Whoops! It's been a while. Thank y'all for your patience with me. And also I apologize in advance. I hate myself so much for this. But don't worry. I promise things will get better. You've been warned.

What better way to stage a war between the werewolves and vampires, then for the leader of each to have a very public disagreement?

Klaus sets the stage for us by hosting a dinner party for the vampire elite.

"Let us begin with a toast to our shared gift: immortality," Klaus begins while raising a glass from the head of the table. "After a thousand years, one might expect life to be less keenly felt, for its beauties and its sorrows do diminish with time. But, as vampires, we feel more deeply than humans could possibly imagine."

The waiter around us calmly slit their wrists and fill the goblets with blood. Hayley watches somewhat uncomfortably from the foot of the table. I reach for her hand under the table as I am sitting to her right.

"Insatiable need, exquisite pain…" Klaus continues. "Our victories, and our defeats."

Diego raises his glass, "To New Orleans."

"To New Orleans!" We all drink to the city we call home.

"I understand that some of you may have questions regarding the recent change in leadership, and I invited you here tonight to assure you that you are not defeated. No, my intentions moving forward are to celebrate what we have. What Marcel, in fact, took and built for this true community of vampires," he places a hand on Marcel's shoulder, who sits to his left. Elijah continues to sit stoically to his right.

"What about them?" Diego gestures to Hayley and I. "The wolves."

"Contrary to popular belief, I am in fact, not a wolf." I stand from my seat to better address the table. "I am a human tied to the life lines of the Originals. Making me one of the few people in this room impossible to kill."

I release Diego from my steel gaze and look more amicably around the room. "But I speak as the wife of the late Alpha when I say that the wolves bare no ill will to the vampires. They want peace."

But Diego, ever predictable, won't leave well enough alone. He was there the night I marched into the compound after Marcel's horrid decision to reverse the plight of the crescent pack. I anticipate Diego to challenge me on that point. I, and Klaus, expect him to bring that fact up. I expect to become riled up against him. I expect Klaus to side with him and to come against me. I expect to walk out of the room with all of the previous steps taken accordingly.

But it does not go how I expect.

"You expect us to believe that you speak as the wife of the late Alpha? Your blood runs in the current Alpha's veins. You became more a werewolf than a triggered werewolf when you gave birth to your daughter," Diego sneers.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I don't think in all my decades of life that I've seen a woman more scorned then you were the night Marcel had that witch curse the pack that you call family. So are you really going to stand there and talk of peace?"

I am taken aback, and my reaction is anything but calculated.

"You leave my daughter out of this. She has nothing to do with any of this."

"And yet last I heard, she was a well respected and powerful Alpha. Hell. She's been regarded as a powerful and influential pack member since she was a child."

I feel my skin start to grow hot as I attempt to contain myself. It wouldn't be good to jump across the table to throttle him at the moment. Even though I really want to.

Klaus is still trying to get over his shock and confusion, as Marcel grows ever more irritated before exploding with harsh words of his own. "Diego's right. You speak of peace and loyalty and all that, even after you turned around and immediately found yourself a new family. What was it? November when little Lana was born?" he spits her name and I find myself swallowing back angry tears. "I've done the math. You had to have gotten pregnant nearly immediately. And yet here you are acting like she has nothing to do with this. But did you ever wonder why I wanted the pack cursed in the first place? It was personal!"

"Silence!" Klaus finally speaks.

His hands grip the edge of the table as he leans over it. He looks up at me and his voice is somewhat quiet when he asks, "You have a daughter?"

I didn't want him to find out like this. I wanted to tell him myself when I was ready. When I could really explain everything. So much for keeping secrets. I can't stop the tear that falls when I nod.

"Is that what it was? You didn't stay for Marcellus. You didn't stay waiting for...for us to come home. You stayed for him? You said you didn't love him. Was that a lie?"

I swallow and shake my head. "That wasn't a lie."

"Lie!" His voice rises exponentially. He doesn't even bother to try to conceal the furry on his face. "The city crumbled around us and you ran back into it like you didn't have a choice and then what? You get married barely weeks later? Get pregnant days later? Or was it the other way around?! Shotgun wedding perhaps?"

This supposedly calculated and planned for argument is feeling more and more like it's full of real accusations and I for one am woefully unprepared for it.

But fine. If he wants to use this, then we'll use it.

"And what?! You just conveniently forgot that I couldn't die? You can't use the excuse that you thought I was dead. Oh no. You had to have known at least somewhere inside you. And it's okay for you to have a child but not me? Is that it? The high and mighty Klaus with his double standards. Fucking any woman he likes and expecting them to never look at another man. You don't get to judge me for living my life when you so clearly have been living yours," I say while gesturing to the pregnant girl next to me.

I shake my head. "I don't have to listen to this."

I push away from the table and begin to walk out.

Klaus's words cause me to pause. "It is not the same! It's been a century. One hundred years. By the sounds of it you didn't even wait one. Don't accuse me of having a double standard when you're not willing to admit your own."

I turn around him and look at him, hurt and angry and knowing that despite the fact that we wanted a fight to go down that neither of us expected it to be quite so real. "I lived my life with the cards that had been dealt to me. I was alone. Abandoned. Scared. I bluffed my way through decades in order to survive while you were off who knows where doing who knows what. The whole point to the political marriage I agreed to was to ensure that an heir was provided to the crescent pack so yes. I moved quickly. Such is the nature of politics. I would ask you not to judge me before you know the whole story but what would be the point? Your paranoid psychology would never believe me anyway."

"Get out," he says lowly.

"With pleasure."

I turn and walk out, feeling broken and defeated. I don't manage to hold my tears farther than a block from the compound. They flow freely and of their own volition.

I made a mistake in not telling Klaus. And it's a mistake that just might mean that Céleste has already won.