🔞 Claudes POV: A Dangerous Obsession

War does not end when the sword is sheathed. It waits in the shadows of sleep, in the silence of empty halls. In the softness of a woman you love.

The sky was the colour of ash. Cannon smoke rolled low across the valley, choking out the sun, and the cries of the wounded echoed over the clash of steel. Claude Sigmund had long ago grown used to the smell of blood and powder, but this morning it bit deep into his lungs, like he was already half-buried in the grave with the men around him.

Bodies lay scattered in grotesque heaps, red soaking the mud where once there had been green fields. Shattered pikes jutted like teeth from the earth. The air vibrated with the thrum of distant artillery and the closer, sickening chorus of dying men calling for mothers, wives, priests.

Claude’s horse, streaked with sweat and grime, stamped restlessly beneath him. He sat tall in the saddle, helm pushed back, blue eyes narrowed against the smoke. His men called him Archduke Sigmund, commander of three armies, undefeated in the years of campaigns. Yet no victory had ever felt like triumph. Today it felt like hell itself had opened and swallowed them whole. Eating the young soldiers for pleasure.

He gave orders with a clipped voice, pointing the way for cavalry to flank, sending his infantry to hold the broken ridge. His words carried weight even in the chaos, soldiers snapping to obey with the desperate precision of men who clung to their commander’s certainty as much as to their swords. Claude never wavered. Never allowed them to see doubt. Never lost.

But when the charge surged forward and the din swallowed all else, a voice cut through, ragged and weak.

“Claude—”

He swung down instantly, armour clattering, boots sinking into muck. He knew the voice before he saw the man. Paul La’Blauvelt, his childhood acquaintance turned friend, lay broken in the trampled grass, a pike wound running crimson from his side. His once-proud uniform was torn and soaked through; his fingers pressed feebly to stem the tide.

“Don’t speak.” Claude pressed his hands over the wound, his gauntlets slipping in blood. “I’ll get the surgeon. Hold fast.”

Paul’s laugh was bitter, a cough that sprayed red. “We both know there’s no time for that.”

Claude’s jaw clenched. He had dragged men from the brink before, hauled them back to life by sheer will, but one look at Paul’s pale lips and trembling frame told him this was different. Death had already marked him.

“You’ll hold,” Claude growled, though his own voice cracked. “You’re not allowed to fall. Not here, not now, I can't get you home from here.”

Paul’s hand shot out, gripping Claude’s wrist with surprising strength. His blue eyes, mirrors of his sister’s, locked onto him with desperate clarity.

“Caroline,” Paul gasped. “Promise me—promise me you’ll see her safe. Father’s useless, the estate—” His breath hitched. “She’ll be left alone. She’ll need a husband, someone who loves her. She can’t be bartered off like livestock.”

Claude’s throat worked, words catching like thorns. “Paul—”

“Promise me!” Paul roared with the last of his strength, and the sound cut through the chaos around them. The clang of battle dulled, as if the world itself demanded Claude’s answer.

Claude bowed his head, pressing Paul’s bloodied hand to his heart. “I swear it. On my honour, on my life. I’ll protect Caroline. I’ll find her a man who deserves her, and I’ll see the estate preserved.”

Paul’s eyes softened, relief flickering through the agony. “Not just any man, Claude. She deserves more. She deserves…to be happy.”

Claude swallowed hard. Of all things Paul might have asked, that was the sharpest blade. He thought of Caroline—her quick wit, from the letters she sent, the care she gave to the men sending them items so they get a little piece of home out here. The way she wrote to them all to give them hope, but not him—and something dangerous stirred in him. But he buried it deep. This was not the time for selfishness. This was about duty.

“You have my word,” Claude whispered.

Paul’s grip slackened, his chest rising once, twice, then stilling. The light drained from his eyes, leaving only the reflection of the battlefield sky—ashen, merciless, endless.

And that is where Paul's body would lie forever, not home, not buried beside his mother, not in a place his sister could visit and mourn.

Claude remained on his knees, hands stained with the lifeblood of the man whose presence had given the men much hope through the words of a woman he had never met. Around him, soldiers screamed, swords clashed, cannons thundered. But inside Claude, there was only silence. A vow forged in blood. A weight that would never lift.

He should never have gone to the king’s celebration to bear witness to the sadness of the loss he couldn't prevent. War was still in his bones, in his lungs, in the tension locked in his jaw. The revelry for his heroic return felt obscene — gilded chandeliers, polished marble, music rising above the laughter of nobles who had no idea what it was to drag themselves from a trench slick with blood. They toasted him as if he alone had conquered a nation, when he could still hear the cries of the men who hadn’t come home.

