♡‧₊˚𝚝𝚠𝚘♡‧₊

Until seven years ago, the word miracle was not in my vocabulary, and I never believed in it.

To me, miracles have always been masochistic fantasies hopeless humans cling to and delude themselves instead of enduring the harsh reality.

Not me. I have never been one of them.

Well, that was the case until I found my first ever miracle—the talisman that had been with me, keeping me sane and human since I was a kid.

I was an idiot not to see it as a miracle all along.

My miracle.

My panacea.

My lifeline.

My existence.

My peace.

My heaven.

My salvation.

My universe.

My beautiful chaos.

My Belle.

The anomaly in my otherwise tightly controlled system. The only person to ever exist who shattered every wall I was born with constructed around my hollow chest and found a heart in it that has always belonged to her and has been beating for her.

She saved me from self-annihilation while ruining me forever. Tore me open and brought out a version of me no one, including myself, could've guessed existed beneath all the cold indifference and anarchy-driven system.

Juliette Rothschild-De L'Aquila was my tether from the time we were kids. But when we reunited after an eleven-year separation, she became the reason I lived and breathed. She grounded me in a way no degree of control ever could by becoming my wife.

My wife.

The word somehow still sounds foreign to me. Like a distant, unreachable dream, even to someone like me who never dreams and for whom nothing is ever unattainable. Sometimes, I feel like I'll wake up and realize I'm still stuck in those years I was forced to exist without her.

"Just a heads up, Dad. We are quite possibly walking into a warzone," he murmurs as we walk towards the kitchen of our family home.

It's a mansion in the heart of the Upper East, bigger than The Rothschild Mansion, just the kind that my Belle wanted to call home for when we'd have her own family.

The sight of her in our kitchen, her blonde locks cascading in loose waves, a bit of dough smeared over the side of her forehead steals my air like it always does when I see her following an interval. Doesn't matter if that interval has been barely two hours. In my dictionary, it's equivalent to two decades because she's my sustenance.

What happened that night seven years ago instilled an emotion in me I never thought I could feel. Fear. They say some things heal as the time goes by. That fucking feeling when I experienced my life ending in a matter of a few seconds when that clone took a shot at her is a moment I'll never heal from. I'd failed to protect my wife again. Just like I'd failed to protect her from those falling into the carefully woven trap of Althea.

She could've died had it not been for another miracle that was destined to enter our lives by saving my lifeline. My Belle. One of the three miracles of my life that's currently by my side—my son Amon. That night, he threw his tiny body on my wife to shield her from the bullet and ended up staying in a coma for two months. A huge price he paid for taking the bullet on behalf of my angel, making me indebted to him for my entire existence.

There's not a single thing about my Belle that has changed in the past seven years. She's still the most breathtaking human I've ever seen, my light, and not to exaggerate, but more fucking beautiful. She's happier than ever. More alive. More at peace. And I'll burn the world before I let it lessen ever again. I'd lost her once for eleven years. Almost lost her again had it not been for my son saving her. I'll never let that happen again. Ever. If I have to obliterate myself a million times over to keep her alive and happy, so be it.

All this time has passed by, and she continues to remain everything I am not.

Light to my darkness.

Yang to my yin.

Softness to my serrated edges.

Peace to my chaos.

Vibrance to my monochrome.

Horizon to my abyss.

Rain to my drought.

My home.

The home of our two sons.

Our youngest, who's seven years old, is currently hellbent on testing her patience.

With my hands crossed over my chest, I lean against the doorframe, watching her try to tame the chaos standing beside her at the counter.

Our youngest.

Aelius Constantine De L'Aquila.

My wife's birthday twin.

The night Amon was shot and my wife fainted after witnessing his condition, we found out that she was almost four weeks pregnant with Aelius. 

If he wasn't my flesh and blood, a part of both of us, a tiny human my wife had endured so much agony for, and someone I fell instantly in love with the moment I held him for the first time in the LDR room, I don't know what I'd have done to him for putting my wife through so much pain. I've never had a conscience or morals to give a fuck about anyway. My stubborn wife opted for natural birth instead of c-section, which made me want to kill each one of the doctors involved for being unable to reduce the pain she brought on herself. By the time our son was born, I felt like I'd won a war and had my wife's nails scarring my skin as proof of it. She could've torn my arm off my body and still wouldn't have cared because nothing was enough in comparison to the agony her body was going through during labor. 

