Chapter 452: The Prince of Darkness
The Archduchess Hedwig von Habsburg of Austria stared out the window of her family’s palace, lying in her bed beneath a cascade of silk and moonlight. Her nightgown shimmered faintly in the dark, but her eyes were fixed on the glowing lights of Vienna—a city that, in the past year, had become the soul of the German Reich.
She had no idea what was happening this very night across the continent in Lisbon. All she knew was what her father had told her earlier that day: she was to marry the exiled King of Portugal, Manuel II, who now lived in England.
He was only seven years her senior—a remarkably small age gap, by dynastic standards. She had never met him, only seen photographs and heard whispers.
But it wasn’t the suddenness of the betrothal that kept her awake, that kept her chest heavy and her sleep elusive. It was the shadow in her heart. A man she once admired. A man she had once imagined herself marrying: Bruno. The man who had stabbed her family in the back—and twisted the knife.
She had not been present for the final exchange between her grandfather, Emperor Franz Joseph I, and Bruno. But she had seen the aftermath. She had overheard the old man’s drunken words—"I was hoodwinked by the devil." The stories told in quiet corners of court were worse still.
Bruno had offered them mercenaries to quell rebellion. But he warned them: "You won’t be able to bear the cost up front. Are you sure you want to offer me such a thing?" Franz Joseph—too proud, too certain of the Habsburg treasury—had waved it off. "I can afford an elite private army. We’re not some Balkan principality."
Bruno had smiled. Not cruelly, not eagerly. Just inevitably. He had tallied every bullet, every medkit, every milliliter of fuel, every breath of morphine administered to the Vienna poor—until the bill came due.
And then, with the smirk of Lucifer himself, he laid the ledger down.
"I did warn you, didn’t I?"
But Hedwig hadn’t seen that part. She’d only seen him—years before—in his Austro-Hungarian Field Marshal’s uniform. Regal, cold, impossibly beautiful. Back then, she had confused admiration for love.
And later, when he returned to Vienna not as her empire’s servant, but as its collector—wearing the uniform of the German Reich, the chain of office around his throat, and the sash of the Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen upon his chest...
She realized who he truly was. Not Michael the Archangel. But Lucifer—cast not down from heaven, but invited in. That night, she knew.