2. Vlad the Impaler
Chapter two
Vlad the Impaler
Eoghan
M iss Kekoa. Kira Kekoa. I tapped my finger on the white linen tablecloth as I daydreamed about the smart-mouthed woman who led the procession of art dilettantes by the nose at Gallery Four.
Even the rhythm of her name haunted me. Kira Kekoa.
If I had been alone, I would have whispered her name out loud, just to feel the syllables on my tongue.
She was fucking delicious.
Everything from her high-heeled shoes with the red soles, the curved calves in her black tights with the black line down the back, accentuating her body’s fullness, to the pencil skirt and black blouse… it was utter perfection.
Had I admired her arse before I listened to her voice? Maybe. I’m an artist, and at heart, a visual creature. But then, her words… well, that was what sealed the deal.
She was a vision. I wanted to take her slicked back bun and unravel it in my hands. I bet that full head of hair would cascade down to that curvy waist.
A true femme fatale.
I clenched my fist, imagining the feel of her hair wrapped around my hand as I pummeled myself inside her from behind. I bet that round arse would be the perfect pillow for my pistoning hips.
From painting to painting, they had hung on her every word like she was the fucking pied piper. I thought she was just a magician, doing things with razzle-dazzle words and a sleight of hand that amounted to nothing.
That was, until she got to my painting, and I saw first-hand that she knew what she was talking about.
I was a damn good painter. A fucking artist in every sense of the word. That was a fact. But not everyone had the taste to see it.
Even now, I could still see the genuine, knowing wonder in her eyes as she looked at my work and declared it a masterpiece, and me, a master.
A week and several hundred miles spanned between us now, and yet she was still here, with me. Her voice, her presence. She followed me like a ghost.
Few people in the world could separate the art from the spectacle that comes with it.
“What was that education for, boyo ?” My father gruffed over the grand dining room table.
The light from the chandelier cast shadows over his wrinkled, leathery skin, highlighting the hair that had turned white the day we found my mother’s bloody body on the driveway.
“Name the great leaders of all time!” His growl implied that I had been in my own head, and that this wasn’t the first time he’d made this demand.
I floundered. His questions never had simple answers. There was a right and wrong response. I had to figure him out. Not passing his tests could have bloody consequences. Blood had stained this white linen enough times since my mother’s untimely, and brutal passing.
I wracked my brain for people with great battle victories.
“Henry the V, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne.” I was spouting off names, trying to hedge my bets. “Von Clausewitz…”
“Wrong!” My father slammed a meaty fist on the table.
Aoibheann, my so-called stepmother, shut her eyes.
Was she about to cry? Why? It was just a little thump. The woman would overreact to anything…
My father sat back, his chuckle filling the room like a poisonous gas.
“The greatest leader was Vlad ?epe?.”
Of course it was. Vlad ?epe?, also known as Vlad the Impaler. The Vlad of the Dracula myth. It was a disturbing choice on so many levels.
“Don’t look at me like that, boyo ,” he said with a sneer.
I used to love it when he called me son, boy, boyo… but now it was riddled with disdain. Especially now that I was almost thirty, head of a criminal organization, and still seen as a child.
“Under his reign, a man could have dropped a bag of gold on the streets of Wallachia, and it would still be there in a week.” My father wagged a thick finger at me. His wrinkled, dry lips had the slightest bit of cranberry red gravy, resembling blood. “The man led with fear.”
The butler pantry to the kitchen opened, and out came the red-haired maid in her black dress. It wasn’t a maid’s uniform in the usual sense. The Green mansion was staffed by men in black suits, and women in black dresses with the logo of a four-leaf clover on the breast. Outside were guards in paramilitary gear, all black, with the same logo on their breast pockets.
Everyone was branded on their skin, our palms marked with the oath of allegiance.
I looked at the horizontal slash on my hand, the scar long faded from red to white.
“Thank you, Malinda,” I said to the maid as she poured me another drink.
