Chapter 255: I Wouldn’t Leave

Elara froze.

Her arms hovered awkwardly in the air.

Caspian’s jaw dropped, staring at the child sitting in his sister’s lap as if Seraphina were an unexploded bomb.

Seraphina made herself incredibly comfortable, leaning her back against Elara’s chest, opening her book, and swinging her legs.

"The orchids smell nice," she observed casually.

The tension in Elara’s body slowly melted. The beautiful, estranged sister looked down at the tiny, dark-haired girl in her lap.

The overwhelming wave of suppressed, desperate familial love broke through the dam.

Elara tentatively, gently wrapped her arms around Seraphina’s waist. When Seraphina didn’t pull away, Elara let out a soft, shuddering sigh of pure relief.

She rested her chin lightly on the top of Seraphina’s head.

"They do smell nice, sweetling," Elara whispered, her voice thick with emotion.

For the next twenty minutes, Seraphina received the undivided ’Royal Treatment’.

Elara, starved for connection, went into full, unapologetic doting-aunt mode.

She gently, meticulously unbraided Seraphina’s dark hair, using her manicured fingers to comb out the tangles with care.

Caspian, completely abandoning his edgy rogue persona, quietly retrieved a silver bowl of peeled green grapes from a nearby table. He sat on the edge of the bench, silently feeding the grapes to Seraphina one by one, looking incredibly pleased every time she accepted one.

It was a deeply sweet, yet incredibly tragic picture.

They were pouring fifteen years of repressed familial affection into a six-year-old child they had known for less than a week.

Seraphina ate a grape, and she leaned back against Elara’s chest.

It was time to detonate the bomb.

"Auntie Elara? Uncle Caspian?" Seraphina asked, her voice high and innocent, lacking any filter.

Caspian nearly choked on his own spit at being called ’Uncle’ in such a sweet tone.

Elara’s breath hitched.

"Yes, little one?" Elara murmured softly.

Seraphina tilted her head back, looking up into Elara’s emerald eyes.

"You guys are really nice," Seraphina stated bluntly. "You feed me grapes, and you comb my hair. And Papa is really nice too. He buys me pastries and brushes my teeth. So... why do you act like you hate each other? Why is Papa so sad when he looks at you? And why are you guys crying when you think nobody is looking?"

The peaceful, serene atmosphere of the conservatory shattered like glass.

Caspian’s hand froze mid-air, a grape dropping from his fingers to roll across the stone floor.

Elara’s body went rigid, her breathing stopping entirely.

The masks didn’t just slip; they were ripped away by the blunt-force honesty of a child.

"We... we don’t hate him," Caspian choked out, his voice a pathetic, trembling rasp, staring at the floor. "We could never hate him."

"Then why did you leave him?" Seraphina pressed, her dark eyes locking onto Elara, refusing to let them retreat into their shells. "Papa said you left because the North was too cold. But I don’t think that’s true. You’re not selfish. So why?"

Elara looked down at the child in her lap.

She looked at those pitch-black eyes, so full of innocent, demanding truth.

The dam broke. The lies they had told themselves, the heavy, suffocating burden they had carried for fifteen years, finally poured out.

"Because we were killing him," Elara whispered, a single tear slipping down her flawless cheek, landing on Seraphina’s dress.

Seraphina frowned. "What do you mean?"

Elara took a deep, shuddering breath.

She didn’t speak to Seraphina as a mastermind; she spoke to her as a child, using the only language she thought a six-year-old could understand.

"Once upon a time," Elara began, her voice a thread of sorrow, "there was a very happy, very bright dog. He loved to run in the snow, and he loved to play with his two younger puppies. They lived in a big, cold den, but they were safe, because they had a massive, fierce, terrifying Guard Dog who stood at the door and kept the wolves away."

Seraphina listened silently.

"But one day," Caspian continued the story, his voice hollow, staring blindly at the orchids. "The big Guard Dog went out into the snow to fight a terrible monster. And he didn’t come back."

"The wolves knew the Guard Dog was gone," Elara whispered, her tears falling freely now, stroking Seraphina’s hair. "They surrounded the den, howled at the door. And the happy dog... he had to change. He couldn’t play anymore. He had to grow sharp teeth, become fierce, and stand at the door and roar into the dark to keep the puppies safe."

"But the puppies were soft," Caspian rasped, his hands clenching into fists on his knees. "They didn’t have sharp teeth. And the wolves were smart. They realized that if they couldn’t bite the new guard dog... they could bite the puppies. They knew that if the puppies were hurt, the guard dog would bleed to protect them. The puppies were a weakness. Every time the guard dog tried to fight, he had to look over his shoulder. He was taking wounds he didn’t need to take, just to shield us."

Elara let out a quiet, heartbroken sob.

"We saw him bleeding," Elara cried, burying her face in her hands. "We saw the light dying in his eyes. We knew that if we stayed in the den, the wolves would eventually use us to drag him down. He would die protecting us."

"So," Caspian finished, wiping roughly at his own wet eyes. "A wolf in sheep’s clothing came to the den. An older, greedy wolf who promised to take the puppies far away to a sunny meadow, where the other wolves couldn’t use them as hostages. The puppies knew that if they told the guard dog the truth, that they were leaving to save his life, he would never let them go. He would lock them in the den and fight the world himself."

"We had to break his heart," Elara wept, holding Seraphina tighter. "We had to act like we hated the cold, act selfish. We left the den, so the guard dog wouldn’t have anything holding him back. So he could fight with both paws. So he could survive."

The conservatory was filled only with the sound of Elara’s quiet sobbing and Caspian’s ragged breathing.

Seraphina sat perfectly still in Elara’s lap.

The mystery was solved.

They hadn’t abandoned Kaelus out of selfishness. They had abandoned him out of a misguided act of sacrificial love and allied themselves with the greedy Uncle Valerius, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, because Valerius offered them a way out of the North, removing themselves as targets so Kaelus could wage his wars unhindered.

They had played the role of the traitorous, shallow siblings for fifteen years, bearing his hatred, just to ensure he survived.

It was tragic and beautiful.

And it was the most fundamentally stupid, logically flawed, emotionally catastrophic decision Seraphina had ever heard in her two entire lifetimes.

’These people are absolute idiots,’ Seraphina’s internal mastermind raged, a wave of protective fury rising in her chest. ’They completely misunderstood the fundamental operating system of the Archduke. They thought they were his weakness. They didn’t realize they were his only power source.’

Seraphina didn’t cry.

She didn’t offer sweet, childish platitudes.

She reached forward, grabbed a peeled green grape from the silver bowl, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed it slowly, deliberately, swallowing the silence.

She looked up at Caspian and Elara.

"That is a very sad story," Seraphina said, her voice dropping the childish innocence entirely. It rang with cold, sharp, and unyielding clarity. "But those puppies were very, very stupid."

Elara blinked through her tears, shocked by the sudden, harsh tone.

Caspian stared at her, bewildered.

"If I were one of those puppies," Seraphina continued, crossing her small arms over her chest, sitting up straight in Elara’s lap. "I wouldn’t have left the den. I wouldn’t have gone with the fake sheep."

"You don’t understand, little one," Caspian argued weakly. "The guard dog would have died protecting them."

"No, he wouldn’t have," Seraphina snapped, her dark eyes flashing with fierce, uncompromising conviction. "Because a guard dog doesn’t fight just because he has sharp teeth. A guard dog fights because he has a den worth protecting. If the den is empty, what is he fighting for? He’s just bleeding in the snow for nothing."

She pointed a tiny, accusing finger at Caspian.