At the Crown Prince's private estate Cecilienhof, the servants had learned to fear the sound of breaking glass.
That evening, they fled from the corridor outside Wilhelm's private office as if from a wild animal. His shouting had risen through the house in great, ugly bursts, raw enough to make even old footmen turn pale. Cecilie had tried to calm him at first—soft words, but Wilhelm had turned on her with a violence that shocked even himself.
One blow. A single vicious slap.
She had fallen against the edge of a table, gasping, and he had roared at her to get out.
So she had.
Downstairs, she sat trembling in a smaller salon while two maids tried to comfort her and a handful of loyal servants stood nearby, afraid to move too far away and more afraid to go back upstairs. Wilhelm's own attendant remained in the hallway outside the office, stiff-backed and silent, listening to destruction continue behind the door.
Inside, glass shards glittered across the carpet like ice.
A vase lay shattered near the door. A chair had been overturned so violently that one leg had snapped clean through. Papers were scattered everywhere, and black ink had splashed across a family photograph in which a much smaller, thinner Oskar still stood smiling beside his brothers.
Crown Prince Wilhelm stood in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving.
He had not taken Moltke's warning lightly.
Another report. Another success. Another day in which men who should have belonged to him spoke Oskar's name with admiration and awe.
Oskar.
First the navy. Then the shipyards. Then the factories, the workers, the books, the comics.
And now even the army—his army—had begun to soften toward the Fifth Prince.
To Wilhelm, it felt like a noose tightening around his neck one day at a time.
He snatched up a wine glass and hurled it into the fireplace. It burst apart with a sharp, satisfying crack, but the rage inside him barely moved. So he grabbed the bottle itself, tore the cork loose with his teeth, and drank straight from it before cursing again into the ruined room.
Three years ago, he had thought he had solved the problem of his fifth brother.
He could still see that night if he closed his eyes.
The long marble stairway had gleamed under the palace lights, descending in a pale sweep toward the first floor. They had been on their way to the evening meal. The others were already ahead. Wilhelm had taken his time getting ready, wanting to enter last, as was proper. But Oskar had waited for him.
Oskar had been fifteen then. Nearly as tall as him already, irritatingly pretty, bright-voiced, full of that open, foolish joy he carried everywhere. He always acted as if they were friends, as if being brothers meant equality, as if the Crown Prince should welcome him at his side.
Still, back then, it had been tolerable.
Oskar had been soft, useless. A pretty disappointment trailing behind his brothers with no medals, no achievements and no inventions.
Nothing.
However, that day, during fencing practice, Oskar had somehow managed to land a single touch on him.
One stupid, meaningless hit and he had laughed as if he'd won the match.
And worse yet, it was then at the top of the stairway, Oskar had slapped him on the shoulder as if they were boys in a village rather than princes of the Empire.
"Race you down, big brother."
That slap, that innocent smile, it was all just too much, and so something within Wilhelm had snapped.
And he realised, that just then no-one was watching.
In one hot, petty, poisonous instant, he had wanted to frighten Oskar. To hurt him. To wipe that smile from his face and remind him that a younger brother did not put hands on the future Kaiser.
So Wilhelm shoved him.
Hard.
Harder than he had meant to—or perhaps exactly as hard as some hidden, vicious part of him had wanted.
Oskar did not stumble.
He flew.
His scream echoed down the stairwell as he struck marble once, then again, body tumbling helplessly, limbs crashing against stone until he hit the bottom with a final sickening crack of skull against marble.
Then silence.
Blood pooled beneath his still, pretty face.
For a few frozen seconds, Wilhelm simply stood there, staring down at him.
Then footsteps sounded somewhere nearby, causing instinct to return.
He screamed.
He put terror into his voice, panic into his face, and by the time the first guard came running, the lie had already been born.
Oskar had tripped.
Oskar had fallen.
A tragic accident.
The guard believed it. The servants believed it. The doctors, summoned too late, believed it. Even Mother had not questioned it properly. Horrified, yes. Grieved, perhaps. But not enough to sit beside the bed of a useless, dying son.
The doctors eventually proclaimed him dead.
Wilhelm had felt relief so sharp it almost made him laugh.
