Page 35 of Claimed By Flame

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 wouldnotcry.

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, shemissedthe 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 justlookingat him too long.

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