Author's Note: Welcome to my new one shot. This takes place after City of Glass, before (or during CoFA...) and involves, well, you'll see. Please enjoy and review! Please note: I own none of these characters. All characters belong to Cassandra Clare. No money is being made on this work. This is a work of fiction and should be treated as such.

The Wrong Place

It was just after dawn when he opened his eyes and stared into the unfamiliar shadows of the bedroom. He could feel the red wine hangover pounding between his eyes and could see the bottle sitting half finished on the bedside table. In the light of day, he regretted what he had done in the dark of night, the same way he did every morning he woke up in Alicante.

He climbed from the bed, found some pants, pulled them on, and crossed the room, passing the picture of her and her husband framed on the bedroom wall. He ignored it. It was the only way he could live with himself, by ignoring that picture and ignoring the fact that she once had a husband while he still had a wife. He walked into the bathroom, found his tooth brush, and brushed the rotten taste from his mouth. He splashed cold water on his face, and then looked into the mirror.

Time had not been kind to him. His eyes were dark and bloodshot, ringed with circles and wrinkles from a hard life of duty and service to the Clave. And penance to the Clave, that to. His eyes forced him to recall his daughter's birth, but not his first born son's, because of the vast changes his life underwent in the months between their births. Alec arrived in fall, the second child born to the Circle, after a perfect pregnancy and delivery that Maryse came through with flying colors. It was a different time then. He had held Alec,who was just days old in his arms as he was baptized in the lake behind Fairchild Manor. Most of the Circle had been in attendance. They had celebrated life that night, as if death did not exist.

By contrast, Isabelle came little more than a year later, fast and hard a month early one cold winter night when he, Maryse and Alec had been in New York for less than three months. Isabelle nearly died during her delivery and almost took Maryse with her and he had never been so terrified. Isabelle had been tiny, so very tiny, no bigger than his hand. It wasn't until a week after, when Maryse finally placed his daughter into his arms for the first time that he finally got to see that he and Isabelle had the same eyes. He broke down into tears then, wondering if this baby and her older brother would ever see the pain and heartbreak he had seen.

It took seventeen years for his fear to be realized, only, he didn't know he would be the one to contribute to his children's pain. He hated himself for it.

"I'm going to tell them," Maryse said, one of the last things she said to him before departing for New York. "This time, I'm going to tell them about her."

He turned around slowly in the bathroom and looked into the bedroom to see her still sound asleep in the bed. Her. The woman he had no business being with.

It had been the night after Max's funeral, after the celebration and the fireworks and the relief that came with Valentine's defeat. Maryse had gone back to the Penhallow's and he had gone down the street to a bar to have a drink and be alone with his thoughts. He had been sitting at the bar, nursing a scotch, looking through the pictures in his wallet of a family in happier times, when she walked up beside him.

"I'm sorry for your loss," She whispered. He looked into her eyes and felt time slip aside as the past came within view again. Her eyes brought back faces and names of the people he tried to forget. He saw Stephen, that impish pain in the ass, and Michael, to, Angel, how Michael and Stephen looked so much alike.

He could still feel Michael with him even though Michael was long gone. His death was just like Max's: one death in a long line of deaths that didn't make sense. Max was innocent and Michael had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the cross fire… but then again, hadn't they all?

She bought the first drink. He bought the second. He bought the third. They stumbled outside at last call, into the crisp Alicante night, the air still smelling of smoke and firecrackers. They went back to her house, climbed up the steps to her bedroom, and fumbled through undressing. She stripped his mourning clothes off… he could still see his white shirt land on floor, light against dark. His arms, covered with runes that were an angry red in the moonlight, went around her body, and pulled her shirt off. He'd lifted her off the floor and tossed her onto the bed like he was nineteen again, and then her arms were back around him, and her lips were hot against his.

She gasped the first time he moved inside of her, making it obvious (as if he didn't already know) that he was her first in a very long time. He knew from her past that she wasn't able to have children. She and Stephen tried but then something happened and she couldn't get pregnant after that. That was for the best. She was always Stephen's girl, even more than Celine ever was. Even after Stephen left her and conceived a child with another woman, she remained faithful to him. Some women were meant to only be with one man.

The first time was so painfully fast, more heat and fiction and pain, both for her and him. The second time was slower, with more kisses and touches. She was nothing like Maryse. She was soft in the places where Maryse was not, gentle in the moments Maryse would have bit and scratched him. He hated himself for comparing them. He couldn't help it. In the most intimate moments of their marriage, Maryse remained as frigid and unreachable as she was during the public moments. When he was younger, he was attracted to that part of her, thinking it translated into fearlessness. It took losing a son to learn why Maryse acted so bulletproof: it was a way to protect herself; a fear beneath her strength.

He fell asleep halfway through the third time with her arms around his back. He might have been crying, and hating himself. He couldn't remember.

It wasn't until the next morning when he was standing in her shower that he realized why she had approached him. This was her way of getting back at the people who helped take her husband from her. He should have cared. He didn't. He got out of the shower, went down to the kitchen, and took her against the countertop, giving her bruises on the back of her thighs and the front of her hips. She screamed his name. He never said hers. He looked at her and remembered his past, and so he fucked her to forget it.

When they finished breakfast, he went back to the Penhallow's house, took Maryse aside, and said simply "I was with another woman." Maryse never asked who he was with. She never asked why, either. One way or another, she already knew.

They were never miserable together, he and Maryse. It was just that they stayed together for the children, only, now the children were no longer children and the one who was a child was no longer living. This was hardly the first time he had been unfaithful. Maryse always knew, the way a wife always knows when her husband has gone looking for that which she cannot, or will not provide, but this was the first time that he admitted his infidelity and Maryse asked him not to come home.

Maryse went back to New York and he stayed in Alicante.

With her.

She didn't ask him when he was coming back to bed. She knew from her past that she wouldn't want either answer. She thought that was precisely why he kept coming back to her all of these weeks later, because she knew better than to ask for more than a man is willing to give. Instead, she was there for all of the things his wife should have been there for, like the nights where he had too much to drink and his emotions bubbled to the surface and he cried into her chest, because that was how a man reacted when he burned a child who barely lived. She was there when he was angry and needed someone to scream at or blame. She was there at three in the morning when he rolled over and took her in his arms and whispered "I still love you.". When Maryse wasn't there, she was.

It was wrong… Angel knew it was all sorts of wrong, he being a married man, Maryse's husband, no less, but she couldn't imagine turning him away. It wasn't even about sex anymore. It was about grief, about shared memories of deaths that should have never happened and innocent lives lost for a lost cause. It was about mutual pain, and moments when he sunk his nails into the back of her thighs and she lifted her hips, letting him push in deeper. It was about each feeling that this was wrong, this was a mortal sin, but it was the only distraction they could both agree on.

Robert stayed. Amatis let him.

Author's Note: Thanks for reading! Please review!