Although, when the family had withdrawn to mourn, he had returned to his own room and did laugh—quietly, carefully, into his hands.
Only Tanya had remained beside Oskar, weeping and praying over him like a fool. Anna, the other maid, kept carrying hot water, clean cloths, and bloody sheets, scrubbing at the mess as if effort alone could bargain with death.
To Wilhelm, it had been pathetic.
And perfect.
There were no clues leading back to him. No witness. No accusation.
There was no pulse.
Wilhelm had been certain, even the doctors had been certain.
And yet—
At midnight, after hours of lying there like a broken doll, Oskar opened his eyes.
Tanya had run through the palace in a frenzy, crying that the prince was alive, that it was a miracle, that God had returned him.
Wilhelm had heard her, and he had acted quickly on pure impulse.
If Oskar was awake—truly awake—then Wilhelm was in danger.
So he took a bread knife, shoved it up his sleeve, and hurried past guards and startled maids before the rest of the family could arrive. Anna was still in the room when he entered. He ordered her out so sharply she nearly dropped the basin in her hands.
Then he went to the bed, knife hidden and his intent clear.
He meant to finish what he had started before Oskar could recover enough to speak.
But when Wilhelm leaned over him and hissed, "Time to die, Oskar," the boy only blinked up at him, and actually smiled.
"My man," Oskar said in broken, idiot German. "Nice day."
There was no fear in him, no accusation, no recognition.
Only that strange, unfamiliar phrase and an empty, cheerful smile.
Wilhelm had frozen, then he laughed.
To anyone who heard, it might have sounded like relief. Happiness, even. The laughter of an older brother overcome by the miracle of recovery.
But it was not relief.
It was triumph of another kind.
Because in that moment Wilhelm understood that his useless brother had become even more useless. Whatever had woken in that bed knew nothing. Remembered nothing. It could not accuse him. It could barely speak.
Killing him there would have been madness anyway. Guards and servants had seen Wilhelm enter. If Oskar was already ruined, there was no need to risk everything.
And most importantly, that was not the same Oskar anymore.
For nearly a year afterward, the revived Fifth Prince had been a joke.
A shambling embarrassment who called people "my man," trained in the gardens like a lunatic, ate like a starving animal, and scribbled incomprehensible nonsense into a little red book he hid ridiculously beneath his pillow. Wilhelm had seen it more than once: mad drawings, foreign script, ugly German, strange diagrams that meant nothing.
Oskar had forgotten how to ride horses, how to fence, to speak, to sit at a table and hold a fork properly.
He withdrew more and more from family dinners, choosing isolation over humiliation, and everyone laughed. The more ridiculous the Fifth Prince became, the more perfect Wilhelm looked by comparison.
For a time, everything seemed secure.
Wilhelm was the Crown Prince. The future Emperor. The natural center of the dynasty.
And then, without warning, the joke stopped being funny.
The scrawny little brother became a nearly two-meter wall of muscle, with a face so striking that even when he was dirty, sweaty, and dressed like a barbarian, noblewomen gasped, maids stared openly, and guards looked at him with something close to awe.
Then the idiot with strange speech began producing inventions no one else in Europe could even imagine.
New engine layouts for battleships.
Triple turrets.
Synthetic fibers like nylon.
Plans to make oil and rubber from coal and plants.
Any one of those things would have made a normal man a legend.
Oskar tossed them out between gym sessions and baby care.
Wilhelm's lip curled.
He had tried, in his own way, to imitate it. He had sat at his own desk and forced himself to think of a weapon, an engine, a book—anything that could rival First Aid for Dummies, German Man, the houses, the lotteries, the technological miracles that seemed to spill from Oskar's hands like water.
But he had no idea where to begin.
How did one simply invent a new engine?
Or a new material?
Or a children's book full of medical knowledge that doctors themselves suddenly treated like revelation?
It made no sense.
And then there were the children.
Three little miracles with platinum-blond hair like silver and violet eyes. Nothing like Oskar himself. Nothing like Tanya or Anna, those two peasant maids he had raised into his bed and dared call his women. Nothing like anyone Wilhelm could find in all of Germany.
And he had searched.
