Iron Cross (Will of Iron #2)

Prologue - The Prisoner

Eoghan

Two weeks after Kira goes missing

A field mouse took up residence in Morelli’s cell. I could hear its infernal shuffling feet and distressed squeaks. In my deluded mind, it sounded like the mouse was barking, trying to protect its master.

Morelli had a pet. How fitting that it was a vermin.

My instinct was to get rid of it. Poison it. Kill it in a trap that would cut it in half like a guillotine.

Deer mice, the most prevalent around these parts, carried diseases if one ingested or inhaled their droppings. I wondered if Morelli would end up succumbing to some medieval plague, with nothing but this pest for company.

My knee-jerk reaction to prevent Morelli from poisoning himself with his pet’s leavings was replaced with the exhaustion that ruled my existence. What did it matter if he died?

He was a prisoner, manacled to the stone foundation of the Green Mansion.

I had bled him for the paint that now graced the masterpiece in the foyer. Then I had him relocated to the secluded underbelly of the big house, in a part of the basement no one ever went. I set up security cameras, and ensured that only one other had access to the space. No one would ever accidentally stumble on my unwilling houseguest again.

After I made my interpretation of Rubens’ The Descent into Hell of the Damned , my madness had cooled. The fury that had fired my veins and clouded my vision drained away.

Morelli was just a prisoner. I had him fed, bathed, and dressed in plain sweats to better fight the winter chill. I’d had him shackled to the wall so he could stand and sit, instead of hanging him by the arms. His shoulders were put back in their sockets.

He’d borne the indignity with a stoicism that I admired. That was likely why my malice had drained away, becoming toothless even as I wanted to hate him.

But not so much that I was willing to let him go. With sick fascination, I had come down here, and sat on the floor across from him, silently watching him eat off the iron plates I gave him - leftovers of the meal upstairs.

I’d watch him in silence as he eyed me with reciprocal suspicion. We sat in almost companionable mistrust, trying to ignore each other.

But not today. Today, I decided I would speak.

“Have you heard of the Prisoner of Chillon?” I asked, “the poem by Byron.”

He looked up at me with his steel gray eyes - the only thing still vibrant on him. Steely eyes, and a sharp mind. He swallowed what was in his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing on his skinny neck.

“Refresh my memory,” His eyes narrowed as if contemplating if this was a trick.

He picked up the fork in his slim hands, and stabbed it into the roasted chicken.

He’d gotten thin in the last two weeks. We didn’t feed him much that first week. And still, he refused to die. Refused to weaken. And when my anger about Kira waned into a simmering pain, I begrudgingly had to respect the man.

I recited the verse, because it seemed so apt for the man I saw reduced before me.

“My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,

But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,

And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air

Are bann'd, and barr'd—forbidden fare;”

I loved the words on my tongue. The poetry of it, even though I knew I was not a poet.

“Hmm,” Morelli said, leaning back as he stared at me from his perch on the stone cold ground. “What a grim thought.”

After two weeks, the resentment in his eyes had waned as well.

“Maybe my recitation is insensitive, given the circumstances,” I admitted. If he weren’t my enemy, I would have apologized.

I used to watch him staring at the small glass opening to the outside world. It showed a bit of the ground, at the base of a rose bush that was now dormant, covered in snow. Those first few nights I had sat and watched him eat - he’d scarfed down the food fast, probably from fear we’d never feed him again. Then he slowed down, savoring his meals. Maybe it would be merciful to poison him now… but I wasn’t in the mood. I had made a vow that he would live until my wife was home. And I wasn’t a man who went back on his word.

“Byron’s prisoner could see a bird, and was comforted by its song.” He looked out the casement window, before turning his eyes back to me. “I have no such luxury. No birds, no swans, no water to glance at.”

I wondered if that small view into the outside world taunted him. Would it have been more merciful to close it off? Did he deserve mercy for his sins? Did I?

“I make do with the mouse that channeled its way into this rotten, haunted place.” He gestured roughly toward the squeaking rodent that was out of sight, but very much present. “Algernon’s poor company.”

“Algernon?”

“The mouse that comes and visits me from time to time.” Then with a glint of mirth, he smiled. “He doesn’t appreciate Italian poetry.”

