Page 91 of Misadventures with a Duke

This place and this time…I still do not belong here. My very bones confirm that. But walking away? Just vanishing and going back…

To…what? And to whom?

Kavia doubles down on her own insistence. “Bast. My boy. It is about…Magique.”

Six quiet syllables on her thin lips.

Six chaotic clangs through all my senses.

I grab my head, digging fingers at my scalp, but the din goes on. It is tamed only when my brother steps up, a protesting glower on his face.

“Magique is dead, Kavia. Oui, he told me all about it. The woman was murdered before his eyes, and then—”

Kavia tosses her head from side to side. “No. No. We are trying to tell you…as absurd as it seems…”

“Stop!” Maximillian stomps to the right, inserting himself between her and me. “I will not allow you to torment him like th—”

Kavia cuts his air short with a vehement shove. I doubt anyone but her could get away with such an affront to my brother. “You think that is why we did this? Risked ourselves together like this? To deliver empty torment to you boys?”

When Max’s opinion is still glaringly clear in his coiled posture, Carl moves forward. “Let her speak, Maximillian. Believe me, if we both had not seen it with our own eyes…”

“Seen what, damn it?” I finally break in. “We are all standing here on borrowed time. You must gather your thoughts and your words, Kavia. Just tell me. What about Magique?”

At last, Max capitulates with a terse nod. But now that Kavia has the full floor, her jaw has nearly dropped to it. At the end of my patience, I am about to prompt her again—when her mouth finally forms around a word.

“Here,” she stutters out. “H-H-Here. She is…here!”

I wheel around—and realize that from her angle, Raegan has been invisible until now. But still, her shock sends me into a similar daze. Only at this moment do I recognize what has felt like impossibility for so long. That Raegan is not invisible to me. More so, that she is not the unusual but passable proxy for Magique. She is…Rayonnement. A unique radiance in my existence. In my spirit.

In my heart.

“Hello there.” Raegan arcs an awkward wave and then drops into a small curtsy. As I battle the urge to sweep her up and kiss her soundly for the beautiful respect to my alternate parents, Carl joins his own gawk to Kavia’s. “So sorry, I know this is mega weird. But…my name is Raegan Tavish. I was apartment sitting for Max and Allie—errr, Maximillian and Alessandra—when somehow, Bastien burst in via the wonder wardrobe and—”

“Oh, no.” I pivot from Kavia in order to wrap my arms around my adorably bumbling woman. “Not just somehow. Raegan. My God…if even I see it by now, how are you so blind to it?”

She huffs, conveying her affronted puzzlement. “Listen, buddy. Somebody’s got to see the forest through the trees, okay?”

“To the point that you do not see the purpose through the providence?” I counter.

“Huh?”

She scowls. I do my best to erase the fine lines of it with my fingertips.

“It was not just somehow, Raegan. None of it. It was somewhere, in a very specific sometime. My collision into you, into this here and now, was a reminder that I had to keep putting steps in front of each other. You reminded me why I received that dukedom… ’Twas not just for how I wielded my sword. It was for the courage I had to keep fighting, even if all the odds seemed absolutely impossible. To keep believing I had been spared for a reason, even if Magique was not.”

There is more to tell her—mon dieu, so much more—but Kavia surges at us, now appearing and acting like the real woman who inhabits her body.

“No. No. My boy, this is the very reason we are here! This—by all the saints that were ever lifted to heaven—this is why we are here!”

She ends it by rushing in and clasping Raegan in her own exuberant grip. My rayonnement darts her wide stare between the two of us.

“I…ermmm…not quite sure I understand…”

“The purpose through the providence.” Kavia punches harder on every syllable than I did. “The somewhere, the sometime—and the someone.”

She nudges in between us. In a numb haze, I let her. My obeisance is more than being the De Leon brother who knew the wrong side of her paddle too many times. It is also not about the shock of actually having her here.

It is the acknowledgement of the words she has just reiterated. The truth she is now staring into Raegan’s soul. The verity I have seen so many times in Raegan’s eyes and been too staggered to admit. To truly see.