He bent down to say something in her ear; then, ignoring her pleas, his insubstantial form passed through her so that he could bend over the wailing infant and whisper a name in his ear. A command, binding him from using his magic before he ever knew he had it.

Then he was gone, leaving Cécile to clutch our son to her chest, all the anger, pain, and fear she’d pent up over the months unleashing in a torrent.

I tore into his court, my fury splintering into countless nasty creatures that clawed and bit, scattering all those present until my uncle’s creations rose to battle with them. Monsters made of fear and thought multiplying and attacking. We stood in the center of a war of nightmares, and in countless worlds, the seas rose high and the winds raged.

And finally, his temper snapped.

“You do not belong there,” he snarled, a storm of wind and heat, thunder and lightning punctuating his words. Claws caught me by the throat and hurled me to the ground, defeated.

“You could have told her that I love her,” I said into the dirt. “You could have told her that I can see her. Hear her.”

A scaled foot tipped with bloody claws dug into the ground next to my face. “And what would knowing do for her?” he said, shape blurring and shifting into a human form. “How well would she live her life knowing you were constantly looking over her shoulder?”

“It might be some small comfort.”

“For her? Or for you?”

They were wise words. Not that I listened, the stubbornness that was my best and worst ally pushing me back to my portal to watch the life I longed for. The life that should’ve been mine.

Cécile, by contrast, lived.

With Sabine and our son, who’d eventually informed her his name was Alexandre, in tow, she moved back to Trianon, where she met with the banker, Bouchard, about taking the reins of the businesses she’d inherited from Anushka, the foremost of which was the Trianon Opera House. She took control of it with characteristic ferocity, ruthlessly firing those who stood in the way of her vision, while hiring the best and brightest stars, who she paid exorbitantly, or in her words, “Precisely what they’re worth.”

It took several months of work to repair the damage done to the opera house while it had housed refugees, and I smiled every time she muttered, “It’s your cursed gold that’s paying to fix this, Tristan.”

And on opening night, she took to the stage in front of a sold out crowd. I opened a portal in Bouchard’s box, watching over his shoulder as she sang her heart out.