Three more days dragged by, and the atmosphere inside the Iron-Wood Manor warped into something entirely surreal.

The imposing, impenetrable fortress of the Vanguard—a stronghold actively bracing for a cosmic, apocalyptic war against the heavens—currently smelled overwhelmingly of cinnamon, baked apples, and spun sugar.

Roxy’s manic domesticity had reached a fever pitch. She was a relentless, vibrating force of unadulterated, aggressive cheerfulness that was actively driving her fiercely protective Warlords to the brink of insanity. She spent hours in the vast kitchens, completely covered in flour, insisting on baking complicated, terrestrial-style pastries that the massive carnivorous beasts of the pack barely knew how to eat.

When she wasn’t baking, she was sewing. She had completely commandeered the central parlor, draping vibrant, obnoxiously bright silks over the dark mahogany furniture. She sat by the roaring hearth, humming upbeat pop songs from Earth while meticulously stitching a bright yellow and pink sundress for Tanith, completely ignoring the freezing winter temperatures outside the warded windows.

The Alpha Kings were absolutely terrified.

That morning, Kaelen had desperately tried to bring a tactical map of the northern ridges into the parlor to brief her on the new perimeter defenses. He had unrolled the heavy parchment across the table, his icy blue eyes grave and focused. Roxy hadn’t even looked at the map. Instead, she had cheerfully thrown a massive swath of pink floral fabric directly over the tactical grids.

"Pink is just so much more cheerful than Vanguard grey, don’t you think, my King?" she had giggled, patting Kaelen’s cheek before skipping off to check on Little Fedor.

Kaelen had stood frozen in the parlor, looking at the pink fabric covering his war plans, an expression of profound, devastating heartbreak settling over his stoic features.

The consensus among the husbands was unanimous and grim. They believed the volatile surge of pregnancy hormones, violently combined with the devastating trauma of Ren’s final, heartbreaking goodbye in the collapsing vault, had completely, fundamentally fractured her transmigrated mind. Their Matriarch had looked into the abyss of the cosmic war and simply retreated into a delusion of idyllic peace to protect her own sanity.

But Syris, the ancient King of the Swamps, was not as easily convinced.

Syris was a master of the mind, a Warlord whose magic was entirely rooted in perception, illusion, and psychological manipulation. He watched Roxy with narrowed, analytical golden-green eyes. He noticed that her laughter never quite reached the absolute depths of her irises. He noticed the way her hands remained perfectly, steadily still when she poured tea, completely lacking the chaotic tremors of a genuinely fractured psyche.

The absolute, flawless perfection of her smile was exactly what unnerved him. It was too perfect. It was a mask.

By the late afternoon, Syris decided he could not take the agonizing charade for another single second.

Roxy was alone in the Manor’s expansive, dust-moted library. She was standing beside a heavy oak table, happily humming a terrestrial tune while arranging a bouquet of winter-blooming frost roses into a crystal vase.

The heavy wooden doors of the library clicked shut with a soft, final thud.

Roxy’s humming paused as the ambient temperature in the room subtly shifted. A thick, localized wave of toxic-green swamp magic instantly rolled over the floorboards, sweeping up the walls to completely seal the room. The wards locked. The sound of the outside Manor was entirely snuffed out.

Syris glided across the room, his dark green robes sweeping silently over the rugs. He stopped just a few feet away from her, his elegant, aristocratic features completely stripped of their usual mocking amusement.

He reached out, his cool, long fingers gently but firmly wrapping around her wrist, stopping her from placing another rose into the vase.

"Drop the act, Roxann," Syris commanded. His rich, deep voice was a low, dangerous purr that vibrated in the silent room. His golden-green eyes narrowed into sharp, reptilian slits that seemed to pierce straight through her flesh and into her transmigrated soul. "Because my Matriarch does not smile and bake sweets when everything is falling. What happened?"

Roxy’s heart gave a violent, panicked lurch against her ribs.

Syris was too smart. The Snake King had seen right through the Stepford Matriarch routine. If she hesitated for even a fraction of a second, if she tried to deny it with more manic laughter, he would use his magic to pry the truth directly from her mind, and her master plan to trap the Demon King would be entirely ruined.

She needed a weapon. And she knew exactly what a Vanguard Warlord’s greatest, most crippling weakness was.

Instead of confessing, Roxy instantly, flawlessly pivoted, using their absolute, unyielding love directly against them.

Roxy’s brilliant green eyes widened, staring up at the Snake King. She let her lower lip violently tremble. She didn’t use her transmigrated magic; she reached deep into the genuine, suffocating terror she felt about the impending cosmic war, grabbing onto the very real fear of losing her family, and forced the tears to rise.