She smiled and I had to keep from wincing at the memory of my old transgression. I had shit where I ate, and it was going to take a lot of maneuvering to ensure that it didn’t blow up in my face.
Malinda was a good girl. A good, infatuated girl who I couldn’t – and shouldn’t – fire for the cardinal sin of sleeping with me when I was drunk and in need of comfort.
I didn’t linger on that thought long as my father was far into his tirade.
“He opened copper mines, made monetary, and border reforms, and made Bucharest the capital city that it is today.” He pointed a finger at me, as if the fact that I hadn’t built a city was a deep personal failing as a son. “He was a smart economic mind, as well as a ruthless military leader. From his cruelty came the security needed for Bucharest to grow. You would know that, if all this art and education hadn’t made you… soft .”
And who had insisted on this education, Da?
I was barely a man when my mother died. When the black cloud above our heads formed. When my father went from being the father I adored – an Irish Atticus Finch – to the person he was now. Just another Dracula, here to bleed us dry.
Mum’s death was the blood-soaked albatross around all of our necks.
His fists clenched on the table, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.
If he had been more ruthless with Anton Vasiliev, then my mother would still be alive. If he hadn’t allowed my mother to make him a peacemaker, then she’d still be in this house, walking up the halls, singing songs about heather and thyme.
And her melody still lingered.
She was a ghost in this house. I’d turn my head and the edge of her skirts would float around a corner like a specter. I would smell her lavender perfume in the air, drifting around me before it disappeared.
At night, I’d hear a voice echoing from a distant place down the hall. But the halls were empty.
I was alone.
My father coughed into his white linen napkin. He cleared his throat with a terrible, disgusting, phlegmy sound, then bunched the napkin in his hand and pointed a finger at me.
“I won’t live forever.” I wasn’t sure why that was an accusation against me, but apparently it was. “You need to get yourself straight, before our women are as broken as your mum was.” Aoibheann flinched as my father looked at her. “If I hadn’t let your mum have so much freedom, she’d still be alive. If I had made her more aware of the danger, or forced her to care about…”
He suddenly stopped speaking. It wasn’t because every word twisted at my heart, like he had stuck a noose around the organ and squeezed it to its breaking point. He’d show me no such mercy. Not after my mother died. No, I think he stopped talking because his heart was getting squeezed.
He was feeling the pain of her loss the same as me.
The woman beside him was just a sad, pathetic approximation of what my mum was.
Aoibheann was never, and will never be, anything like Isla Green.
“I’ve made you soft,” my father said, low and under his breath.
He looked at the paintings - my paintings - on the walls, and smirked. Without a word, he reached for the candelabra, and plucked a single white candle from the arrangement.
Malinda’s eyes narrowed. We watched as the old man got up and walked to the nearest painting.
Aoibheann opened her mouth in horror at what he was about to do.
Both women’s eyes darted to me, and I lifted a hand to calm them.
I felt nothing. I was numb to him now.
Not even my heart rate changed as he took the candle to the bottom of the canvas - the one of my mother, sitting on a green, velvet chesterfield armchair. She held a rose and a copy of Beauty and the Beast on her lap, her hands elegantly caressing it with love.
“You’re soft, just like your mother.” With a frightening amount of purpose, he placed the candle at the lowest part of the canvas. It took a while for it to light to his satisfaction. For several long, slow, agonizing minutes he placed the flame where my mother’s hands were crossed over her beloved book, until it charred. The smell of burnt canvas and oil paint stank up the room, tickling my nose. But I knew I could not sneeze, or cough. That would be another weakness in his eyes.
Malinda looked at me in horror, then back to the painting. Was she about to weep?
Why was I surrounded by crying women all the time?
I stared at her, and when she finally made eye contact, I shook my head. It was a small tilt, that begged her not to show interest in my father’s destruction.
It was better to pretend that none of this was happening. That this was an ordinary dinner occurrence – just the run-of-the-mill paternal vandalism.
