1909 ended the way Oskar's life always ended things:
Not cleanly.
Not quietly.
Not without consequences waiting in the next room.
He had tried—truly tried—to keep his name untangled for a season. To let the wedding settle. To let Germany breathe. To let himself be "proper" for once.
And yet, morality—like silence—was never something the world allowed him to keep for long.
In late November, he went to Schwerin Castle in Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
Not as a guest.
Not as a petitioner.
As a man who had already decided what he would do.
Quiet circles had expected a confrontation. Accusations. A reckoning—perhaps even revenge—because Cecilie's father's name still floated in the shadows of what had happened to Oskar before.
But Oskar did not come to fight the old man.
He came as if the man did not exist.
He walked through the castle with the calm certainty of ownership, past courtiers who stiffened and servants who lowered their eyes, past doors that opened too quickly because no one wanted to be the one who stopped him.
He went straight to Cecilie.
She was pale with exhaustion, fresh from birth, the air around her still carrying that faint, unmistakable scent of clean linens and new life. She sat propped against pillows, a bundled infant in her arms.
And when Oskar saw the baby, something in him stopped.
A girl.
Small, warm, impossibly fragile—yet already marked by the same strange beauty that followed his bloodline like a curse and a blessing. Pale hair, almost silver. Eyes like ice-water.
Elisara.
Cecilie had named her herself.
Oskar stared for a long moment, shocked by something he had not expected to feel so sharply:
Responsibility.
Beside the bed stood little Wilhelm, three years old, watching Oskar with uncertain eyes—too young to understand politics, old enough to sense that adults carried storms inside them.
Oskar had no hatred for the child.
The sins of a father did not belong in a boy's hands.
Oskar looked around the room.
High stone. Heavy doors. Guards in hallways that belonged to Cecilie's own blood—and yet felt like prison bars.
Captivity dressed as protection.
And in that moment, Oskar decided he had seen enough.
"We are leaving, now," he said quietly.
Cecilie blinked, tired confusion crossing her face. "Oskar—what are you—?"
He was already moving.
Not rough. Not careless.
Just unstoppable.
He stepped to the bedside and slid an arm beneath her, lifting her with the ease of a man who forgot other people weighed anything at all. The baby stayed cradled against her chest, instinctively protected by her body.
Cecilie's breath caught, startled, protesting out of reflex more than anger.
"Oskar—!"
"Be at ease," he said, low. "I have you."
Then he looked down at little Wilhelm.
The boy hesitated, eyes wide.
Oskar looked down at him with a warm smile.
"Be a good boy," Oskar said gently. "Come with us."
Wilhelm swallowed.
Then, slowly, he stepped forward and gripped a hold of the fabric of Oskar's pants.
Small fingers.
Big decision.
Oskar turned and walked out.
No shouting. No scene. No debate in the corridor.
Just movement.
Servants flattened themselves to the walls. Nobles stared as if reality had cracked. Guards stood frozen—caught between orders and the terrifying truth that the man carrying Cecilie was the Kaiser's son, and the future of Germany's power in the flesh.
No one stopped him.
And by the time anyone found their voice…
the Muscle Motor cars were already rolling out of the castle grounds, engines humming like a verdict.
---
Potsdam received them in silence.
The matter was kept private—locked inside the palace as tightly as any vault.
But inside Oskar's household, nothing stayed truly hidden.
Tanya, Anna, and Gunderlinde were stunned when Oskar arrived with Cecilie, a newborn and a small three year old child.
For a moment, the air in the room tightened.
Not hatred.
Not jealousy.
Shock.
Then questions. Quiet voices. Careful understanding forming piece by piece.
Tanya and Anna had been friends with Cecilie once. They knew her kindness. They knew her loneliness. They knew the way she had been trapped—used as a symbol by people who cared nothing for what symbols cost.
And they also knew Oskar.
When he decided something was unjust, he did not negotiate with it.
He broke it.
So Cecilie stayed.
Not announced. Not paraded. Not offered to the public as another scandal.
Simply… absorbed into the palace's private world.
A fourth woman beneath the same roof.
Two new children brought into the orbit of Oskar's household like moons dragged into a larger gravity.
And as 1909 came to its close, the strangest thing happened:
The palace yet again felt fuller.
Not safer.
Not simpler.
But fuller—alive with footsteps, small voices, whispered lullabies, the constant soft chaos of too many children and too many futures.
At night, Oskar lay in his oversized bed that had been built for a giant and still somehow felt crowded.
Four women slept close.
Not like trophies.
Like anchors.
Tanya had claimed his chest as a pillow, sprawled there on top of him with shameless comfort. Anna lay at his side, warm and steady beneath the shelter of his arm. Gunderlinde slept pressed close on the other side, still new to this life but learning quickly what safety felt like.
Cecilie lay near Anna, one hand resting lightly against Oskar's arm as if checking—half asleep—that he was still there.
Oskar's arms held them without thinking.
This was his life now, and he loved it. He felt happy about living a life for the people in his bed. For his children. For the fragile lives he had gathered into his orbit and refused to let go.
Outside the windows, winter waited.
Inside, a new year had begun with warmth. Followed by normal mornings. Normal meetings. The same cold air over Potsdam. The same rhythm of letters and schedules.