Algernon and I were alike in that sense, I suppose. Italian poetry waxed far too melodramatic for my taste.

“My father died today.” I pulled a flask from my breast pocket, then put two glasses on the ground between us. I had not anticipated imbibing with my unwilling companion, but since he was a captive audience…

I took one glass and drank. Morelli sipped the other.

“My condolences,” he said, the glass to his parched mouth. “... I think.”

He looked at me, assessing where to go next with this strange interaction. Him, a doomed man. Me, the monster that doomed him.

“How did it happen?” he asked, as he downed the rest of the glass, then put it back down. I refilled it.

“He fell down the stairs.” I took another shot, the Redbreast whiskey burning its way down my gullet.

Morelli’s bushy brows rose, his eyes still able to register shock, after the weeks of torment and isolation with nothing but me and the surgeon that bled him for my paint as company.

“That seems like an undignified end for the great Alastair Green.” Morelli took the refilled glass and drank it, before he started in on the chicken again.

He wasn’t wrong. It was an undignified end. I had just come up from my daily bleeding of Morelli, when I found them.

My stepmum, Aoibheann, with her ghastly red hair like a flame about her shoulders, her moon-pale face gazing down from the top of the stairs. Her green eyes were blank, and lips slightly parted in what looked like satisfaction. Like she had just taken her first breath in over a decade. Below, my father was sprawled, his neck twisted as a pool of blood blossomed around his head, his body limp and lifeless, strewn out like a rag doll.

Then that fucking melody again - the song she hummed to herself when no one was speaking to her.

Aoibheann wrapped her skeletal arms around her waist as she swayed on her feet, humming that haunting melody of hers. The sound of it flew around the house like a wicked spell, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had done something to him. She had made a deal with some devil and murdered her husband. She was Judas.

Aoibheann, at the top of the staircase, her hands over her mouth, as my father lay with his head splattered at the bottom of the steps. His soulless eyes looked at me with a blankness that filled me with… relief.

Morelli almost looked sad as he watched me replay the ghastly memory. That was surprising, since the two weren’t exactly friends, but mortal enemies.

The way he and I were mortal enemies.

But under the circumstances, maybe I could confide in him. It was Benjamin Franklin who once said, “Three could keep a secret if two of them were dead”. Morelli was almost dead, and I was dead inside. So maybe the last one standing would be the damn mouse, Algernon.

“His wife murdered him,” I said, whispering words that I knew to be true. “That witch cursed him.”

There was no other explanation for why a perfectly healthy man would break from such a simple stumble. He hadn’t so much as rolled an ankle in years, and now he took a tumble down the stairs? Preposterous.

The guard at the end of the hall said that she never touched him. So the possibility that she pushed him was out. That left only that damn black magic of hers, which carried on the melody she hummed to herself when she was in her strange trances. The melody that made our skin prickle - me, and my father’s old guards who had heard it in their nightmares.

“His wife… his wife… his wife…” The old Italian pondered a moment, tapping at his scraggly chin. “I could never say her name. One of those long lettered Irish things that don’t use the letters in it.”

“Aoibheann.”

“Ah, yes, Aoibheann,” he said amused, as he held his glass up in the space between us. “The second wife. The quiet one. We could never get much about her, other than her connection to the Boston Irish.”

“There's not much to know of her. She's a dull and quiet little thing. No more hardened than your pet mouse.” That was the real insult to injury. That mousy thing had somehow stolen my wife and killed my father.

“Ah, don’t underestimate the quiet ones,” Morelli said, raising a finger and wagging it at me. “Mice can survive anything. Long ship voyages, the wilderness, and even the New York sewers. The mice thrive and multiply, no matter how many times they are stomped out, killed, and poisoned. We set traps and bait, and yet they thrive. There is something admirable and cunning in that.”

There was nothing cunning about Aoibheann. Without her old Irish witchcraft, that particular kitten would have no claws at all.

“Are you advising me?” I asked, with a chuckle, downing my glass and refilling it, feeling the burn of my father’s whiskey as it slid down my throat, burning my chest where my heart should have been.

He coughed when his drink went down the wrong pipe, and covered his mouth with the back of his skeletal wrist.

