Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 637: Beneath the Chandeliers

The ballroom of the Neue Schloss Berlin shimmered under the glow of three dozen crystal chandeliers, each one imported from Bohemia and refracted into golden fire across marble columns and high gilded ceilings.

A string quartet murmured something Vivaldi-esque in the background, barely audible over the gentle roar of political conversation and laughter too calculated to be genuine.

Waiters floated between diplomats and nobility like wraiths in white gloves, offering caviar-topped canapés and gold-labeled Riesling chilled to the decimal.

The war had not yet begun. The world had not yet broken. But tonight, the Reich had won something.

The Olympics were over, and Germany had left its mark not with medals alone, but with poise, discipline, and unapologetic dominance.

At the heart of it all, the ballroom was a stage.

And then, the doors opened.

A hush, the quiet, unconscious gasp of 200 people all sensing a predator enter the room.

Bruno stepped through the gilded threshold, not with a smile, not with a dramatic stride, but with the deliberate weight of a man who knew the walls themselves would lean to hear his words.

He wore a tailored uniform-dark dress coat of Prussian cut with a minimalist iron cross pinned just above the heart.

Not a single unnecessary medal. No grand cape. No saber. Just power, clean and unadorned.

Heidi walked beside him in a black satin dress lined with Tyrolean silver thread.

The neckline was modest, but the crown of black diamonds she wore glistened like night frost, a signal.

The Angel of Berlin no longer needed to prove beauty. She was now a symbol of order.

Everyone noticed the absence of any armed guards. And yet, somehow, everyone knew he was the most dangerous man in the room.

Some approached. Most didn’t.

Ambassadors from Hungary, Italy, and Brazil offered congratulations and empty smiles.

The British delegation, led by a visibly tired Prime Minister Ramsay, bowed with a particular strain of cordiality reserved for rivals too dangerous to antagonize.

Bruno answered each in turn. Always brief. Always surgical.

He shook hands as if signing treaties. Kissed cheeks like sealing fates.

At the far end of the ballroom, near a series of grand staircases, Eva, his eldest, stood by a marble balustrade sipping a flute of something sharp.

She wore a fitted navy dress with silver trim and spoke to two sons of a minor Danish duke, who hung on her words with that particular idiocy of adolescent diplomacy.

Her posture was perfect. Her tone, demure. But her eyes tracked the room like a chessboard.

Erich was nearby, locked in a firm handshake with a Belgian colonel who had taken an interest in Prussian officer training methods.

The man was grinning, effortlessly polite, but concealed beneath his eyes was the same general distaste for social affairs that his grandfather had once been so infamous for.

His resemblance to his Bruno was striking. Whether it was appearance or demeanor, some joked that Erich was simply the reincarnation of his grandfather.

As if Bruno himself wasn’t nearby to hear such an absurd claim.

Elsa stood apart, nearly a ghost against the curtains, pale hair cascading in an icy braid.

She said little, but watched everything. Several older women mistook her for aloofness. They were wrong.

She was listening.

As the night bloomed, the performers came.

First, a procession of ballet dancers, the National German Ballet Company, fresh from their Rome tour.

They twirled to applause. Then came the string ensemble. A Wagner interlude. A folkloric dance from the Tyrolean Alps. Then silence.

The final act stepped forward: a symphonic rendition of the lyrics Bruno had once spoken during the Great War.

In a particularly glum moment he had optic for a war song from Russia that shared his dread perfectly.

The tone was equally somber. No one applauded.

Not out of disrespect, but because the message was so precise, so artfully brutal in its implications, that clapping felt inappropriate.

Heidi smiled quietly.

Bruno had not moved.

He stood now beside the French delegation, who had kept their distance all evening.

A younger French official, red-cheeked and a touch drunk, broke etiquette. “You do enjoy the theatre of it all, don’t you, Herr von Zehntner?”

Bruno’s eyes didn’t flicker.

“I enjoy symmetry,” he said. “Tonight celebrates the return of balance.”

Another man might have laughed. The Frenchman paled.

Far above, on the overlook balcony reserved for senior officers and family, an American military attaché leaned in to whisper to a British peer.

