WAR OF HEARTS ↠ KOL MIKAELSON [1]

THE ONE WHERE HE MISSED THE MAGIC

1275 – Verona, Italy

Verona was still centuries away from its famed balcony tragedy, but it already knew love and destruction—especially when it came hand-in-hand in the form of Kol Mikaelson and Rhea Monroe.

If the city had remembered its history books—or at the very least, heeded the warnings etched in the margins of monasterial grimoires—it might've barred its gates the moment their names were whispered.

But Verona was proud. And proud cities rarely listened to reason.

They arrived just past moonrise, cloaked in charm and gold dust, Rhea's cloak sweeping behind her like fallen dusk, Kol's smile already sharp enough to be dangerous. They blended in with ease—Kol pretending to be a traveling nobleman with land near Marseille, Rhea posing as his scholarly wife with a suspicious talent for divination and a "bad habit of reading people's futures over wine."

Which was only partially untrue.

By midday the next day, the city had descended into a carefully orchestrated chaos that could only be described as deliciously anarchic.

The bishop's prized hawk, a symbol of ecclesiastical purity and the only creature said to listen to God besides the choirboys, was now perched atop the cathedral bell tower singing tavern ballads in a baritone slur. Rhea had claimed—utterly deadpan—that she'd simply "enhanced its inner voice."

Kol had nearly cried from laughter, doubled over in the middle of the square, his face red, wheezing, gripping Rhea's waist like she was the funniest thing in five centuries.

Not long after, the apothecary's roof caved in, the weight of fifty greenish frogs—enchanted familiars that Rhea had summoned in a fit of boredom—proving too much for the rafters.

"I said three, Rhea," Kol muttered as they watched the man scream about divine punishment from the alley across the street.

"I sneezed," she said dryly. "The spell multiplied."

Kol smirked. "Bless you."

The final straw came when half the noble court woke up barefoot, their velvet slippers and leather boots missing, replaced by peasant sandals tied with enchanted vines. Rhea had turned the Duke's silk slippers into a pair of squawking geese.

"Consider it a metaphor," she said with a shrug.

"Consider it a declaration of war," the Duke had replied—seconds before Kol compelled him into performing a dramatic monologue about his lost footwear to a crowd of weavers and street children.

That evening, after being firmly yet nervously escorted from Verona by five trembling guards—two of whom Kol had nearly compelled into reciting sonnets in her honor—he and Rhea retreated to an abandoned villa nestled in the lush hillsides beyond the city walls.

The place smelled of wild thyme and scorched cedar, the air still clinging to the warmth of the day. There were vines creeping into the windows, a fireplace crackling lazily with embers, and silence—a rare, sacred kind—that only the truly untouchable could find comforting.

Rhea had vanished for a while, slipping away under the moonlight with nothing but a towel and a bottle of rosewater. When she returned, her hair was damp, curling in loose, dripping waves down her back, her skin glowing with residual heat from the stream. She wore only a thin ivory shift, nearly translucent in the firelight, and moved like she was still part of the night itself.

She looked like something conjured, not born.

Kol sat on the edge of the bed, one leg braced on the wooden frame, a goblet of dark wine in hand—forgotten, untouched. His shirt was open, collar loose, exposing the smooth expanse of his chest, still flecked with ash from the fire he'd built while she bathed. He wasn't watching her with lust, not yet.