Chapter 408: A New Star is Born
Eva von Zehntner was the oldest of Bruno’s children. As a young woman, she was entirely unlikely to inherit her father’s position, and that was fine by her. She was not some ideologue of liberal virtues, despite having received a classical education while growing up. Rather, she deeply admired her parents’ relationship and the traditional values her mother embodied.
When she heard from her father that an arrangement had already been brokered to marry her off in the future to Prince Wilhelm—not the immediate son of the Kaiser, but his grandson and future heir to the throne, who was currently roughly the same age as her—she didn’t cry, or rebel, or throw a tantrum of epic proportions.
Rather, the young woman who had been raised her entire life with the civility and grace of a proper princess spent most of her time fantasizing about how their future relationship would blossom.
Sure, because of how close Bruno was with her fiancé’s grandfather, and the importance both men had in the German Reich, they were already acquainted. But the idea of marrying the future Kaiser, and becoming the single most important woman in the world, had been nothing short of a fantasy—until Bruno casually dropped the nuke on the family over a breakfast conversation.
It was a secret so powerful it had the ability to change the course of history, and provoke disaster upon their entire house by those who would naturally be envious of the alliance brokered in the shadows.
And the political significance of the Kaiser marrying his grandson—a man who would one day be the Kaiser—to a young woman from a house of noble upstarts with a lineage barely more than a single century? It was unfathomable. In another timeline, it would have never happened.
But Bruno was a force of nature—like thunder and the lightning which preceded it. He was a dealer in death on a global scale. The Kaiser’s enemies were broken, defeated, and scattered to the winds, licking their wounds as they gazed from afar in horror at the prosperity and might that Germany was building at this very moment.
Historical enemies, like the Habsburgs, had been bound by a leash of servitude. Not through the brilliance of old and ancient dynasties which had supported the House of Hohenzollern for centuries—but by one man.
Sure, the Austrians didn’t quite realize it yet, but they had sold their soul to Bruno in order to save the heart of the Empire: the Archduchy of Austria and its crown lands. But when the time came to collect, Bruno would take everything from them.
Austria was poised to be peacefully integrated as another subordinate state of the Prussian Royal House—a feat that had never before been done in history, despite both nations being clearly German.