Page 2 of Grand Romantic Delusions and the Madness of Mirth, Part One

Duties. All the things he trained Armin to do, to eventually take over. Over a decade of training just to stand at our father’s side. All the things I don’t have the intelligence or the fortitude or the power to —

My father clears his throat. “When the time comes.”

When the time comes.

To hold the intersection point.

I had already put the pieces together in my head. I just hadn’t taken a good look at the overall picture.

The fissure of grief that cracked open in my chest five months, seventeen days, and eight hours ago yawns wide now.

Eleanor’s hand tightens on my father’s shoulder.

She squares her own shoulders, letting me know that I’m projecting.

Projecting all the stupid energy that comes with the purple eyes that match Armin’s, only a shade darker than my father’s orbs.

My fundamentally useless energy— unless I want to go around subverting or even slaughtering all the people I’m supposed to represent. The people I’m meant to now lead …

No. My eyes matched Armin’s eyes.

He’s dead.

Just a pile of ash in an ornate urn on my father’s mantel.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to rein it all in.

Eleanor fucks my father, but somehow can’t stand to be in the same room as me …

I shove that thought away, understanding without needing to be told that it’s my lack of discipline that makes my energy so off-putting.

Though its currently … twisted tenor is new …

I find a rational thought within my overwhelmed mind, shoving it like a possible lifeline into the stilted conversation. “But Tinsel and Twinkle …”

Eleanor sighs affectedly at my use of the three-year-old twins’ nicknames. Nina and Levi.

I ignore her, grabbing hold of the spark of relief that floods my system at the idea. “They could manifest. So, Father, unless you plan on dying at least half a century before —”

“Anyone can die,” he chides.

He chides me. As if I weren’t the one to have identified Armin as he lay cold and stiff on that metal gurney. Surrounded by his useless guards, my own detail, and all the hospital staff. So that I couldn’t react. Other than to nod, then later stand as witness to his cremation.

Just to protect the family. Standing there and watching my brother burn down to nothing but ash, even while finally understanding the utter, abrupt despair that had brought me to my knees earlier that morning.

Anne and Eleanor shift uncomfortably. Anne actually slaps a hand over her mouth as if to stop herself from laughing.

My essence is leaking. Again.

And the most cruel thing about it? Other than the fact that my father is immune and I can’t hurt him the way he sits across his desk hurting me?

I make people happy.

Happier and happier until their brains melt.

“Anyone can die,” my father says again, snapping testily now. He hates repeating himself. And he doesn’t like my affecting Anne and Eleanor. “I’m not an immortal being, Euphrosyne.”

He hits every syllable of my given name— yoo-FRO-si-nee — pointedly.

Not Mirth. Because I flinched at that name earlier.

And the less upset or easily triggered I am, the easier he can guide me through this conversation until it reaches a point of satisfaction.

For him, at least. Since that satisfaction demands my acquiescence.

Euphrosyne is neither an odd nickname nor a term of endearment. Mirth is my more commonly used name, among family and friends. A name bequeathed to me by my brother, because even to another toddler, Euphrosyne is a stupid name for a baby.

Ironically, not even my father is arrogant enough to have named his daughter after one of the ancient Greek Charites, or one of the so-called ancient Roman Graces.

Euphrosyne is courtesy of my absentee birth mother and a clause she insisted on adding to her own breeding contract. My breeding contract?

Before I can sarcastically snark back at my father about him acting like a god when it suits him to do so, because he’s as near immortal as a human can be, he speaks. “The twins will not manifest.” Then he gently pats Eleanor’s hand.

Eleanor doesn’t take her gaze off me, but she does remove her hand from my father’s shoulder.

She’s the twins’ biological mother. She’s also my father’s chosen mate, one of three.

The twins were a surprise. A so-called late-in-life pregnancy.

A thoroughly joyful addition to the family three years ago that has now been overshadowed by my brother’s death.

I choke on another extreme swell of grief. They still hit me regularly, if randomly. It’s worse here. In this castle. In this company. With the land, the mountainside, literally seething energy under every one of my steps. Literally reminding me that I will never be enough with every footfall.

