Chapter 60: The Shape of the Flame
Reginald Liore "Ainsley" stood alone at the edge of the estate's upper terrace, his hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixed on the line where forest met sky. Below, the gardens spread in intricate layers of green and gold, sunlit and harmless. Beyond them, somewhere among the winding paths and flower-laced arches, was Eva.
His niece. His not-daughter.
The wind carried a laugh—light, high, full of mischief. It pierced him like an arrow, not for its sweetness but for the weight it carried. There was too much in that sound. Too much mind. Too much soul.
She didn't belong in the gardens.
She belonged in the war rooms.
He exhaled slowly. Deliberately. That laugh—uncontrolled, joyful—echoed everything he resented. Everything he feared.
Vivienne and Evelyn were soft. Soft in the way wet clay forgets its shape without hands to force it firm. They let the girl run wild with her poetry and her Latin, let her quote Virgil in the morning and curl in a lap by afternoon. They whispered lullabies into her hair and spun tales around her brilliance like ribbons around a torch.
And the child burned.
She didn't know it. Not yet. But she did.
Eva—his Eva, he sometimes dared to think, if only in the privacy of silence—wasn't like the others. She wasn't some fragile flower to be kept in glass and wept over when she wilted. She was fire in its first form: unshaped, wild, raw.
And it enraged him that they coddled her.
They wanted her to stay soft.
He wanted her to be unbreakable.
A memory came, unbidden—a morning three months ago. He had found her in the west library, alone, legs swinging from the leather armchair, surrounded by maps. She wasn't reading them. She had drawn new ones—strategy maps. Arrows, formations. Colors for different sides. When he asked her who the red pieces were, she said, "The ghosts." And smiled.
She'd never been taught any of it.
That brilliance—it wasn't nurtured. It was born.
And still they coddled her.
Vivienne refused to let her touch anything sharp. Evelyn covered her eyes when old war footage played on the screen. The two of them wrapped her in music and silk and whispered, "You're perfect," like it was a blessing instead of a sentence.
Reginald pressed a hand to his chest, right above the spot where the ache lived.
He wanted to mold her. Wanted to teach her how to calculate threats, how to pull a trigger, how to read the heart of an enemy by the tension in his shoulder. She should know how to break a man's resolve before he ever spoke.
Instead, she knew how to write a sonnet.
The Council had warned him—explicitly. Eva was not to be touched. Not molded. Not claimed. Not trained.
Not yet.
She must grow "naturally," they said. No pressure. No suggestion. Let her be a child. Let her wonder. Let her bloom.
And what would become of her, then? What would happen when the world came for her brilliance?
Would she write a poem at it?
Reginald's jaw tightened. He had been obedient. He had smiled at the meetings. Had nodded when they told him that any deviation, any interference, would not just be punished—it would be erased.
But the thought of it—of letting that girl grow up without armor, without a blade in her hand, without the instincts he had bled to earn—it drove something cold and furious through him.
He turned from the balcony and went inside, his footfalls silent against the marble floors of the Ainsley estate.
She wasn't his. And that was the hardest part.
He had not fathered her. He had only played the part. Pretended at bedtime stories and stern nods over breakfast. The Council had chosen him for his face, his standing, his name. He was not permitted to love her the way he sometimes did—without condition, without strategy.
But he wanted to claim her. To say: this brilliance came from me.
To shape it into something terrifying.
There had been a moment—a single one—when she called him Papa and reached for his hand after scraping her knee. That tiny, warm hand in his… It had shaken him more than any battlefield.
He wanted her to be his. Not just in name.
In legacy.
He had trained men twice her size and broken their arrogance like glass. He had orchestrated defenses in countries that no longer had names. And yet here, in this house with tea and violins and too many windows, he was powerless.
The Council wanted her unshaped.
And he was furious.
He moved into the study and locked the door behind him. His sanctuary. No lullabies here—just blueprints, records, tapes. He sat at the desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out the file marked EVA: STRATEGIC POTENTIAL.
It was thick.
Medical reports. IQ assessments. Behavior notes from passive observers. All under aliases, all traced and protected.
He opened to the latest page.
Entry 61 – Subject displays early signs of predictive pattern recognition. During a conversation with subject S—, the entry read, —she completed a complex metaphorical analogy that forecasted the ending of a hypothetical scenario not yet presented. Subject unaware of cognitive leap.
Reginald closed his eyes.
She didn't even know what she was capable of.
And they let her sit in someone's lap and hum.
He turned the page. Then another. Then stopped.
A hand-drawn picture—Eva's—on a crumpled napkin, preserved under a film. The drawing showed a chessboard. Except the pieces were all birds. The pawns were wrens. The queens, hawks. In the margins, she had written in careful block letters:
"When they forget how to fly, they only know how to fall."
He stared at it.
This wasn't childhood. This wasn't play.
This was prophecy.
A knock came at the door—soft, measured.
Vivienne.
"I know you're in there," she said.
He didn't answer.
"I just came to say—she's asleep. She spent the afternoon composing a ballad. You'd hate it." There was a pause. "It's about her heart. Apparently, it leaks when she sees a particular smile."
His heart clenched. He hated that it clenched.
"She's four," Vivienne added, her voice drifting off.
He waited until her footsteps faded.
Then, slowly, carefully, he tore the latest entry from the file.
He would hide it. For now.
But the time would come. Sooner than they thought.
And when it did, Eva wouldn't be a girl who wrote poetry under trees.
She would be ready.
*****
Later that night, Reginald stood outside Eva's door, listening.
There was no sound but the steady rhythm of her sleep.
He reached out, hand hovering just above the doorknob.
He could still see her—feet swinging, eyes alight with knowledge she didn't yet understand. Her laugh. Her poems. Her maddening, magnificent mind.
She would outgrow them all.
Vivienne and Evelyn would keep trying to keep her young.
But childhood was not a shelter. It was a gate.
And she was already walking through it.