“Do you feel it?” he said. “This isn’t just a party.”

The Brit nodded. “It’s a coronation without a crown.”

“Or a warning without a declaration.”

Down below, Bruno accepted a glass of champagne and did not drink it.

Near the close of the evening, an old nobleman, one of the old guard who had managed to survive Bruno’s purges stepped forward.

“To Germany,” the man said. “And to you. We never dreamed you’d come this far.”

Bruno turned his head, just slightly.

“I did,” he said.

The silence between them was heavy enough to crush a lie.

Later, on the balcony outside, Eva and Erwin stood side by side.

“He didn’t smile once,” Erwin said, staring over the cold Berlin skyline.

“He doesn’t need to,” Eva replied, tapping ash off her cigarette. “The world smiles for him now.”

Erwin shifted uncomfortably. “Sometimes… I wonder if this is the world we wanted. All this fear. All this power.”

It was clear that Erwin was still worried about his son, Erich, and the role the young man would play in the coming war.

And his older sister picked up on this instantly.

Eva tilted her head.

“History doesn’t care what we wanted. It cares about what we built.”

Behind them, the ballroom doors opened again. Bruno stepped out alone.

Neither child said anything. They simply stood straighter.

He looked out at the city. Lights stretched across the dark like veins of gold. A new empire, not born from revolution, but discipline. Sacrifice. Order.

And yet he sighed.

Softly.

Almost inaudibly.

As though for a moment even he felt the weight of what had been won.

—

The last car pulled away from the Neue Schloss just past 2 a.m., its taillights swallowed by the fog rising off the Spree.

Inside, the ballroom lay in disarray, not disheveled, but clinically deserted.

Half-empty glasses, orphaned gloves, and the scent of too many perfumes hung in the air like ghosts clinging to velvet.

Bruno stood still at the edge of the marble gallery, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

His coat was gone, tossed somewhere over a gilt-backed chair. The iron cross on his chest still gleamed, the only thing untouched.

His shoulders sagged ever so slightly.

From behind, soft steps on the polished floor. Heidi.

She didn’t announce herself. She didn’t need to. He knew her gait like the rhythm of his own breath.

She wrapped her arms around him from behind, resting her cheek lightly between his shoulder blades.

“You didn’t even drink the champagne,” she murmured.

Bruno didn’t answer.

She exhaled in mock disappointment and gave him a gentle squeeze.

“After nearly sixty years,” she said, “you still can’t learn to enjoy being human for one night, can you?”

He chuckled, dry and low. “Humanity was never my talent.”

Heidi moved beside him, her bare feet soundless on the cold marble.

Her dress shimmered like black water in the moonlight. She brushed a lock of white from his temple.

“You looked the part well enough,” she said, studying his face.

Bruno’s eyes were distant. “I felt like a lion in a museum exhibit.”

“You mean surrounded by sycophants and glass walls?”

“I mean like I should have died already.”

Heidi smiled, not mockingly, but with the practiced patience of someone who had weathered every season of his melancholy.

“You say that every decade.”

“Because it’s true.”

She folded her arms, leaning against the window beside him.

“Yet somehow you still breathe. You still win. You still terrify men half your age.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, softly:

“Do you think they know how tired I am?”

Heidi’s expression softened.

“No,” she said gently. “Because they see the iron.”

Bruno’s gaze stayed locked on the foggy skyline. “Maybe I should let them see the rust.”

Heidi stepped closer and took his hand. “Not yet. Let them think the statue still moves. Let them dream that gods still walk.”

He turned to face her then, just slightly, just enough for the weariness to flicker through.

He reached up and brushed the crown from her hair, setting it aside on the windowsill. With slow hands, he touched her cheek.

“You wore this crown better than I ever wore mine.”

She smiled up at him, eyes gleaming. “Mine doesn’t weigh as much.”

Bruno leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers.

“I just want one night where no one expects anything of me.”

“You just had it,” Heidi whispered. “They all expected you to smile. And you didn’t.”

That made him laugh, a real laugh this time. Quiet, warm, fleeting.

He kissed her gently.

And for one moment, brief, unguarded, sacred, he let the empire disappear.