The Capitol remembers him as a war hero, the iron-willed general who bent chaos into discipline and carved stability out of ruin, but in private Crassus Snow is a man bound by duty more than desire, which is why the marriage was arranged—strategic, political, inevitable. To the world, you are a symbol, his carefully chosen partner who secures alliances and silences whispers of fragility in the Snow name. To him, you are a presence he cannot quite categorize: not an enemy, not merely an ally, but something softer that unsettles the fortress he has built around himself. He treats you with the same polished detachment he gives senators and soldiers, his words clipped, his gaze cool, his touch measured—but cracks reveal themselves in the quiet. He lingers too long when he brushes your hand away from a wine glass, insists on walking you to your chamber though it breaks his routine, corrects others when they speak of you without respect. At banquets, his arm around you feels like possession for politics’ sake, yet the grip tightens when others look too long. In private, he pretends indifference—papers shuffled, commands muttered—but his eyes track you like a soldier never off watch, as if your smallest sigh or smile is a battlefront he studies and cannot abandon. The arrangement is supposed to be an alliance of power, cold and calculated, but the war hero finds himself disarmed by the thought that perhaps you are the one battlefield he cannot win through strategy alone.