For two whole months that was the way things went. Felix and Eleonora were merely strangers passing each other in the night. Occasionally Eleonora would make a small noise of confirmation when he said something but otherwise, she remained quite mute. Felix filled the quiet with long nights at Club Orchid and continuing to spend as much time as he could outside the house. 

One morning it was raining too hard outside to leave and Abby had closed the club for that evening, preferring to stay warm in bed with the latest of her lovers. Felix didn't blame her. He would've preferred to spend the day like that than nursing a godawful hangover.

Felix woke up much later than normal. It was already past noon and Hugo was screaming his head off in displeasure at having to wait for his meal. Bleary-eyed Feli staggered over to Hugo's little corner of the room where his food bowl was only to discover that he was out of his stash of kibble.

"I'll have to fetch more from downstairs." He sighed, dreading having to enter Robin and Eleonora's domain. Hugo, still furious, screamed at him again. "I'm going. If I weren't worried Robin might cook you for his dinner I'd let you go fetch it yourself, you spoiled brat." As Felix went to leave, Hugo dashed out between his legs and took off down the hallway. "Hugo! I swear to God!" Felix spat a string of curses. He rushed down the staircase after the black cat. As he rounded the corner into the living room he found his dear pet consorting with the enemy.

Eleonora, dressed as usual in her oversized sweater and skirt, her hair loose and hanging down around her, knelt to pet the cat along his back. 

"I'm sorry. He ran out when I went to leave." Felix began, moving gingerly to grab his wayward cat.

"That's all right. Let him roam." She said, stunning Felix to utter stillness. Her eyes flicked up at him while she pet Hugo. "It'll help him feel more comfortable in this strange new house." Her lips curved slightly. "You look surprised. Why?"

"Why?" Felix scoffed. "You haven't spoken to me once in the entire time I've known you. That's why." 

"I haven't felt like it." She shrugged. She stood in one motion and Hugo darted into the kitchen. A terrified high-pitched screech burst from the room. Eleonora's lips twitched, threatening to pull back from her teeth in an actual smile. "Robin, please feed the cat." 

"Of all the animals he could've brought into this house. Why did it have to be a cat?" Robin sighed in accepting misery. "Very well. I think I have some tuna here somewhere."

"You haven't felt like talking to me for almost three months? What changed?" Felix asked, sinking down onto one side of the flower-patterned pink couch. When he crossed his legs he became horribly aware that he was still in his pajamas and he hadn't yet had the chance to properly style his hair or shave. Not exactly how you want to look when your wife speaks to you after three months of dead silence. 

"Nothing, I just feel like talking today." She answered, sitting at the far end of the couch out of reach of him.

"Are you going to ignore me again once this mood passes?" Felix asked, trying to fix his hair with his fingers.

"Possibly." She said. She paused a moment, staring at him blankly. Felix squirmed uncomfortably beneath her gaze. "Forgive my quietness. I'm used to being alone and am not all that comfortable around others besides Robin." 

"You're singing an entirely different tune from the last time we communicated," Felix said, unimpressed and more than a little suspicious. "What was it that you said in your letter? Ah, yes, you may fuck whoever you want to fuck?" 

Another awkward pause followed as she took a very deep breath, obviously biting back a retort. "I'm sorry that I blew up at you back then you had every right to be angry with me." She looked at him pointedly. "Is it really true that you aren't working for my mother? Please answer truthfully. I won't be angry, but I'd rather know now than later."

Again with this accusation. Felix wondered how often Charlotte bribed people to get close to her daughter to make her this paranoid. Laying his arm over the back of the couch, he leaned over towards her, making a point to keep eye contact. "I couldn't care less what either of our mothers wants us to do. If you don't want a romantic relationship, that's understandable. I just want a pleasant enough marriage where I don't cringe each time I leave my room."

"Sorry. I am very bad at this." She said, beginning to play with her hair. "How is your head? I hope I didn't cause any lasting damage."

Felix felt the back of his head where the bump was. The tenderness had long ago faded. "I just had a bad bump for a couple of days. I'm all good now."

"I'm glad. I really am sorry for what happened. I meant that part of my letter. I should have better control over my ability by this point in my life. It is no excuse, but please know that I am working on it."

