Later that evening while Rae slept, Wulf sat in his office again, alone, staring at the blank monitors and holding his cell phone to his ear. It was late in the evening in Germany, about midnight.
Unaccustomed flutters still inhabited his chest. His face heated, but he kept his voice calm, low. He asked, “Did you think that I would make idle threats?”
“Don’t you threaten me,” Wulf’s father, His Serene Highness, The Hereditary Prince of Hannover, Philipp Augustus, said.
Wulf tended to use all of his father’s titles in his own head out of habit because one of the servants had always presented him and his twin brother to their father using all their titles when they were children, standing together, unmoving, and waiting for it to be over.
Wulf said, “The trucks will arrive in two days to remove you to Kaiserhaus in the city. You’ll have a minimal staff. Your allowance from the trusts will be cut by two-thirds.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” his father sputtered.
Wulf was too angry to be gratified. “I absolutely will.”
“Constantin would never have done this to me.”
The thick mass of scar tissue on Wulf’s back kept him from leaning back in the office chair today. “Constantin is dead.”
“He would have made a much better prince.”
This was an old tactic, one that Wulf didn’t much care for. “You met Constantin a total of thirty-one times, all before he was nine years old.”
“And yet, I know that he would have been a good prince and a good king. He had a regal personality, an authoritarian presence.”
Wulf was finished with that line of conversation. He lowered his voice. “If you ever interfere in our lives again, before the wedding or thereafter, I will make far more draconian cuts. Is this perfectly clear?”
“I understand.” And yet he sounded dismissive, like he didn’t believe all this would happen.
“Stay out of our lives. Do not contact me nor anyone about Rae. How did you know where her family was, and how did you know that we would be skiing last week?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Wulf could hear his father’s sneer all the way across the Atlantic ocean.
It didn’t matter.
Wulf said, “If you act on any other information, no matter how you obtain it, there will be more repercussions.”
“The rest of the family won’t allow that to happen.”
A few years ago, that might have been true, but they had seen the operating budget for the castle Schloss Marienburg, and most realized that a change in its status would mean a significant increase in their dividends from the family trusts. “Go ahead. Try me on this.”
“They’ll vote you out as head of the house.”
“Make your run. We’ll see how far you get.”
“You can’t marry that common woman! I won’t grant you the status of a dynastic marriage!”
“Elizabeth already did. She is the one with the authority, and we have been legally married for months. Our children will bear your titles, and if, God forbid, we are ever restored, they will sit on your throne. Enough of this nonsense. You always have been irrelevant in my life. Now, make yourself as absent in our lives as you were when I was a child.”
Wulf thumbed his phone and hung up.
This time, he whipped the phone at the wall.
It shattered in a bright spray of glass in the dim recessed lights.