4. Don Juan Triumphant
Chapter four
Don Juan Triumphant
Eoghan
“ I t seems, young king,” Morelli said, pacing back and forth, the shackle on his right foot clanging with the movements. “You need to make her fall in love with you.”
I should take that damn shackle off. Between the cell, the outer door, and the guards that roamed my property, he had no means of escape. Especially not in his state.
How simple he made it all sound. Just make her fall in love with you…
“She’s already in love,” I protested, quietly, stating the fact that I knew in the marrow of my bones. “She loves me.”
Of this fact, I would be unwavering.
If she loved you, she would never have run.
The doubt niggled at the back of my mind, but I dismissed it. I killed it like the fucking pest it was.
For years, Morelli and I had come to know one another, and all his prophecies had come true.
Each time he had done so, I gave him a reward. A book, a basin to clean himself, a brush for his teeth, a crayon and paper with which to write. A pencil could be used as a weapon, or for suicide. Neither was acceptable to me, so he had to make do with the indignity of a child’s writing instrument.
He did not complain, though it bothered me.
As trust grew, I gave him more sketch pads and books until the room was littered with them. He now had a yoga mat to sleep on and a blanket against the cold. He even asked for pellets to give to the mouse that visited him from time to time - the insipid little rodent, Algernon.
We shared a bottle of wine and talked the nights away like old companions, where he advised me as my father should have as I assumed the mantle of head of Green Fields Enterprises.
Morelli was the brilliance behind the Durante empire. As Eugenio Durante’s right hand, he was the perfect consiglieri, building an empire, while never asking for anything in return. He’d done it all for her - for Cosima. The Mafia Princess he’d adored from childhood.
He built the kingdom for her, all the while, ready to hold the knife at Eugenio’s throat if he so much as talked about a marriage pact for his one and only heir.
“Why were you after my Kira?” I had asked this question over and over again, and each time, he showed remorse. But each time, he did not answer. “Why were you tormenting her with your bastard of a nephew?”
Remorse colored his features.
“Because her father arranged for Cosima’s marriage. She was going to marry someone else. She turned away from me, and accepted her fate.” His jaw ticked, the long, scraggly white beard moving with the tension on his face. “I wanted her to run away with me. We could start a new life, far away from the Durante Mafia. We could be normal. We could…” He let out a long sigh, his voice hoarse. “She would not run away with me. She said it would be a death sentence for me. She told me to move on, and to find someone else. She banished me from her bed.” He shut his eyes, sadness overcoming him as anger tore through me. “Nothing mattered to me at that moment. I lost my way. My nephew offered me a woman, and I accepted because… because I had nothing else. Forgive me.”
I beat him senseless for it. He lost a tooth, broke his nose, and I came close to ending his life, stopped only by his genuine remorse. A remorse not extracted from the pain I inflicted. He’d taken every hit as though he deserved it, but that was not enough to satisfy me. I starved him for three days, deprived him of light and air, and when my temper cooled, he was waiting.
I had only ever heard of one potential marriage, and it had been ill-fated, as the man in question was put away for tax evasion before the alliance could be fully struck. And that timeline coincided with the death of Kira’s father.
He had spoken the truth. That, in the end, was why he still lived.
“She loves me,” I said again. “I know it.”
If he could be constant to his love of Cosima in this cell, then my Muse deserved no less from me.
“Do not speak to me about love, Irish,” he said with a dismissive chortle. “Your people do not have the culture for it.”
“Bullshit,” I chuckled, throwing a small piece of bread at him, which he caught in mid air.
Imprisonment had dulled him, but not by much.
“It’s true!” he teased, “Your Irish songs are all fuck the English! Oh look how sad I am!” He made an exaggerated frowning face, then kicked his feet about in front of him, mocking a Riverdance. I almost laughed. “But we Italians write operas and grand symphonies for love. For the taste of a woman.”
He kissed his fingertips - the chef’s kiss. His gesticulations before him were so Italian, he was practically a cartoon.
“Agree to disagree, old man,” I said, picking up the cup of red wine. There was no crystal stemware for this dungeon. “We Irish might not have operas, but we sing plenty of love. Songs that can actually be sung by normal people, instead of pompous little trussed up chickens on a stage.”
I would die on that hill.
Irish songs were far more romantic, with lyrics of heather and thyme. They were not as bombastic or cacophonic as the operas, but that did not make them less heartfelt. They might have the lights, the show, and Giuseppe Verdi, but the Irish had songs so old that their composers were lost to the mists of time.
“If she were in love, she would never have left,” Morelli countered, again forgetting that I held his life in my hands. He and Shiny had a bad habit - a dangerous habit - of forgetting that I owned their next breath.
“You don’t understand what Kira and I are.” I felt the tension in my fist, as it clenched at my side. The old urge to pummel him is still latent beneath my skin.
Kira and I are eternal.
Not everyone could see it, but that didn’t matter to me. The world could burn and I would hold her above the flames.
“You think you are her destiny,” Morelli said, amusement in his gray eyes. “Bah!”