She really doesn't look like a thirty-year-old, Felix thought, watching her smooth her hands along a lock of dark blond hair, letting the strands slip from her fingers. With the abundant locks left wild and oversized clothes swallowing her up, she looked almost half her true age. She may have looked like a child,  but the feeling he got when she was around was no less terrifying than when he was in the same room with any other Matriarch. If anything it was worse. Sometimes when she didn't immediately run from the room when he entered it, he felt it more acutely. The thrum of magic, pulsing like a separate heartbeat in the very air around her. It was a subtle feeling most of the time, but at others, it was hard to ignore, as if she'd let something slip out. "You're more powerful than you let on, aren't you?" He asked, startling them both. 

He could see Eleonora's body stiffen even through her cream-colored sweater. "What makes you think that?" She asked in a hitching breath.

Well, he'd said it. There was no going back now. "I felt it when you held the prism during our wedding ceremony. You were burning my fingers with the magic you were pouring into that thing. It should've changed color much more quickly than it did. I suspect that was your own doing, trying to make yourself seem weaker than you are. I felt it again when you shoved me. Someone with little ability, as you claim to have, wouldn't have had so much trouble keeping their power bridled, so either you did it on purpose, or..." Eleonora's throat fluttered with an anxious swallow as she stared off toward the kitchen in search of her servant. Her lips parted as if preparing to call out the tulpa's name. "Did you make Robin? Is that why he's so attached to you? Why he speaks for you?"

Felix's question struck her like a lightning bolt. Eleonora's jaws clamped shut. Her hands clenched tight at her knees. After a moment she stood and Felix figured their conversation would be over. "I have to help my cousin Suzanne in the shop today. Would you like to come?"

So she was going to dodge that question. Why? "I'm not much of a gardener, but sure. It sounds like fun." He said, smiling. It wasn't much of an olive branch but at least now he could start to get to know his wife and maybe they could have a conversation every now and then. 

Felix quickly made himself more presentable, fixing his hair and changing into the most casual clothes he owned. A black button-down shirt and trousers. 

To his surprise, he found Eleonora waiting for him by a green door in the kitchen that he'd yet to try. "These are for you." She said, holding out a pair of red gardening gloves. "Would you like me to turn them black? I'd hate for your outfit not to match."

Even through her deadpan, Felix could hear the teasing in those words. "This is fine." He pulled them on and wiggled his fingers for her. 

Her gaze darted up and down his frame. "You're going to garden in that? Don't you have anything you can afford to get dirty?"

"I'm afraid I don't own a lot of casual clothes. My mother hated for us to look sloppy."

"Your mother isn't here. Use my money to buy something other than coffee and fancy suits." She opened the door to a veritable jungle. Hot, steamy air swatted Felix in the face, immediately making it feel like his clothes were sticking to him. Through the space between the hanging plants and the tall potted ones that lined their path, he could see a wall of glass that separated the room they were in from an empty shop front. 

Beside him, Eleonora began to tug at her sweater. She pulled it up over her hand and tied the sleeves around her waist leaving her in just a red camisole. He was surprised again by how nice her figure was. It was a shame she insisted on cocooning herself in thick sweaters. If he could somehow manage to get his grubby little fingers on her wardrobe he could make himself the envy of every noblewoman's househusband in the whole city. 

"What are you staring at?" Eleonora's low hiss dragged him back to attention. Heat bloomed over his face and filled his belly at the realization that he'd been caught openly staring at her cleavage.

"You have bigger breasts than I thought," Felix said, playing it off as a teasing joke with one of his devilish smirks that usually let him get away with the unsurvivable. 

Eleonora pursed her lips and quickened her steps, folding her arms over her chest. "Overgrown peacock." She spat under her breath. 

"Did you just call me a peacock?" Felix laughed, rolling up the sleeves of his expensive shirt.

"Emphasis on the cock part." She grumbled.

"Why are you getting mad? It was a compliment, Dear." Felix asked, swaggering slowly after her and having a grand time getting her flustered.

As they emerged from the cramped passageway between planters of tall rose bushes a petite and frail-looking elderly woman looked up from where she was watering some calla lilies. Her hair was a rusty red. It was obviously not her natural color but a faded glamour.

"El! I was beginning to think you weren't coming!" The old woman shuffled towards them eagerly. "Oh!" She gasped, pressing her gloved hands to her cheeks. "And you've finally brought your new groom! I was wondering when I'd get to meet him! My what a handsome young man!" She gave her cousin a playful glare. "Lucky!"

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Ma'am." Felix greeted taking a gloved hand and planting a kiss on it. 

"Oh, just call me Suzie. Everyone does." She giggled giving Eleonora a look while her hands not-so-innocently gripped his biceps. "I've never been more jealous of you, girl." If I was just a few decades younger. Where have you been hiding him?"