So he had fled to the veranda, a drink untouched in his hand, the night air heavy and still. He wanted silence, just for a breath, away from the king’s cheer and the princess’s cloying attention. Instead, the door creaked open and footsteps wavered across the floor.

The door creaked behind him. Soft steps. A figure moved across the balcony, skirts whispering. His heart clenched instantly into suspicion. Too many nights of ambushes, too many assassins creeping from dark corners. He turned, steel flashing, blade raised before he thought better of it.

The young woman froze. Tears streaked her cheeks, and she swayed as though wine kept her upright.

“Miss, are you hurt?” he heard himself ask, voice rough.

She startled, turning toward him with red-rimmed eyes. And then she laughed — a trembling, drunken laugh as her gaze swept over him.

“No, but you are,” she said.

Something inside him snapped. His grip tightened on the hilt, and the sword point pressed forward, right between her breasts. The cold steel against her breast should have terrified her. Instead, she only blinked at him, wide-eyed.

“Was that a threat?” I had demanded, jaw locked, teeth grinding. His voice carried the echo of the battlefield, sharp and merciless.

But she laughed again. At him. At his rage.

“I meant in your eyes. You are hurting, like Paul. He was always unhappy.”

Paul.

The name hollowed him. He stared at her, his vision suddenly clear. Caroline. Paul’s sister. Not an enemy. Not a spy. A girl crying on a balcony because her brother lay unburied in foreign soil.

Shame scalded him. He sheathed the blade with a snap, the weight of his own madness settling like a stone. He had threatened her — the one person Paul had begged him to protect.

“Paul?” he echoed, voice sharp.

“Yes,” she whispered, confusion in her face.

He stepped closer despite himself, hand lifting of its own accord. His thumb brushed the tear from her cheek, tilting her chin so her eyes — Paul’s eyes — met his in the light spilling from the ballroom door.

“You have the same eyes,” he murmured. But it came out wrong, rough, almost like disgust. As if seeing her broke something open in him, he could not bear.

He let go at once. Turned. Fled into the palace before she could speak again, boots striking hard against the marble.

He had faced down armies, never flinched at the point of a spear — but that night, he had been undone by a girl’s tears. And by the shame of breaking his vow before it had even begun.

He never apologised. He could not. For every time he saw her afterwards — across crowded halls, at court gatherings, at the edge of dances he refused to join — he remembered only the cold glint of his sword at her chest. And the knowledge that, on the night they first met, he had already failed Paul.

He left for war again soon after, unable to face her. She was married off, as Paul had feared—traded like coin in a contract to secure alliances. Claude watched from a distance in the years that followed, his duties dragging him back and forth across the land. Every time he returned, she was changed. The soft girl had become a woman; her beauty was no longer innocent, but edged with sorrow, her smile practised, her eyes guarded.

She bore no child. Each year that passed without an heir made her seat precarious, her future unsafe. And yet—God forgive him—Claude took secret joy in it. Each time her womb remained empty at a ball, a flame of hope kindled in him: that perhaps she might one day be free, that she might still be his.

That hope festered with guilt. He was betraying Paul’s wish even as he clung to it. Paul had asked him to protect her, not to covet her. To find her love, not to hoard the dream of her for himself. But Claude could not help it. His promise twisted in his chest like a blade, cutting deeper every year.

And then—her husband was dead.

The news struck like lightning. Shock, relief, guilt, desire—all at once. Paul’s sister, Paul’s last plea, was unmoored again. Widowed, childless, vulnerable. Claude knew his moment had come, though whether to redeem his vow or damn it further, he could not yet say.

Claude stood once more at the edge of a battlefield years later, the ghosts of Paul and every man he had lost pressing heavily upon him. The promise still burned in his chest. He had failed Paul once. He would not fail again.

But in the marrow of his bones, he already knew: keeping Caroline safe and keeping her from his own arms might be the same thing.

And that was a torment no war could teach him to endure.

However, now that Tristan, the crown prince, also seemed to covet her, he had to make his move before Tristan made her into a mistress.

The halls of his estate were quiet now, but silence was no mercy. Every step echoed with ghosts. He would walk the corridors and see Paul’s dying face in torchlight, hear Caroline’s drunken laugh as the sword pressed to her breast, feel again the shame of failing them both.

He did not sleep easily. When he did, he dreamed of ash skies and the cold touch of steel against warm skin. Of Caroline’s eyes, Paul’s eyes, watching him from the shadows. He woke drenched in sweat, hand reaching for a sword no enemy had drawn.

War had not ended. It never would. Not for him.

And now Caroline was free. The vow called to him, sharp as the blade he carried. He would have to face her again, not as Paul’s commander or her father’s ally, but as the man who had promised everything and delivered nothing.

He could not run back to the battlefield this time. The war he dreaded most had finally come home.