“Pardon me, oh, chief of the Irish,” he said with only the slightest hint of sarcasm. “I’m a consiglieri. Old habits die hard… or they’ll just die with me.”

“I’m not the chief—” I stopped myself from correcting him, realizing that I was in the wrong.

Now that my father was gone, the enterprise was mine, and mine alone.

“Ah, the young prince finally realizes that he must put on the crown,” Morelli said with a smirk, his arrogance not quite extinguished. Maybe I had gone too easy on him. “Do let me know how heavy it is.”

“And if it takes off my head.” I made a slashing gesture across my throat. “Will you rejoice, old man?”

“Hardly,” he said, his eyes lifting up to gaze at me. “In fact, I will make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

“The Godfather, really?”

“I'm in the Italian Mafia,” he chuckled. “We’ve all hate-watched it many, many times.”

“What’s your offer?” He was a likeable old man. It would be a sad day when I had to execute him.

“I will help you take down Eugenio Durante,” he said, his head tilting up to me with an arrogance I despised. “I will be your consiglieri.”

“I’m never letting you out of this cell alive.” I was baffled that he would offer. If this was a ploy for his life, it was a bad one.

“I know this, young king,” he chuckled, as if I was a petulant child he was indulging. “I know I will not leave here with my heart still beating. All I ask from you is a favor.”

“Why? Why would you help me?”

“Because Eugenio Durante must be destroyed,” Morelli said, “He is the scum in the pond. The cancer that must be cut out.”

“Aren’t you his best friend?” I was surprised by the hostility, and more than a little suspicious.

Morelli had been by Durante’s side through it all. In every photograph, and every slaughter, he was there. A second in command. The perfect lieutenant. His right hand man.

“Your spies are good.” Morelli smirked. “But they are not able to read between the lines, are they, young king?” He leaned back, and smiled. Eerily wise and ethereal, like some ancient woodland fairy, able to tap into an ancient wisdom that we mere mortals craved. “Have you seen how many others have been third or fourth in command? How many right and left hands have come and disappeared? Like the dictators of old, Durante is afraid of his own shadow. Of any man who could usurp his… inadequate hold.”

Morelli sneered at his critique of his former boss. Or maybe he was still his boss now. I was not sure.

“I have lasted because I do not crave power. But…”

“But?”

“Cosima.” He said her name like a prayer, as though he was uttering the name of the Madonna herself.

The way he said her name struck me in the heart. Not because I cared about the woman, but because there was a longing in his tone that I recognized. It was a tone I had used many times, when I whispered Kira’s name into the dark.

“Mark my words, young king, as Kronos ate his children, Durante will eat his young to keep them from taking what he believes to be his.” He shook his head. “He only has the one heir and he has done more harm to her than the Bratva, the Irish, or the Triads could ever hope to do.”

“You think he’ll kill her?” I asked, curious at how Shakespearean this was all becoming.

“I think he will kill her, marry her to a man who will beat the life from her if not literally, then at least metaphorically, or…” He shook his head. “He will cause his own demise, and take her with him.”

He was right. Slowly, I had whittled down the Italians to what they were, sinking their ships, breaking their commerce. Dissent among them grew louder and louder, as their wealth diminished. But a starving animal was always its most dangerous in its final throes of life. That was why I was building an army to exterminate them.

“I want her saved. I want her protected.” Morelli looked down at the ground. “Durante will fall, but perhaps if I help you be the executioner, you will keep her from burning with him.”

“You’d live in this squalor, helping me, to save her?” I asked the question, even though I knew the answer. Because I would do the same for Kira. I would do everything for Kira.

“You’re a man of honor,” Morelli said. “I help you, you will grant me my wish.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Because it’s my gift. I see the future laid bare before me. I see a man and know their worth within a single conversation. These quiet meals we have exchanged, as pleasant as they have been, have given me time to think, and… to see the situation as it truly is.”

I sat quietly, contemplating his words. Then I shook it off, reaching down for the now emptied plates and glasses - because I could not let him keep utensils lest he hurt himself or others, or possibly pull a Count of Monte Cristo and tunnel his way out. Without a word, I came to my feet, knocking on the door for Kieran who was waiting on the other side.

“Visit me again, little king,” Morelli said as I turned away. “You’ll find my counsel invaluable.”