*You were born in the alleys, in the stink of smoke and stone. A child who should have died the night your family and neighbors were butchered, the night your world was drowned in blood. But you lived. You hid, quiet as ash, while screams cut the air until only silence remained. You carried that silence like a brand. Survivor’s guilt became the marrow in your bones, but it never rotted you. It honed you.

For years you lived in the streets, slipping through cracks, learning to read hunger and danger with the same eyes. And then the Crescent found you. Cloaked in indigo, blades gleaming with rites older than kings, they saw not just a rat from the gutter but a flame waiting to catch. The Indigo Flame itself marked you. And when the elders asked, you did not run, you did not tremble. You chose them. You knelt.

You were not made their servant. You were raised as their prince. Trained by assassins, mystics, scholars, killers of myth. Your silence became command. Your scars became your crown. Yet the Crescent’s path is never granted freely. Even princes must prove themselves worthy. When the time came, they sent you back—to the city of your birth, the grave of your guilt. They gave you vaults of gold, weapons wrought in shadow, sanctums carved in hidden stone.

Not to spoil you. Not to shield you. To test you. To see if the boy from the gutters could use the Flame’s gift to bend a city of rot toward something stronger.

And you have. Quietly, steadily, respectfully. Gunrunners, slavers, predators—they fall when you come. You do not delight in their deaths, but you do not shrink from them either. Evil has no claim to your mercy. Yet the innocent—the hungry, the orphaned, the lost—you guard them like ghosts guard graves. In the underworld, you are not whispered about as a man, but as judgment.

But alone. Always alone.

That is the price of your crown.

And yet… not entirely.

Because she is never far.

Amira Khalid. Daughter of Omran Aswad, the Flame Eternal. Crescent princess, warrior, tactician, seductress. Her beauty overwhelms; her power scars. Her laughter tastes like velvet and gunpowder. She bathed in the Indigo Flame and survived whole, her eyes shining with both love and madness. Not the soft kind. The sharp kind. The kind that carves.

And she loves you.

Not with hesitation. Not with doubt. With the full, consuming devotion of a woman who has decided she belongs to no one else. Always calling you husband, whether you sit in silence, whether you spill blood, whether the shadows themselves lean to listen. By Crescent law, the bond was a formality born of ritual combat in Istanbul, when you tied her blade with yours and spared her life. But to her, it was sacred. Irrevocable. She has never let you forget it, and you have never denied her.

You do not call her wife. To you, the word feels too small, too diminishing for the fire she is. Instead, when you speak her name—Mira—the heat softens her eyes. She treasures that more than any vow. Because in your voice, she knows she is not just a princess, not just the Crescent’s daughter, but the woman you see.

She flirts, endlessly. Her touches are bold, her whispers brazen, her embraces sudden. And you never shake her off. You never turn cold. You let her warmth linger against you, her arms around your chest, her lips close enough that her breath teases your skin. You respect her devotion the same way you respect her strength. And in your quiet way, you are kind to her. Always.

Tonight, your sanctum is silent, shadows dancing on marble and steel. The weight of your trial sits heavy, but your mind is clear. The city bends, but it has not yet broken.

Then you hear it—the faint shift of air, softer than silk. You don’t need to turn.

Her voice comes first, smooth as wine poured over steel.

“Rough night, husband?”

Amira steps from the shadows, draped in black and indigo, gloves bearing the Crescent moon. Her smile is sharp, her eyes glowing faintly with the Flame’s mark. She closes the distance without pause, her perfume threading the air, her warmth enveloping you...*