I grabbed the drink in front of me - the Redbreast 21. My father’s choice. Not mine.
I took a sip and tried not to wince at the burn.
The burning painting had taken hundreds of hours. I had poured over sketches and photographs of my mother. I studied the light and spent days tilting my sketch book in many directions until I had figured out how I would do it. Then another hundred hours so that I could paint the freckles over her nose just right. I used a single haired brush to paint on the small flickers of light in her gold and auburn locks until it was perfect.
Now, it would take a hundred seconds for my father to destroy it.
I didn’t look. Not even when ash floated in the air around me, speckling the white tablecloth like a malevolent, black snow.
I wasn’t worried about everything catching fire. Not really. If it got out of control, a guard would come in and put it out with an extinguisher.
It was best for me to just block it out.
My father took his seat, replaced the candle, and speared the pork on his plate.
He looked at me, searching for a reaction to the destruction of my final homage to my mother.
We ate in silence, the high-pitched scraping of our forks against the porcelain was the only sound until my father silently came to his feet and retired to his office for the evening.
“I’m so sorry, Eoghan,” Aoibheann whispered, her strange little voice adding irritation to injury.
“It’s nothing.” I got up, my chair scraping as I took one large gulp of the whiskey, feeling the burn in my throat.
“It was your portrait of your mother.”
Thank you, Aoibheann, for stating the bloody obvious.
“You’re best when you’re silent!” I barked, walking away and slamming through the dining room doors.
I could feel my stepmother staring after me, with hurt in those blasted green eyes.
Did she deserve my wrath? No. But she had it all the same. She was there, and another witness I had to ignore as I stumbled through life under my father’s boot. Christ, I couldn’t wait for the old man to die.
Malinda tried to follow. I stopped her with a wave of my hand as I took the stairs two at a time, up to the living quarters and into my chambers.
The women’s sympathy was maddening. They wanted to coo, and caw over me like I was a fucking pet they had to comfort through a thunderstorm. They were the ones in need of protection, not me.
I didn’t need that painting. My mother never saw it. There was not a single brush stroke that I couldn’t recreate. There wasn’t a single smile, or tear, that wasn’t imprinted in my memory. I didn’t need a painting to remind me of her because every hue and every blemish lived in my head.
Hell, I could even remember every detail on that stupid fucking book. Beauty and the Beast. A fairytale with a happy ending… but not for her.
I lived with these images every day. All of them. All at once. Every single moment that I was in this wretched house.
I slammed my bedroom door shut and walked right into the adjoining room - to my studio. To the mercifully blank white canvases on easels, and the white, blank sheet that covered a fainting couch where I could bring a model in to sit.
The marks of the last woman’s blush and foundation stained the armrest where she had rested her cheek. Malinda. The housekeeper’s daughter.
I was lonely, and a fool, and she had thrown herself at me with a reckless abandon that I needed. She’d ridden my cock with an eagerness that relieved my aching balls but disgusted me in equal measure.
What a mistake.
A mistake I would not make again.
I needed to leave this blasted house. I had to get out of Middlebrook, and back to the city where things made sense. I had to get out from beneath my father’s humiliating control.
This haunted mansion was a mockery of my childhood, of my mother, and of any memory that I held dear.
The memories my father blackened with every vile encounter.
I opened a window, allowing the scent of the rose garden to come in with the cool spring air. I pulled cigarettes from my pocket, along with a zippo. A Celtic cross was emblazoned on the silver shell.
I put the Dunhill cigarette to my lips and lit up, feeling the nicotine infiltrate my blood and relax my muscles - evaporating the rage that brewed just below the surface.
It was just a painting. It meant nothing.
My father was a crazy old man. He would die soon, and none of this would matter.
And Kira Kekoa was just a woman, with full lips. I wondered if she would smell like roses. Would she taste like sin? Would her body mold to my hands like a pliant sculpture? Would she pose for me? Would she scream?
I smiled to myself as I knew, in my heart, that she would do it all - I would make her.