And then, little by little, Oskar's plans began to lock into place.
In April he submitted the next designs to the Navy—two proposals stamped with the plain confidence of inevitability:
King-class battleships.
Derfflinger-class battlecruisers.
The Admiralty and the Naval Technical Committee reviewed them with the careful dread of men reading a bill they already knew they would pay. The costs were obscene. The demands on steel, turbines, guns, and labor threatened to swallow budgets whole.
There was controversy. There were arguments that went late into the night.
But Tirpitz was Tirpitz.
He did not bend.
And Wilhelm II—who had once viewed Oskar's naval ambitions as dangerous arrogance—had learned to treat his son's "madness" as something closer to prophecy.
The designs were approved.
By late April, the first keels were laid.
Work began.
---
The King-class was not merely an improvement.
It was a declaration.
Displacement: thirty-seven thousand tons.
Main battery: three triple-mounted 380mm guns, fifty-caliber.
Armor: belt thickness rising toward 380mm.
A warship built not to chase, but to endure.
And despite the mass—despite the steel piled upon steel—speed did not fall away as it should have. Oil-fired boilers and turbines drove the new hulls hard enough to keep them above twenty-three knots.
Five were authorized.
Their names would come later, when the first hulls were far enough along that no one could pretend the project might still be "reconsidered."
The Derfflinger-class followed like a predator beside a fortress.
Battlecruisers, by name.
But by reality, something far uglier.
Displacement: thirty-five thousand tons.
Main armament: the same triple 380mm arrangement.
Speed: pushed toward twenty-seven and a half knots.
Armor was lighter than the King-class—by necessity—but not by the standards of what Britain still called a battlecruiser. Against the thin-skinned British designs built to run rather than withstand, the Derfflingers promised something terrifying:
A fast ship that could take punishment long enough to return it.
Germany's fleet had not merely shifted course.
It had broken away from the old path entirely.
The names on paper might look familiar to future historians.
The ships would not.
And everyone in the room—Tirpitz most of all—understood the price.
Germany was spending at a rate no ordinary empire could survive.
If it weren't for Oskar—and the royal coffers, and the constant injections of private industrial capital into the naval machine—the program would already have collapsed under its own weight.
Even so, the warnings began to appear.
Maintenance. Ammunition. Training. Storage. Repairs.
Costs that did not end when the hull slid into water.
Costs that accumulated like snow on a roof—quiet until the day it caved in.
So a private agreement formed between Oskar and the government:
If war did not come by the end of 1914, investment would be cut back sharply.
Not because they wanted to stop.
Because no nation—no matter how strong—could sprint forever without the heart giving out.
---
And while Germany tightened its grip on steel and schedule, other countries were not steady.
Across Europe, the arms race was already draining treasuries into deficits that could not be politely ignored. Some governments could no longer afford peace.
Not because they loved war—
but because war was a lever.
A way to divert public anger.
A way to seize resources.
A way to push debt into blood and call it victory.
If you won, you plundered the defeated and bought yourself another decade.
If you lost… there was no future to worry about.
That was the logic whispering in enough cabinets and war rooms to matter.
Every nation had its agenda.
In Berlin, some powerful men wanted to break the colonial order Britain and France had built and carve more space for Germany and her allies.
In London and Paris, men wanted Germany crippled before she became unstoppable.
Russia and Austria-Hungary tightened their grip on the Balkans, each one choking the other, both convinced that Constantinople and the Straits were more than geography—they were destiny.
Across the ocean, America watched and calculated the way a rising giant did: profit, lending, influence—power gained not by dying, but by waiting until others had bled themselves into dependence.
Oskar saw it all like a weather system gathering.
War might be avoided.
But avoiding it would not be easy—because too many powerful men had already decided that peace was unaffordable.
Still, Oskar remained stubbornly hopeful.
His industrial network was spreading outward like roots. In time, he believed, nations would become dependent on German infrastructure and German supply—tied into his web so tightly that open conflict would become too costly to risk.
That was the dream.
That was the gamble.
---
Then, on 6 May 1910, the world shifted.
King Edward VII of Britain died at Buckingham Palace, taken by pneumonia.
Even in an era used to death, it landed like a blow.
Britain's position was being challenged—by America's rising weight, by Germany's growing industry—but the Royal Navy still made it the leading maritime power on earth. Its dominance of the seas felt unshakeable.
And Edward VII was not merely a king.
He was a connector.
A social ruler. A network in human form. A man whose bloodlines ran through Europe's thrones like wiring through a palace wall.
He had been born Albert Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He had spent a lifetime moving through titles and ceremonies, and through scandal as well—mistresses, excess, a private life that newspapers hinted at but could never fully print.
Yet he had remained strangely beloved.
Approachable.
Human.
And to Wilhelm II, he had been something personal too:
Family.
A maternal uncle—one of the old generation whose death made the world feel less anchored.
Europe mourned.
Europe watched.
And somewhere beneath the mourning, governments began to adjust their calculations—because a throne changing hands was not merely a family matter.
It was a geopolitical tremor.
And in a continent already armed to the teeth…
even tremors could become earthquakes.