I felt that way even when I had Armin.

Now he’s left me.

And he chose … ultimately. He chose to leave me. Though I know anyone, everyone, would think me a terrible person if I ever uttered that thought out loud. That fundamental belief that has grown alongside all the grief and despair.

Armin chose to ski alone. He chose an ungroomed, unmarked extreme ski run. He chose to sneak off without his guards. He chose to leave me.

Though Armin was two years older, we were inseparable for most of our shared childhood, then through to early adulthood. Excepting for those six months after my awry nature had asserted itself, and I failed …

I tried and failed … failed to be what I should have been.

I meet my father’s eyes.

Purple-hued eyes.

Slightly brighter than my own.

Brighter than my brother’s were.

I never met my deceased eldest half-sibling. My father, who is now in his late nineties, lost his first child and his only soul-bound mate, Natalie, years before I was born. Not that I’ve ever heard a word about either of them directly from him.

That’s what grandmothers are for — purveyors of family gossip. Or what they were for, at least. My father’s mother passed seven years ago.

Armin’s mother, Julianna, left him and my father after an attempted kidnapping.

One of many attempts to snatch my brother and me throughout our lives.

They both survived, but Julianna was badly hurt protecting Armin.

She tried to take him back to her own family in France after.

But no one won those sorts of battles against my father.

I attended Julianna’s funeral three years ago, just to hold Armin’s hand. He didn’t cry. But he also didn’t know her very well.

Maybe it would have been better if he cried?

Maybe it would have been better if he had someone other than just me to hold his hand?

Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to fling himself — alone — off the side of a mountain in unstable snow conditions.

My birth mother, Daphne, was little more than a surrogate. She knew she would eventually leave me, and was paid well for it. Not that she needed the cash. Her family is almost as filthy rich as mine.

The difference between those women — the mothers of my father’s first three children — and my father’s actual chosen, Eleanor and Anne?

The purple eyes.

Or at least an ancestral history of having true-blooded awry manifest in their progeny. As with my mother, whose eyes are dark blue without even a hint of purple.

“The intersection point,” I mumble, surfacing above the grief just long enough to articulate what all my random thoughts have been circling. When Armin was alive, there were two of us. Him the elder and the more powerful.

Now there was only me.

I couldn’t hold all the power of the intersection point on my own.

Not even my father can, really. He needs his chosen, whether or not they’re also sexual partners.

I don’t think he and Raoul are lovers, though they share Eleanor and Anne.

But even with their essence only entwined by intent, all of them share the responsibility of holding the intersection point currently seething away under my bare feet.

One of seven intersection points through which the essence that fuels the world radiates.

There were nine points centuries ago, but two fell.

And those collapses created massive upheavals in the world.

Some historians say that there was once an ancient civilization with technology to rival our own— and that they were wiped out when the first of the nine intersection points was compromised.

With humanity driven back into a dark age.

Over a century ago, the entire political and demographic landscape of North America fractured and still hasn’t completely recovered — according to my father — after what he called ‘an attempt at a hostile takeover’ of their intersection point.

If my father died, taking his own chosen with him and leaving only me as his essence heir, an untended and untethered intersection point would draw those of power. World wars have been fought over less.

But there’s more than one problem with me being the only heir.

“I’m a dud,” I say hollowly.

My father huffs. But he doesn’t refute my disparaging assessment of my abilities.

“You’re not a dud!” Anne exclaims, glancing between me and my father, then dropping his hand. “And I don’t want to hear you say anything of the sort again.”

Anne raised Armin and me. As much as she was allowed to do so, at least. For about a year, if I’m remembering correctly, before we were shipped off to school. Then during any breaks we spent with our father— or rather, in the proximity of our father.

I don’t drop his gaze. Absolute derision — directed only at myself — drips from my next words. “A dud. But at least I blooded true, right?”

He nods stiffly.