I cannot even bear the idea of making her sad, so imagine my state when I saw her crying and writhing as she pushed to bring our son out of her.

"Does your mother's plan for my birthday involve her setting the kitchen on fire?" I ask my oldest as I watch my wife and my youngest bicker as they try to bake sachertorte.

"Aeli is being punished with kitchen responsibilities for setting your custom McLaren on fire last night."

I mentally wince, recalling the phone call I received last night from the chief of my son's security informing me about the incident. My wife was prepared to blow my head off if I wasn't on my way home from Tokyo when she called to give me a rap on the knuckles for encouraging our youngest's destructive tendencies. I don't encourage them per se. I just don't try to suppress them, much to my wife's exasperation. He has inherited my nature, so I'm well aware of the basic fact keeping him on a leash is as impossible as touching the sun. Any form of suppression will only make him revolt more and the consequences would be catastrophic. But she's not wrong to feel the way she does. Our son's destructive tendencies, as she labels it, have the effect of galactic collisions or, worse, gamma-ray bursts.

My seven-year-old demon spawn is the embodiment of irrepressible mayhem.

Amon is aloof, but he's not a cutthroat raging anarchist, which Aelius was born as. He has not only just inherited my nature and traits as a part of his genetic code, but he's also my replica. He's me down to the last detail. His mother loves to complain that he has none of her genes, even though she was the vessel that nurtured him inside her for nine months and went through a painful birth process.

Just like his brother, he's also a genius prodigy who has been crossing developmental milestones with his unusual brilliance at a rate that's nowhere close to normal. He holds the Guinness World Record for the youngest member of the Mensa since the age of two. When most toddlers can barely speak full sentences or point out familiar images in picture books, Aelius was reading English as a two-year-old and got well-versed in Mandarin and Japanese by the time he turned three. When he was five, he was already reading books like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings from my collection, doing pre-calculus, solving Math problems, and devouring encyclopedias to feed his insatiable curiosity about everything.

He's a menace with unceasing energy, unending curiosity, and an unparalleled capacity for annihilation. It's like having used a time machine to go back in the past and watching the version of myself when I was his age, except where I'd been a quiet kid, my youngest burns with life. And I am glad that he isn't like me in that aspect. I was pathetic and never knew how to smile except for my Belle, but that's not the case with him. He knows how to smile and laugh. How to have fun. Those are the things that he inherited from my wife as a part of her side of the gene pool. And that's most important because both his mother and I had a not-so-ideal childhood where I didn't smile at all, and she faked it almost all the time except when she was with me. We're glad that our children aren't growing up in an environment like ours.

"What was he trying to experiment with this time?" I ask, unable to take my eyes off my breathtakingly stunning wife, who's indulging our youngest with the kind of attention that was once reserved only for me.

And yes, I am absolutely envious of that. I love our sons and would move the universe for their happiness, but one thing I wouldn't do is let their mother share any portion of her attention reserved for me and give it to them. 

Years have passed by, but one thing has remained the same, just as she'd promised me when she'd married me again in an over-the-top wedding of the century that satisfied Jennifer and Elizabeth's universe-sized egos—we remain the center of each other's universe. Considering, we're three who want her attention, it should be a fair share, but it isn't. I don't let it be. Call me selfish. A majority, even if it's by a mere margin of 0.00005%, is reserved for me.

I don't want more kids. Two are enough. I don't know how other parents manage their time with more than two children. I don't want to. My hands are already full with Amon, Aelius, and you. I've gotten more than I could've ever imagined, and I don't want to be greedy. I am happiest with what we have, your highness. She'd told me on the night of Aelius's third birthday when I'd asked her if she wanted more. Given the nature of our sons, especially Amon's, because of what he'd gone through, more children would mean more splitting of her time between them, and she wasn't prepared for that. I wasn't against growing more family, but yes, I would've been selfish and wouldn't have allowed the split of any share of her time for me, so her words made sense.

"He'd written and programmed a custom AI to improve McLaren's aerodynamics and engine efficiency. It was a perfect program, Dad. He could've succeeded, but at the end moment he decided to push the factory settings too further than his original plan. You should have him share the program with you. It could help with the speed of fighter jets." A fierce sense of mighty pride for his younger sibling drips his words.

The two are thick as thieves. Amon was out slowly recovering from the trauma when Aelius was born. My Belle was afraid that the arrival of a new member in our lives might affect him negatively and cause envy, but the complete opposite happened. Mama was the last word we'd heard Amon say before he threw himself on my wife to protect her. When he woke up from the coma, he had become completely mute. Doctors said it was selective because of the trauma he'd gone through. We showed him to various psychologists, but nothing worked until Aelius's birth. When I introduced him to his younger brother in the hospital, he spoke for the first time since the incident. The first word that came out of him was Aelius while he held the newborn. He repeated it after I told him that was the name his mother had chosen for the baby. It was like he was reborn that day. Ever since, he became his sibling's fierce protector, defender, and advocate. He's also the mediator more than his mother when my youngest tries to antagonize me and piss me off for a sport, which happens to be his favorite hobby.

"Although that would mean you are applauding what he did, and Mom wouldn't like it. Unless you want to sleep in my bedroom like last time when you appreciated the program he'd created and enraged her?" He adds.

"Yeah, fuck no. That won't be happening," I scowl at him. "Don't repeat that bad word."

"I am eleven. Not three, Dad."

"It'll upset your mother."

"I know. I won't," he huffs, shaking his head. "I am leaving. I need to finish a book before your party this evening."

"This is so damn boring," my youngest huffs.

"Language!" My wife scolds him while working on the cake batter base.

"C'mon, Mom! How long is it going to take?" he huffs.

"A while."

"You've been saying that for the past hour."

"That's because we haven't succeeded in making a single perfect batch of Sachertorte. We aren't stopping until we have one."

"I refuse to stay in the kitchen the whole day."

"You will stay for as long as I want you to!" She scowls at him, followed by a bewitching smile that has been making my existence better since its existence. "And we'll get this one right, sweetheart."

He cocks an arrogant brow. "In the next one hour?"

"If you let me focus. God, you're worse than your dad when it comes to patience."

"Dad has a supreme kind of patience, Mom. He deals with you. That's not easy," he shoots a smile that rivals a Devil's. Little Minx was born trained to say the right things to soothe the blow of his sharp words.

"Ouch!"

His grin only widens as he crosses his arms in a challenge. "I think we should go with my fireworks idea to surprise Dad."

"No, we are not," she says firmly in a no-nonsense tone that she yanks out of her whenever she's dealing with his schemes, but her voice is soft. "You said you wanted to do something special for his birthday, didn't you?"

"Special, like giving him the AI program I compiled. Not this stupid cake. Dad doesn't even like desserts."

"He loves me, so he'll be fine with dessert," she takes the equally arrogant tone, mimicking Aelius's.

"But you love the fireworks, and Dad loves you the most, so he'll love them too, Mom. It'll be special for him. Think about it."

I chuckle at the calculated sweetness in his words to charm his mother into doing this his way.

"Your smooth talk won't work on me, sweetie," she laughs, ruffling his hair with her free hand and leaning down to kiss the top of his forehead. "No fireworks. That's final."

He scrunches his nose in the classic boyish display of I am a big boy, not a baby fashion as he always does, but it doesn't stop his mother from treating him like one. 

"Fine. Hunting, then? Dad and I love hunting. I'll hunt down a boar or something. Probably a lion or an endangered species. That'll be his birthday surprise."

My wife never fails to grow horrified whenever he mentions hunting without masking his love for it.

Aelius lacks empathy, something which his mother tries her hardest to make him accustomed to. He was born just as emotionally detached as I was. He's a devil incarnate like Jennifer likes to point out. Extremely sharp and cunning, a ball of restless energy, ruthlessly unapologetic, supremely arrogant, a predator, and carries himself well-versed with the fact that he was born to rule—the latter is a result of both of his grandparents spoiling him rotten, especially Jennifer and Ramon, and feeding his larger-than-life ego at this age. There's only one thing that he doesn't share with me. Unlike me, who never uses charm as a weapon, he uses a sociopathic level of charm to manipulate and disarm people by charming them and blinding them with a false sense of security.

The more I've been watching him grow, the more I realize how Ramon must have felt handling not just one but two fucked up kids like Chase and I. Kaden keeps mocking me for the fact that Aelius is a criminal-in-making if I don't rein him in. He's not wrong. Aelius's mischief is not that of a normal child's—they're of a practiced criminal's. 

But I don't rein him in. Never tried to. Nor has my wife. We accept him as he is just as Ramon and my Belle accepted me as I was. We know that he's untameable, and trying to put him on a leash would only let the chaos living inside him take the shape of a Tsunami. My team and I, especially his favorite Horace, have to work overtime, keeping an eye on him so he doesn't end up doing something worse than he's always doing.

However, none of this means my wife stops being an optimist. She tries to instill her warmth and light in him regardless of how futile her efforts are. She keeps her attempts going even after knowing that the more he grows, the more his darkness eclipses any softness she hopes to nurture in him. Not that it makes her love him any less. 

Yet she never leaves a single opportunity to glare at me and tell me, "he's turning into you, your highness!" in the wake of his every mischief and his obnoxiously arrogant "So what?" in response when he's questioned about it. She conveniently loves to forget the part that I was never a mischievous child despite my psychopathic tendencies, as she likes to label it. That was her brother. But, of course, she turns a blind eye to that fact. For her, Chase can do nothing wrong until she has a mood swing and wants to kill him.

"Aelius Constantine De L'Aquila, you are not to talk about hunting! What did I explain to you last time? It's bad to hurt innocent animals."

"We eat innocent animals every day, Mom," he counters too smoothly for a seven-year-old. "I bet someone hunts them before it reaches our plates."

She's speechless as she stares at him with her eyes narrowed. It's not the first time he has rendered her flabbergasted. Aelius has a manner of dissecting statements that's way too shrewd for his age, a quality his mother accuses he has inherited from me.

Finally, she exhales an exasperated huff and smears a little chocolate batter over the tip of his nose playfully. "No mention of hunting. Dad agreed there'd be only two hunting trips a year for you. You've already had one so the next will be in six months. Not a day before."

"Four," he corrects her with a sly grin. "Uncle Chase promised to take me on two more."

"Your Uncle Chase is in deep trouble."

"Don't you love me, mommy?" He changes his tune like a true sociopath and hugs her.

"Won't work on me, you cunning young man," she laughs, kissing the top of his head again. This time, he doesn't pull a face.

Watching her with our sons is nothing short of a miracle. I never believed in miracles, but I now do. It's breathtaking. My wife is a dotting mother to our sons. She loves them in an excessive, unhealthy, and obsessive amount if you ask me, and it drives my possessiveness and territorial nature up a notch. I feel neglected.

Aelius's attention shifts to me walking toward them. "Happy Birthday, Dad!" He screams, and jumps off the stool, and runs in my direction, hurling his body on me.

You're my superhero, Dad. He'd told me when he was three. That's exactly how he has always looked at me and continues to do despite growing up.

"Thanks, son!" I smile, wrapping my arms around him. "Have you been troubling my wife while I was away?"

"Your wife? Yes. My mother? No," he grins.

He's tall for a seven-year-old. My youngest is at a stage where he doesn't like hugs. A part of it has to do with him growing up watching his brother's issues with physical touch, and a major part of it has to do with his own emotional detachment that makes it difficult for him to indulge in such gestures just the way how it has always been for me. However, again, unlike me, he has no problem emulating such gestures when they fit his means.

"I made an AI program for your birthday present, but it didn't work out. But I am soon going to beat you at being the best at programming."

Since he feels too connected with his brother to consider him a competition, considers his mother his responsibility to keep safe, and there's no one else other than the three of us he considers worthy enough to match his superiority level, he has naturally considered me as one and keeps competing me at every turn. Most of the time it leads to disastrous experiments like the one last night.

"You think so?" I chuckle.

"I know so. You need to save me, Dad. Mom's pissed. Do your gross kissing and distract her. I am escaping. Love you, Dad," he whispers with a mischievous grin and runs away. 

How was the chapter?

Thoughts on Areston?

Thoughts on Aelius?