Quietly, carefully, he had sent men to look for people with those same features, hoping to prove the children were not miracles at all, but the product of some other man, some scandal, some hidden shame.
They found no one, no such men or such women. None. It felt wrong, unnatural, unholy.
His thoughts circled back again and again to the same impossible memory: Oskar lying dead at the foot of the stairs, and then rising after midnight.
He died. I know he died. So what, exactly, woke up in his body?
The first time the thought had come, Wilhelm dismissed it as madness.
The fiftieth time, it began to feel like truth.
"Oskar," Wilhelm muttered, breathing hard as he stared at the smiling face in the cracked family photograph. "You are no brother of mine. You are a demon wearing his skin."
He clung to that belief because it made everything easier to understand.
Oskar's impossible strength.His flood of inventions. His unnatural children. His charisma with the people.
And so in conclusion, if Oskar truly was possessed—if some devil had crawled into him the night he returned from the dead—then Wilhelm was not merely a jealous brother.
He was a chosen instrument of God. The one man willing to do what had to be done.
His hands stopped shaking.
Slowly, terribly, an eerie calm settled over him.
Crown Prince Wilhelm sat down at his desk, pushed aside broken glass, and dragged a fresh sheet of paper toward himself.
His quill hovered for a moment.
Then he began to write, a short letter that seemed polite on the surface.
Urgent beneath it.
It was addressed to Schwerin in Mecklenburg—to his father-in-law, Grand Duke Frederick Franz III. The estate there had men who understood delicate matters. Hunters. Veterans. Officers without scruples.
Wilhelm did not write Oskar's name directly.
He wrote instead of a threat.
A corrupting influence.
Someone who must be removed quietly for the sake of the Empire.
He sealed the letter with wax, hands steady now, and summoned his most trusted confidant.
"This must reach my father-in-law personally," he said. "No one else. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Your Highness."
When the door closed and he was alone again, Wilhelm walked to the window.
Night pressed against the glass, heavy and black. Somewhere out there in Berlin, Oskar was no doubt kissing his miracle children goodnight, embraced by two beautiful maids who should never have been allowed near a prince's bed.
Wilhelm clenched his fists.
"Oskar must die this time," he whispered to his reflection.
"Only when he is gone will Father stop using him to shame me. Only then will my throne be safe."
He repeated it several times, like a prayer, until the last traces of hesitation faded from his face.
Then another thought crept in, a sweeter one. One about all that wealth.
All those factories, shipyards, shops, books, lotteries.
The vast river of money flowing through Oskar's hands.
"If he dies without a will," Wilhelm murmured, "Father will control it all. And after him… I will. With that money, I can fund the navy properly. Buy the army the best guns, the best railways, the best uniforms. Once I hold the purse strings, they will all support me."
His voice grew brighter, almost feverish.
"In the next war, I will crush the British, the French, the Russians. I will go down in history greater than Frederick the Great, greater even than Alexander. The world will remember my name."
Then the thought darkened.
"And once Oskar is gone… his women will be mine to save."
The word save twisted strangely in his mouth.
Tanya and Anna, those small, voluptuous maids Oskar had lifted from service and made into scandalous little queens. Wilhelm imagined them grieving, frightened, helpless. He imagined stepping forward as protector, as righteous guardian, as the man who would decide what became of them and their children.
Whether they wished it or not would not matter.
If they wanted their current children kept alive, they would obey.
And perhaps, under his roof, they would give him miracle children too.
The thought sent a hot thrill through him, ugly and triumphant.
No more mockery of God's order.
No more demonic spawn.
No more Oskar.
He could see it all so clearly in his mind:
the grieving Emperor, robbed of his favorite son;
the righteous Crown Prince stepping forward to comfort and command;
the nobles and generals rallying around him as he poured Oskar's stolen fortune into ships and guns;
the priests preaching that the demon prince had been punished and the Empire cleansed.
Wilhelm laughed softly, then louder. Until the sound echoed off the walls, half triumph and half madness.
In his own mind, the decision was made.
He was no longer just a jealous brother scheming in the dark. He had convinced himself he had found his calling, "to kill a demon, seize his gifts, and save Germany in the process."
Whether the rest of the world agreed would be a question for another day.