A single, fat tear spilled over her dark eyelashes, tracking a wet path down her pale cheek.

"You think this is an act?" Roxy whispered, her voice cracking with a perfectly executed, devastating fragility.

Syris’s grip on her wrist instantly loosened, his sharp eyes widening slightly at the sudden, raw display of sorrow.

"I am terrified, Syris!" Roxy suddenly sobbed, her hands flying up to cover her face as her shoulders began to violently shake. She stumbled backward, leaning heavily against the oak table as if her legs could no longer support her. "Ren is gone. He is really, truly gone. And now I have another baby growing inside of me, and a god in the heavens who wants to destroy everything we have ever built!"

"Roxy—" Syris started, his combat aura instantly extinguishing as the sheer force of her weeping hit him like a physical blow.

"I know the world is falling apart!" Roxy cried out, aggressively swiping at the tears streaming down her face, weaponizing her pregnant, traumatized state with terrifying precision. She looked up at him, her chest heaving with manufactured hysteria. "I know Kaelen wants to talk about war! I know Zarek wants to burn the continent! But I can’t do it right now! Is it so wrong that I just want to pretend?"

She stepped forward, her small hands grabbing the lapels of his dark green robes, looking up at him with absolute, pleading desperation.

"I just want to give our children one last happy spring before the world ends!" Roxy wept, burying her face directly into the center of his chest. "I just wanted to smell sugar instead of blood! I just wanted to see Tanith in a pretty dress before the sky falls! Why are you trying to take this from me? Why won’t you just let me have a few days of peace?!"

The heavy, guilt-ridden accusation completely, catastrophically shattered the Snake King’s resolve.

Syris’s Warlord instincts—the deep, primal, biological need to protect, comfort, and provide for his pregnant mate—violently overrode his analytical suspicion. He felt like an absolute monster. His wife was drowning in grief and apocalyptic terror, desperately clinging to a domestic fantasy just to keep herself from breaking, and he had cornered her in a sealed room to interrogate her like a prisoner.

"Oh, my beautiful, sweet Queen," Syris breathed, his voice rough with profound, agonizing guilt. "I am so sorry. Forgive me."

He wrapped his long, elegant arms tightly around her trembling frame, pulling her flush against his chest. He buried his face in her dark curls, pressing frantic, apologetic kisses to the top of her head.

"You can have your spring," Syris whispered, gently stroking her back as she continued to quietly sob against his robes. "Bake your sweets. Sew your dresses. We will handle the war, Roxann. I swear to you, the heavens will not touch our children. I am so sorry I pushed you. Please, do not cry."

He held her for several long minutes, entirely consumed by the Warlord guilt of making his pregnant Matriarch weep. When her sobs finally, slowly hitched to a stop, Syris gently pulled back. He wiped the tears from her flushed cheeks with his thumbs, offering her a look of pure, unadulterated devotion.

"I will leave you to your flowers," Syris murmured softly, completely dropping his interrogation.

With a flick of his wrist, the toxic-green wards sealing the library instantly dissolved. Syris took one last, lingering, deeply regretful look at her before turning and gliding out of the heavy wooden doors, intending to go absolutely berate himself in the training yards.

The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind him.

The absolute, definitive silence returned to the library. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The second the latch caught, the devastating, heartbroken posture of the sobbing Matriarch completely vanished. Roxy’s trembling shoulders instantly steadied. The tears stopped flowing like a faucet that had been abruptly twisted shut.

Roxy stood perfectly straight in the center of the dusty room, wiping the residual moisture from her cheeks with the back of her hand. Her brilliant green eyes, which just moments ago had been wide with fragile, pleading terror, turned terrifyingly cold, sharp, and flawlessly calculating.

She had done it. She had successfully manipulated the most perceptive, dangerous mind reader on the entire continent. She had used his absolute love as a blindfold, securing the cover she desperately needed to execute her trap for Abaddon.

She was a mastermind playing a lethal, cosmic game of chess, and she was winning.

But as she looked at the heavy wooden doors where her deeply devoted, violently protective husband had just exited, a massive, heavy knot of genuine, profound self-loathing tightened in her chest. The Warlords were willing to die for her, and she was looking them right in the eye and lying to their faces.

Her transmigrated heart violently ached at the heavy, lonely burden of the ultimate deception.

Roxy lowered her head, her cold eyes softening for just a fraction of a second as she stared at the closed door.

"I am sorry, Syris..."