Chapter 154: Steal a Pie

"I can steal a pie! I am very stealthy!" Bartholomew begged, but it didn’t work, of course.

"I’m not hungry," Seraphina stated, her voice suddenly losing its sleepy, cute cadence. The tone dropped, becoming flat, cold, and clinical.

She stood up from the rug, smoothing out the wrinkles in her cloud-patterned, pale blue silk nightgown. She didn’t look like a tired toddler anymore. She looked like a general preparing a map for an impending siege.

"I am going to sleep," Seraphina announced, turning her back on the ghost and walking toward the massive four-poster bed.

Bartholomew blinked, floating after her. "To... sleep? But My Lady, His Grace, the Duke Kaelus, will undoubtedly be returning soon! He will ride back with the haste of a madman once the battle is concluded! Do you not wish to remain awake to greet him? To demand your rightful praise for saving his life? To bask in the glory of your triumph?"

Seraphina reached the edge of the mattress. She placed her small hands on the silk sheets, preparing to climb up.

She stopped, then turned her head, looking over her shoulder at the ghost butler.

Her dark eyes, previously wide and innocent, were narrowed into sharp, terrifying slits. A dark, incredibly dangerous, fiercely intelligent aura settled over her tiny features.

"Why would I wait up for him?" Seraphina asked, her voice dripping with a chilling apathy. "Papa Duke put me to bed. He gave me a cup of warm, sleepy milk. He explicitly wanted me to be unconscious while he handled the ’adult’ matters. It would be incredibly rude of me to ruin his careful planning by being awake when he gets back, wouldn’t it?"

Bartholomew felt a cold, phantom shiver run down his spine.

He looked at her face. He saw the cold, utterly furious rationale behind her words.

She wasn’t just going to sleep because she was tired. She was going to sleep because it was phase one of a psychological warfare campaign.

"My... My Lady," Bartholomew stammered, his athletic posture shrinking slightly under her intense gaze. "You... you are angry. You are furious that he utilized a sleeping draught to bypass your involvement."

"Oh, please, I am not angry at all," Seraphina smiled. It was a terrifying, beautiful, yet entirely hollow smile that she had learned by observing Kaelus himself. It was the smile of a predator watching its prey step into a snare. "Anger requires energy. Anger implies that I care about his betrayal. I do not care. If Papa Duke believes he does not need me in his life when things get difficult, then I simply will not be there."

She turned back to the bed, effortlessly scaling the high mattress, crawling under the heavy silk duvet. She lay down on her side, pulling the blankets up to her chin, fluffing her pillow with little punches.

"But... but he loves you!" Bartholomew pleaded, desperate to prevent the impending domestic tragedy. "He only left you behind because he was terrified the monster would harm you! His actions were born of fatherly paranoia, not malice!"

"The motivation is irrelevant, Butt-tolomeow," Seraphina said coldly, closing her eyes. "The action is what matters. He broke his promise. He said we were a team. He decided we weren’t. I am simply adjusting my behavior to match his new operational parameters."

She settled into the mattress, her breathing deliberately slowing down into a steady, rhythmic hum.

"Do not wake me when he arrives," Seraphina ordered her ghostly sentinel, her voice muffled by the blankets. "And if he asks, I have been asleep the entire time."

Bartholomew floated at the foot of the bed, staring at the small lump beneath the blankets in horrified awe.

He had served the aristocracy for over a century, witnessed blood feuds, poisonings, duels to the death, and grand political betrayals. He had seen Archdukes scream at each other and declare war over taxation tariffs.

But he had never, in his entire existence, witnessed a maneuver as devastatingly cruel as the one this six-year-old girl was currently deploying.

’She is not going to yell at him,’ Bartholomew realized, his hands flying to his mouth in shock. ’She is not going to throw a tantrum or break his belongings or demand an apology. She is going to give him the freezing silence of the void.’

The ghost butler slowly turned his gaze toward the heavy oak doors of the suite.

He knew Duke Kaelus von Nacht was currently galloping across the volcanic plains, likely sweating through his armor, his heart hammering with anxiety, preparing himself to face a hurricane of toddler fury. Kaelus was probably mentally drafting apologies, promising to buy her the moon, preparing to weather a storm of screaming and crying.

’Oh, you poor, foolish, doomed bastard,’ Bartholomew thought, offering a silent prayer for the Reaper of the North. ’You think you survived the anomaly, and the danger has passed. You have absolutely no idea that your soul is about to be destroyed and broken.’

Bartholomew floated over to the window, took up his position as the silent guardian, and waited for the executioner to return.

***

The journey from the Ashen Forest back to the Obsidian Gate was accomplished in record-breaking time.

Duke Kaelus von Nacht rode his massive, demonic warhorse, Ruin, with the desperate, frantic intensity of a man fleeing an erupting volcano.

The beast’s hooves struck sparks against the obsidian roads, its lungs heaving, a trail of dark, exhausted smoke pluming from its nostrils.

Behind him, trailing far in the distance, Archduke Leonidas, who was heavily bandaged and groaning in pain on a makeshift litter, and the rest of the Vanguard struggled to keep up with the mad dash.

Kaelus didn’t care about the stragglers. He didn’t care about the political fallout of abandoning the carcass.

His entire consciousness was funneled into a single, terrifying focal point: the guest suite.

’She is awake,’ Kaelus’s mind screamed on an infinite loop, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribcage.