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SEBASTIAN
It happened on a cloudless summer day like any other in Messalina. It was Sunday. Nothing strange about it. Sunday is my favorite day of the week since it is the one day I try to force myself not to work if I can avoid it. Being king doesn’t always allow for such luxuries, but on this particular Sunday, it did.
The children and I were in the garden, Phaedra and Sabrina chasing me with a kite they couldn’t get to launch. Their blonde, braided pigtails bounced against their backs, their smiles giddy and infectious. Zayer was sleeping in the nanny’s arms since anytime she attempted to put him down, he’d immediately wake up fussing. He missed his mother and her breast and wasn’t afraid to let us all know it.
But that’s why we were out in the garden. Waiting on Nora, my wife, my queen.
We were in our summer residence. A palace built into a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The helicopter was due to land any moment on the other side of the grounds. The girls, anxious to see her, decided they wanted to be outside to watch her land and greet her.
Nora had been gone from us for a little over a week, back home in France with her mother, who was no longer well enough to travel even the short distance from her home to our palace here. I was set to take the children out to see them there, but Nora decided at the last minute to return on the helicopter, and then we would all fly to France together so the children could visit with their grandmother.
Thewhomp, whomp, whompof the helicopter’s rotors tickled the edges of our ears, and the girls immediately stopped running, their faces cast up to the heavens, searching until they found the black dot in the distance, cheering as it grew larger in the sky.
I knew it before it happened.
Having once flown helicopters myself, I could see something wasn’t right. The nose was listing down and to the right. Not much. But enough to tug a frown to my lips and have my hand rise to my forehead to block the sun so I could scrutinize it better. It was another second. Maybe two. Hardly enough time for me to make a noise and definitely not enough time to demand the girls go inside.
They saw it all.
It unfolded like watching a horror film. One where you know what’s about to happen, but you’re frozen in a fear so consuming you can hardly breathe or blink or gasp or scream. I tried to swallow, but it was impossible. Burnt cotton down my throat, I had no voice. Even so, I did my best to yell, commanding the girls to drop to the ground and cover their eyes. A last-second warning, a half-second before the helicopter started to fall.
Neither moved but I reacted on instinct.
I grabbed the girls, tackled them to the ground, and covered their bodies with my own. The nanny ran inside, holding a crying Zayer to her chest. The sound of the explosion wasdeafening. The heat of the fireball excruciating as the flames licked my skin from afar.
I watched. I had to.
A raging ball of orange flames and black smoke, it plummeted to the earth in a freefall only to slam into the ground, the impact rumbling through our bones, and it exploded again, this time with pieces of helicopter shooting in every direction.
There was nothing to do but watch. Hold my girls and keep them safe while their mother died before their eyes in the most gruesome of ways.
In that moment, I knew none of us would ever be safe again.
That the trajectory of our lives was irrevocably altered.
And it filled my heart with a panic I have not been able to shake since.
Morbidly, I knew what losing Nora in that oh-so-graphic and blatant way represented. I was all too aware of what was headed our way, and I could not,would not, allow that to be the fate of my children. I didn’t care how I’d do it, but Iwouldprotect them.
I’ll admit, years ago when I was just a teenager, I would have been the first person to tell you the supposed curse on the throne of Messalina was bullshit.
I mean, who the fuck believes in curses in this day and age?
It’s ridiculous. The fabricated absurdity of fairy tales. Sure, I knew the stories by heart. The history of my ancestors. How they perished before their time in abnormal ways. How they were plagued by strange diseases and heartbreaking tragedy.
It was my daily education. The lessons I chose to dismissively roll my eyes at.
After all, I was to be king.
Who was anyone else, past or present, to tell me what was headed my way?
I wrongly, perhaps arrogantly, assumed death, tragedy, andillness happen to everyone. That statistically, nothing about our throne or kingdom put us more at risk than anyone else by comparison.
I was determined to believe that.
Even after someone kidnapped my little sister Desta when she was just a baby and our father was murdered in the skirmish, making me king far earlier than I should have been. Even when my baby sister Brea was first diagnosed with her condition and our mother, wrought with dread and grief, whisked her last remaining princess away, hiding her from the world.