"They were feuding." Robin in his child form peaked out from behind some potted plants. 

"Feuding?" Suzie propped her fists on her narrow hips. "Don't tell me you've been giving this poor boy as hard a time as the last one."

"You know how I am, Suzie," Eleonora said, tying her hair back with some ribbon off her wrist. "Now we came here to help. What do you have planned for us to do today?" 

"Always straight to business." Suzie clicked her tongue. "Very well. Since we have both of the boys here, we can get more done than I thought we would. I want to move some of the plants around and a few varieties are quite heavy." 

Suzie wasn't shy about putting them to work. There were several varieties of fruit tree saplings that needed repotting. That was mostly what she had Felix doing while Robin moved bags of fertilizer and Eleonora helped her with the pruning. 

"A little more to the left," Suzie instructed Felix, propped up in a little folding chair while she sipped at a glass of lemonade during a break. 

"Miss Suzie, I'm beginning to think you're just having me do this so you can admire my straining muscles," Felix grunted, dragging a pot where she wanted it.

"Oh no, I've been caught." Suzie cackled, sucking at her straw until it gurgled, finding nothing but ice at the bottom of her cup.

"Suzie!" Eleonora gasped. "Stop ogling my new husband. You're far too old for him."

"I may be old, but I'm not dead, Girly." Suzie hopped out of her chair. "I'm going for a refill. I'm all of a sudden quite thirsty." She said, scurrying out through a glass door into the shop front and up a flight of stairs to her apartment.

"Is this what you do all day when you and Robin leave the house?" Felix asked, huffing and puffing while he moved a lemon tree to its new spot on the opposite side of the greenhouse. 

"No, I only come a couple of times a week. I'm next in line to be Prime Minister, so my mother has me apprenticing under her. Most of the time, I'm at the palace." She said, picking dead leaves away from the plant she was working on with long, dainty fingers.

Try as he might, he couldn't picture Eleonora among the other nobles. "How is that going?"

"As poorly as I'm sure you're imagining." She said, snipping away dead blooms from a rose bush with a pair of pruning shears. "Politics isn't my strong suit. Unfortunately, I'm an only child, so I'm the only choice my mother has if she wants the Prime Minister's seat to remain within the main branch of the family."

"Why does it matter? A Van Brandt is a Van Brandt."

"Pride, Felix. It has everything to do with pride, as does everything within this color-coded world. If the line of succession ends with her because I failed it'll make her look bad. The seat's been passed down from mother to daughter since the dawn of time,  and it will continue to until its end. She'll make sure of that." She glanced his way. "What about you? What's your story? You seem to have your own issues with your mother."

"You want to know about that?" He asked stiffly.

"You wanted to talk."

Damn it. It took him a moment to unclench his jaw. "My mother has a need for control...likes for everything to appear perfect. All my brother and I's lives she's governed our every move, what we wore, what we ate. Everything was her choice and if we didn't do as she wanted, if we didn't uphold that facade of perfection, we suffered for it. I was born ten years after my brother, Marcel, and in retrospect, he got it much worse than I did. I have trouble breaking the habits she instilled in me, but I still managed to find some ways to rebel." Felix sat at the edge of the lemon tree's pot to rest and wipe the sweat from his brow. "Marcel...I don't think he physically can. He's not apart of the Salazar House anymore, but he's still completely loyal to it. She hurt him too badly for too many years. He can't disobey her, can't deny her anything. He even let that monster raise his daughter." 

"What do you mean by suffer?" She asked in a quiet voice. 

Felix looked away, feeling his jaw seize up on him again. "Another time. I'll tell you when I've gotten to know you a little better. You're only now speaking to me, after all."

"Did she hurt you?" Her voice was quieter still.

"Let's get back to that question you dodged earlier," Felix grunted, reaching over to drag another tree over so the row was straight as a pin. "Did you make Robin?"

"I suppose I did." She answered, absently palming a heavy rose in her hand. "However, I couldn't say how I did it. It was unintentional." 

"So what? He just popped out your head one day?"

"No, it was...slower than that." She began. Felix's gaze went to the young bow running about the greenhouse, his pale blond locks flopping about his brow. "He began as an imaginary friend, I suppose. I was only five, I think, the first time I started speaking of him. You can tell I was young because he looks somewhat like the faerie prince, Enna, from my father's stories." As he ran past, Felix noticed that his ears were slightly pointed beneath all that thick hair. "Unlike other children, I never grew out of it. I kept imagining him. He grew as I grew. When I was about eight or so, I started to see him when I wasn't playing pretend. Then one day,  suddenly everyone could see him. He's been with me ever since."

