I was like Bluebeard’s wife, only without the murder.

I had discovered what my husband was, the secret he’d kept from me. As a woman of faith, I should recoil in disgust.

Or make a move to destroy him with my sacred powers.

But this was HIM. He who had wiped away my tears, sat up with me on sleepless nights.

He’d let me read to him and make the cutest screwed up faces when it was too complicated to understand.

And most of all was the truth I could not deny.

He had killed his own kind to protect me.

My power attracted millions like him and though we had a barrier, I should have been ambushed on every trip outside.

So he had to have made a large, bloody, statement to his compatriots. An example. I shuddered at the thought.

And he had marked me, I now realized.

I should destroy him. I should at least want to. My better nature should drive me to expunge him from existence.

But alas, all I saw when he stood there, wreathed in flames, was him standing in his formal attire at our wedding.

How it must have pained him to participate in a sacred rite. He had barred himself forever from his homeland and what he was. He had sloughed off his true self. What I was seeing was merely a mask of what he once, and never more could be.

For now he was no longer what I hunted and I was no longer what hunted him.

We were bound inexorably by the bonds of love.

And so I closed the door I should never have opened.

Bluebeards wife returned to her bed, and sank back into blissful ignorance, sacrificing the truth for something greater: love.