An old argument about my supposed unwillingness to embrace the truth of my twisted essence hovers between us for a breath. About my manipulative, destructive abilities and how suppressing them holds me back from fully Becoming .

Even though my father was the one to walk away from my training. He was the one who simply sent me back to school once I had my power all stopped up and refused to unstop it again. He was the one who could never understand I didn’t want it. Any of it.

I couldn’t risk my power accidentally killing people during training, just for the possibility of eventually controlling that power.

Not again.

I rise stiffly from the chair, head held high even in my borrowed sweats and with my tangled hair. “Good for breeding if nothing else,” I say pertly, flippantly.

I’m almost out the door before my father calls to me.

“When you are capable of being more rational,” he says, all cool toned and arrogantly detached, “we’ll discuss this and your new role further. I won’t wait for those names.”

I keep walking, out the door and into the stone corridor.

Names.

Of those few people I would consider— that I even could consider— as chosen mates.

Even better if they come with their own ancestral history of purple eyes, but don’t possess the eyes themselves.

Because those eyes would mark them as potentially dangerous, even volatile.

In all the same ways I might be, if I hadn’t balked at the destruction I might potentially wreak if I allowed myself to just admit I am more , more than a few empathic tricks and … simple mirth.

But I’m not more .

I’m so much less. So much less that even mirth and joy have abandoned me.

Those names … those few that my father will ask me to whittle down into an acceptable number— or will more likely whittle down himself— will be plucked from people in the best political and financial positions.

And all with robust essence-wielding abilities.

The strength needed to balance my inherent weakness.

My life partners will be chosen, not soul bound. Not fated or destined. Even if such bonds might exist for me, my freedom to find them ran out the moment my brother shed his mortal coil.

My chest constricts so tightly that I’m forced to dart into a niche off the hall.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the overhead lighting and press myself against a fucking marble statue as I struggle to breathe.

I might not have the practical, useful power that typically comes with these purple eyes, but I got all of the light sensitivity.

And a collection of vintage designer sunglasses to go with that, of course.

My father frowns on the idea of admitting that sensitivity for himself, as well as shielding others from the sight of his purple eyes.

I manage to keep breathing even as I allow myself to cry. Quiet, stifled sobs, threaded with all my thwarted love and fortified with all my ever-growing anger.

Maybe this is what it feels like to lose one of your soul bound?

Armin and I might not have been brought into this world together, but we never liked being apart.

Maybe my brother belonged to me through more than just blood?

Maybe our souls were pulled into these mortal coils from the same starlit section of the universe .

And he still chose to leave me. Armin’s need to feel, to thwart danger, to be … thrilled? All of those needs were stronger than his love for me.

I know … I know it was just a terrible, senseless accident, but I can’t, I can’t …

So, so selfishly … I’m so, so morally weak that I can’t …

I can’t forgive him.

And now this … this utterly ridiculous chosen-mate matching event.

Armin is dead.

And he’s taken my life as I knew it with him.

That bright, hot anger finally wins over the disabling despair.

I straighten, pushing away from the statue that’s been the only thing keeping me on my feet. I manage a few deep, full breaths.

The castle guard who escorted me to my father from my rooms left at my father’s behest. The few staff still traversing the halls even this deep into the evening ignore me, my reddened eyes, and my tear-stained cheeks as I slink back to my rooms.

I distract my churning mind with a hot shower, then settle behind my desk to deal with some of the paperwork for my next charity event.

That’s mostly invitations to the celebrity guests, painstakingly handwritten in an ornate script that I’ve practiced to perfection for over half of my twenty-six years.

One of the rarest of rare purple-eyed awry. One of the most favored by the old gods— or one of the essence twisted, according to some of the factions that actively hunt the purple-orbed in other parts of the world.

This is all a princess is good for. Right?

Good for breeding. Good for giving away money to more worthy people, more worthy causes … more .

A face, a practiced smile, to represent the so-called royal family of Europe. To mitigate the fear my father’s power evokes.

So … fuck soul-bound mates.

Fuck loving anyone at all.

Not ever again.