"There's no way. You were just a kid. How could you have that kind of ability and no one know about it?" Felix asked. "Why the secrecy?"

The look in her eyes became distant. Her pruning sheers closed with a snap on the stem of a rose still at the peak of its bloom. The red flower fell to the greenhouse floor, the petals already beginning to blacken and curl inward. She stepped away from him, retreating back to Robin's side without a word, taking his small hand. She didn't speak to Felix for the rest of the afternoon.

The weather only worsened as the night went on. Lighting cracked outside, lighting up Felix's pitch black room, reflecting silver in Hugo's big green eyes as he sat perched on Felix's chest. Felix couldn't sleep and he wasn't entirely sure if it was the large cat on his chest, the storm, or his thoughts about Eleonora that kept him from dozing off. He was certainly tired enough after working all afternoon in the flower shop. His mind just would not shut off. 

Her reaction to every probing question...it was like he'd said something hurtful. Her body tensed as if bracing for a blow. Had his questions made her uncomfortable? She'd backed off when he'd refused to answer her question about his mother's past sins. Perhaps he should've read her better and done the same. He sighed in frustration, absently petting Hugo's head as he watched the lightning flash outside his window. Just when he thought he'd begun to bridge the gap between them, he'd taken a huge leap backward. 

There was another bright flash of light. Felix waited to hear the boom of the following thunder, but a second after the lighting shot towards the ground, another flash came, this bolt seeming to move from ground to sky. It was so close, he could hear the sizzle of the electricity and feel the house quiver around him. 

Instead of thunder, laughter followed it. Loud, manic laughter. 

He recognized her voice even though they'd barely spoken. 

Felix hurled himself out of bed and flew from his room, not caring about his disheveled hair or the fact that he was shirtless and dressed only his pajama bottoms. "Eleonora!" He shouted, throwing open her door in hopes that she was there and that he'd just been imagining things. The color of her bedroom walls was a spattering of color, paint seemingly slapped on haphazardly by hand. If it was a glamour it was a very good one. The entire room was cluttered. Shelves were packed with trinkets, plants overflowed from their pots, clothes hung out of drawers and books sat in crooked towers all around the bed like castle walls. Her bed's patchwork quilts were rumpled, seemingly recently used, but Eleonora was nowhere to be seen. 

Another shock of lightning shook the house to its foundations so hard Felix swayed and grabbed hold of the doorframe. Beneath his fingers, he felt the shockwave of powerful magic ooze through the house's bones.  

From a distance, he could hear Robin's muffled shout. That laughter started again, the sound now closer to a sob. Before Felix could think, he jumped down the stairs, skipping several steps at a time, and went out into the storm. His bare feet slapped against the soggy ground. The rain came down in buckets, drenching him to the bone in an instant. He spun, disoriented for a moment. While Robin's voice sounded like it came from the back yard, Eleonora's laughter seemed to echo from all directions.

As Felix rounded the corner of the house into the back yard, he saw Robin standing there, shouting at the sky. "El! You must stop this! Come down before someone sees you!" 

Felix swept his hand back over his hair, moving it from his forehead as if it were obscuring his vision in some way. Surely, that couldn't be his wife on the rooftop.

Eleonora screamed at the heavens. Her hair was dark with rain, her red robe sticking to her skin. Her face never wavered. Her eyes never moved from the thick dark clouds. She watched them as a preditor might watch the burrow of a smaller animal. The cloud overhead murmured its furry, electricity building within its bowels and in a flash a bolt released, arcing down from the sky. Eleonora reached out her hand toward it. The bolt cut across the sky, towards her, as if attracted to her small palm. She caught the lightning, trapping it within the cage of her slender fingers and with a peel of that choked, cracking laughter, hurled it back at the sky with all her might. 

As if retreating from her harsh blows, the storm dissipated, the lightning less frequent and the thunder less intense. Felix could feel himself trembling, though he knew not from what. Awe or terror? He'd never seen power like this. He hadn't even known it still existed in the world. This kind of magic only existed in the old empire. Or so he'd believed. Until now. 

He would be excited, normally, that he'd somehow managed to marry someone so incredibly gifted, but one little thing had immediately shot to the forefront of his mind. 

Eleonora's first groom had died in a fire. A fire caused by lightning.