Virginia pondered herself in the full-length mirror hanging from her bathroom door. It had been years since she had disappeared into the world of the nine kingdoms, since her father had decided to break his ties with the world he once succeeded in. They'd kept the original mirror, Virginia and Wolf, receiving it as a present from Wendell in gratitude for their actions in protecting the state of the Fourth Kingdom. The two had left the connection open, never with the intention to return, but to keep the lines available should Tony feel ready to come home. They'd received little letters through the pane, occasionally, messages from the other side, scrawled in Tony's disjointed lettering, detailing his latest achievements, or the most recent young maiden he'd happed to charm.

Even less frequently, Tony would step through the fissure between dimensions, spending a few uncomfortable minutes conversing with his daughter and son-in-law, taking hold if his grandsons with great trepidation, before graciously muttering his good-byes and vanishing through the gilded mirror. Less and less often, his letters would come, until eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Virginia received only one more letter from the nine kingdoms after her father's last, this one from King Wendell. Dearest Virginia, it began in the delicately looped penmanship, so strikingly different from her father's, I write to you with the grave duty of informing you of your father's disappearance from my kingdom… and she could read no further than that before her stomach collapsed into her knees. Wolf had found her that night tragically curled on the bathroom floor, vomit staining the tile and the front of her shirt.

She'd left the mirror with Wolf, afterwards, a decision she would come to question for the next year and a half. She wouldn't dare to go back, despite her want; it wasn't the mirror that she desired, but the connection. Virginia never considered herself a naïve girl, but part of her refused to let go of the idea that someday, her father might not only return to the Fourth Kingdom, but to his home, here in New York. That part of her never forgave her choice to leave the mirror in the hands of that monster.

Richard had never met Tony; he knew very little of Virginia's life before him. She'd told him little of her history, carefully omitting anything relevant to her mother's altered state of mind (she found it easier to tell him the lie she thought she had lived), anything that hinted at Wolf's feral nature, anything that referenced the world of the Nine Kingdoms. The lies had been adequate, and nothing further had been pressed; Richard, completely taken with the sweet-faced girl who came to him for help, opened his heart to her, and welcomed her wholly into his life.

She found, in Richard, a sense of normalcy denied her in her life with wolf. Richard didn't crave raw meat violently; Richard didn't suffer drastic mood swings; Richard didn't need to be chained within the linen closet for three nights every month.

Virginia ran slender fingers across her profile; thirty loomed in the near future, and though she was still a young woman, she felt sometimes as if she had lived a full life twice over. Lines of stress had begun etching their way around her eyes, taking a detour to pull at the corners of her mouth.

She would dream, sometimes, that she had never followed the dog; that she had turned back once she reached the tear in the fabric of reality. These dreams were peppered with honest smiles, with tears of mirth, with a future not marred by a pane of glass. That journey, though dear to her heart, had caused to much pain, too much sorrow, and had tainted too many lives.

Virginia looked again at the crumpled letter she held in her hands. I write to you with the grave duty… She'd never intended to return to the Nine Kingdoms; yes, her father was missing somewhere in that domain, and she desperately wished to see him again, but she never thought it would be her business to root him out if he didn't want to be found.

I know were to find Tony, he had said, a futile last-ditch effort to needle her into staying with him. Wolf had seen how broken she was at discovering Tony's disappearance, and knew that any hope he could give her had as good a chance as any. She'd prevailed that night. For too long she'd stayed with Wolf out of fear of the outside world, out of fear that no other man would dare to touch her after marrying a fairy tale creature. Her savior came with a comic book name, and she found she didn't have to believe Wolf's tales anymore.

Virginia's gaze shifted to another letter, ink still fresh, resting ominously on her bureau. This had been a letter of threat, a letter of pleading, a letter of promised mercy. Virginia never intended to return to the Nine Kingdoms, but found now that she had to. The darkness of the kingdoms had taken her father, and now, its bastard son had taken her husband.