cunning. Silent. Ambushing them from angles too narrow for steel.

Cassian took a cut across the ribs. Alek almost lost a hand. Seraphine had to burn through the ribcage of a creature stitched from bone and blood-moss to stop it from mauling Brann.

They retrieved the shard.

But she didn’t speak to Cassian for the rest of that day.

Didn’t let him touch her when he tried to stop her hand from shaking.

Didn’t explain when she went to the far edge of the camp to throw up blood and bile.

She didn’t have to.

He knew.

The third shard was hidden inside the Weeping Forest.

The trees there whispered. Not with wind—but with voices.

She heard her mother’s voice first. Then Vaela’s laughter. Then Cassian—saying her name in a tone she’d never heard him use. Begging.

Cassian had to slap her to bring her out of it. Not hard. But enough to pull her back from the edge.

“You weren’t blinking,” he said, voice sharp. “You weren’t you. ”

She hated how grateful she was.

They retrieved the third shard in silence.

She didn’t sleep that night. Just stared at the fire and wished she knew how to un-feel someone.

The fourth shard was submerged beneath a lake where the Veil had once thinned to nothing.

The waters held ghosts. Literal ones.

Seraphine had to dive with Cassian, bound by an air ward and a thread of shared fire magic, their hands laced together as they swam down, past memories that clawed at their skin.

She saw her coronation.

Her mother’s funeral.

Her father, standing over her as she bled into the floor and told him she would not cry.

Cassian surfaced before her. Had to drag her up.

When they broke the surface, both gasping, he didn’t speak. Just held her there in the cold until her shaking stopped.

They didn’t talk about what they saw.

Some truths were better left where they drowned.

She knew what the Court would say if they saw them now.

Still, when the shadow crow landed on her shoulder as they made camp at dusk, she froze.

The scroll it carried was sealed in obsidian wax. The Drakar crest—her family’s dragon sigil—embedded deep enough to draw blood if she wasn’t careful.

She broke the seal anyway.

The message was simple.

“Your progress is noted. The Court grows curious about your companion. Continue your service with clarity of loyalty. I need not remind you the price of deviation. — Emperor Zareth.”

It wasn’t signed with love. Or even respect.

Just power and pressure.

Seraphine burned the message before the others saw it.

But Cassian watched her through the smoke. Eyes too sharp, too knowing.

That night, she dreamt of her father.

Of his hand closing around her shoulder as he spoke of loyalty like it was a chain. Of her mother, bleeding in the snow because she chose wrong once.

“You’ll learn,” Zareth had told her, voice soft as a dagger. “That love is a fire you drown in. Duty is what survives.”

When she woke, her cheek was wet.

She didn’t know if it was sweat or something else.

Cassian kept his distance after that. Not far. But enough. Enough that his silences were heavy with what he wasn’t saying.

God, she missed the sound of his voice, his bad jokes, the way he looked at her when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

But what could she offer him? A crown lined with iron? A kingdom built on obedience? She was breaking rules just looking at him too long.

So she didn’t.

Not until that moment by the geyser.

Steam curled around her like smoke. Her shoulder throbbed with phantom ache. And she felt him before he spoke.

“You planning to vanish,” Cassian asked, “or just need space to fall apart?”

She took a breath, unable to ignore him any longer. “He knows.”

Cassian didn’t ask who. He just nodded once. “Zareth.”

“He suspects something.”

“I’m not exactly good at hiding.”

She turned toward him. “This isn’t a joke.”

“I’m not laughing.”

For a long moment, they just stood there.

Not Princess and mercenary. Not heir and pawn. Just Seraphine and Cassian.

Two people caught in a storm they didn’t start—but might not survive.

In that stillness, as their fingers brushed and the steam turned gold in the dying sun, she wondered:

What would she choose, if it ever came to it?

Duty? Or him?