He waved the back of his hand at me in dismissal.
“I know we are destined,” I said through clenched teeth. “There is no her, or me. We are one. ”
“Calm yourself, young king,” Morelli chuckled. “I am only teasing.”
He tapped a finger against his chin, his beady eyes glinting with that humor that had started coming back over time. He liked to yank my chain, and then he’d appease me. I just had to wait for the balm that he would provide.
“You feel for her as I feel for Cosima,” he said with a wistful sigh. “If I could have loved someone else - anyone else - I would have. But love is a blessing and a curse. I understand your feelings.”
“You did not want to love her?” I asked, perplexed.
He solemnly shook his head.
“She is too young. I am too old. Better she fall in love with some stronzo that her father could set her up with. Someone who could be her ally. Her partner.” He placed his hand on his heart, as if the organ pained him. “The tragedy is not that I loved her. It is that she grew up, and loved me back.”
He looked around, and I caught a glimpse of a tear in his eye, as Algernon squeaked in the corner of his cell.
“This is not going to end with joy and happiness,” he gestured to the cell around him. To me.
I felt the jab of his fingers against my skin, even if he did not touch me. A poke, a prod. A pain that hit me in the chest.
“She loved me back, and look at what the fates have given us.” The waver in his voice was so unlike him, that I felt the urge to reach forward and take his shoulder. To tell him that he would find happiness. That I would make it so. I would find a way somehow.
But in a flicker, the moment was gone, his eyes stone cold and clear, as he looked at me.
“But you, young King?” He chuckled, and even smiled a little. “You have a chance at something, ha? You could be happy. You could stop these wars, and Cosima could live in a world away from this life. From all of… this. Maybe she can be happy.”
Again, he gestured to his surroundings but I knew it was not to his cell. It was to the house, to the city, to the world that lived in the shadows away from the prying eyes of the law. A world I did not want my son to grow up in.
Then he wisely smiled at me, as though he were a priest bestowing a blessing on me.
Morelli’s teeth had yellowed, though remained intact. I had given him water to clean himself, to clean his teeth. Though his hair and beard grew out in shaggy clumps of white and gray, he was meticulous about his cleanliness. As meticulous as the circumstances could allow.
I knew he was on my side. I knew that because of the information he provided about the Durantes - allowing me to weaken them, while also shoring up Cosima’s position as his replacement. Good-hearted, powerful and sly, Cosima was ready to stick the knife in her father’s back. All she needed was a little… push. The right moment.
Morelli assured me she would wait. She would sit back, until the moment was at its richest.
And I believed him. He had never failed me.
He led me like a tutor to the correct answers.
“Fate is a fickle thing,” Morelli mused. “But romantic love, when it is true and blessed, can give us wisdom and mercy, where we would normally choose cruelty.”
That was his way. He made a deceptively simple statement, then Socratically pried the answers from me, occasionally giving me inside knowledge of the Durante Mafia. The man was professorial and a lover of the classics, like myself.
I poured us two glasses of red wine, the two demons of the Diavolo dell'arte label winking at us in black and red. A suitable palette for two men like us. He rummaged through his pile of books, his fingers skimming the titles.
Like me, Morelli was fucking mad. And we were two men in a wretched place, heartbroken and longing, but for very different reasons. But with his ample amounts of free time, with only books for company, I was starting to think he was turning into Alonzo Quijano, and would take off to become a knight errant to start tilting at windmills.
I wouldn’t blame him. Hell, I almost wanted to release him. Already the possibilities of peace with the Italians swirled in my mind. A peace where Eugenio Durante was dead, and Morelli and I could rule as comrades.
“Ah, yes! Here it is!” he said. “Don Juan!”
He threw the book at me - a well-worn, wrinkled paperback - and I caught it in mid-air.
“I’m not a fucking libertine!” I was irritated, as I sipped the wine.
“ Cazzo !” he said, whacking me on the head with a book. “Don’t be an idiot, Green. It does not suit you.”
He was more schoolmaster than consiglieri sometimes, and I couldn’t make myself resent it, though I pretended to.
“Watch yourself, Morelli,” I warned, but couldn’t stop the smile from spreading over my lips.
“Don Juan Triumphant!” He gestured to the book in my hand. I looked down and saw the bottom half of the cover was a classic painting of Don Juan at the foot of a lady. Don Juan wore the guise of a servant, as the gentle lady pointed him about. I assumed that was his paramore. “Read it, and maybe you’ll feel inspired.”
I thought I was understanding his meaning. But I wasn’t sure.
“That’s… not going to work.” I scratched my forehead with the corner of the spine, and Morelli sat down on the flat blanket that was now his bed.
“Then we will talk about it until it does.”
And we did. Drinking like old chums, we concocted a plan that was so insane that it might work. What if it didn’t? Then I’d kidnap her and try something else. Stockholm syndrome was still a thing, wasn’t it?
We got rip-roaring drunk, my prisoner and I. I clung to his words the way I had with my father, holding on to every strange antiquated wisdom he had to pass down.
He laughed, as we opened a second bottle of the wine, and he drank it so fast, that it dripped from the corner of his wrinkled lips, down his long beard.
“I should give you a shaving kit,” I said, looking at his long white beard, stained with burgundy red, and I immediately regretted my words.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, leaning forward and bopping me on the forehead with his finger. “If you do that, you won’t know if I will just—” He made a slicing gesture over his throat.
“I’m more useful to you alive, and I’ll find too much relief in death.” He pointed at his temple. “Think, young King. You must think. Always two steps ahead. That is how you protect what you love.”
What was he protecting by telling me this?
This was the way of things. I wanted to offer him kindness, and he called me an idiot for doing so.
In small, indiscernible ways he earned my trust. At the end of the night, when the black of the sky started turning peach with the dawn, he looked at me with tired eyes.
“Do you have anything for me?” He was almost sheepish, as if the hope of a good answer was something he did not think he had a right to wish for.
Some days, I had nothing for him. But other days, I did.
“She started a new endeavor.” I leaned back against the wall, remembering the tidbit our spies had relayed to me. “A foundation for literacy.”
He smiled, as if the news tasted sweet.
I warmed, at the thought that in this damp cell, in the midst of this squalor and hell, I could give him something of comfort.
“She calls it Giovanni House.”
Giovanni’s eyes, grayed and dull with age, and even more with years of captivity flashed with alertness.
I pulled a photo from my pocket, and handed it to him.
“This is her, cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony.”
He reached for the photograph with his trembling fingers. It shook in his hand as a tear fell down his cheek. He stared at it, captivated, as I cleaned up our cups and the wine, leaving him nothing with which he could do harm to himself, or his guard… or me, for that matter.
He waved one finger in the air, as if he was lecturing me on something. “She looks good in silver, doesn’t she?”
“She does.” Not as beautiful as Kira in emerald green, though. But there was no need for me to say it.
“See these gloves?” he said, turning the photograph to me. “I gave those to her.”
His trembling fingers came to his lips.
“She’s wearing gloves I bought her for Christmas to cut the ribbon.” He nodded, bringing the photo to his lap. “She is telling me that she still loves me.”
I would need to be blind to not realize that there was genuine adoration between this man and his goddaughter. His love was true, just like mine. In that, we were able to see eye to eye.
“But you see this?” he said, pointing to something in the photo. “The way she is standing away from her father? The way she is holding her arm?” Morelli’s snarl was a surprise. I didn’t know a man who had lived in this room for three years was still capable of such a vicious sound.
“He’s hitting her again.” His fists clenched, wrinkling the photo, and he flinched, suddenly trying to smooth the folds out, as if the imperfection on the image might harm the woman it depicted. “That bastard used to beat her anytime she defied him. The fucking tyrant…”
He let out a sigh, shaking his head in sorrow.
“She’s refused an offer of marriage,” I said, repeating what my spy had relayed.
Morelli smiled. “My Principessa will never deign to marry someone who is beneath her.” Then he paraphrased a book that I did not expect. It was Jane Austen. “‘She is determined that nothing but the deepest love will induce her into matrimony.’”
He shook his head, joy radiating from his features.
“Is that why you’ve never married?” I asked.
“Marriage is a paper, young King.” Then he tapped his chest, over his heart. “In here? I have been married to her from the moment she first kissed me, and I opened my eyes to find her a woman, grown.”
He put the photo away into a notebook, stacking it with all the others for safe keeping, so that he could leaf through them at his leisure.
“We must destroy Eugenio,” he said, old malice returning to his features. “Before he dims the brightest star in the sky.”
Morelli was a good consigliere. If the fates had any mercy, they would not force me to kill him.
“Might I ask a favor, young King?” he asked as I stood to take my leave of him.
In the quiet of the early morning, there was nothing but the shuffling of Algernon in the corner somewhere, probably waiting for my departure so that Morelli could feed him the scrap of fruit and bread he’d set aside for him.
The man could charm a lion into its own cage.
“Name it,” I said, my heart growing sick as I stared at him, lying on the cold ground in this terrible place.
I had offered to bring him upstairs to a different room, to hide him from prying eyes, to give him comfort. But he had summarily refused. He said that he’d be seen, that Durantes spies would send word back, and he unraveled the disaster by weaving the tale of an outright war. One Durante would lose. On the off chance he did win, Durante would simply torture Morelli, not trusting that three years in my presence did not result in betrayal.
Morelli was betraying him. Each time I sabotaged a shipment, it was my hand in command, but his voice that drove me.
Cosima would try to save him from the wrath of Eugenio, but it would be in vain. She would only be tortured and killed alongside him.
That was a future he could not abide.
So in this cell he remained, with very few comforts.
“Among my things was a cross I wore around my neck,” he whispered, his long finger touching his clavicle as though the cross dangled there. “It was a gift from sweet Cosima. Might I have it returned to me? It would be a great comfort.”
And who was I to deny such a thing?