35. Bread
Chapter thirty-five
Bread
Kira
I was feeling an incredible craving for saltines. I don’t know why. My stomach roiled with a strange kind of nausea I had never had before. It felt a bit like the unsettled gut you get from a beer hangover. My stomach was empty, but full, my skin felt like it was drawn thin with water weight, and I was exhausted.
It was the crack of dawn and Eoghan was up again, getting dressed into sweats and a t-shirt.
Every morning, he left me to go for some kind of jog, or workout around the property.
I don’t know how he was able to work out, but while I was exhausted by our sleepless nights, he seemed invigorated by it.
He’d always come back in a fresh set of clothes after showering somewhere else in the house. I had asked him about it.
“I don’t want to come back to you covered in grime.” He pinched at my side, tickling me until I laughed. “My sweet wife doesn’t need to see me when I look like a fright.”
I couldn’t ever imagine him looking frightening. He was so devilishly handsome, that even covered in sweat and dirt, he’d probably still take my breath away.
After two weeks in this house, I had learned a few things. The Greens were not early risers, and breakfast was an optional meal. As was lunch. The only thing that was mandatory was dinner. Thankfully, none of them had been as dramatic as the first night.
Poor Dairo had to sit there, playing the referee between Eoghan and my new father-in-law. I longed to talk to Aoibheann, though. There was something hauntingly beautiful about her. I wanted to ask Eoghan to paint her with that keen eye of his. The way she had this sacrificial, ethereal beauty that was hard to find in a modern woman.
There was something about her that looked like she was a woman in trouble.
I tended to skip meals if Eoghan wasn’t with me. I slept the days away in a kind of laziness I hadn't experienced since long before my father died. If I wanted to, I’d just lay naked in the sheets all day until he came back in the afternoons and could lay down with me.
I was losing weight, which was something that Eoghan commented on, and not in a good way. He had caressed the roundness of my stomach, and asked if I was feeling sick. Then he asked if the food was to my liking.
When I admitted that going outside without him made me uncomfortable - too many new faces, and some of the old ones just seemed terrifying - he looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“Has anyone been cruel to you?” he asked.
“No, not really. But sometimes they just look at me like…”
“Like what?” The fire that burned in his eyes would have been frightening, had they been directed at me. But they weren’t. They flamed for me instead. I knew he’d strike down anyone who tried to hurt me.
It was probably best not to tell Eoghan anything anyway. If I did, then he’d probably fire the lot of them - though maybe that was a good thing?
There are worse things in the world than a protective husband.
Still, I felt better just hiding in our room, and the studio.
After a while, I was hungry enough to brave the outside world without Eoghan.
I didn’t often have cravings. Food had long since lost its flavor, since my father died and I had to recover by getting up every day, and nourishing my body as best I could.
But today, the idea of a warm piece of bread was just orgasmic. Like it would cure the low-grade nausea that had been turning my stomach for days now.
It was probably just exhaustion. That made sense, because of so many sleepless nights in Eoghan’s arms. My insatiable husband might have had to leave me during the day, but he made sure to make up for it every single night.
“We’ll be gone after the funeral,” he promised me. Back home, to the penthouse; he even offered to move into my tiny apartment, or we could find somewhere new. It didn’t matter.
I popped over to the dining room, then to the kitchen. Women in black sheath dresses with the white aprons bustled around, shining and cleaning this and that.
The familiar red hair of Malinda trailed behind her like a bad perfume. Unlike Aoibheann, whose hair looked like it was the one mark of fierceness that she contained in a body that her husband tried to scare into subservience, Malinda’s hair looked like it was from the fires of hell.
Or maybe I was biased.
Probably the latter.
I pulled back my shoulders and looked at the staff. I remembered Eoghan’s words. What had he called me? The future Lady of the House?
I could pretend to be one, right?
So I summoned a voice that I had heard the authoritative bitties who had servants following them around, doing their bidding.
“Is there any toast?”
One girl jumped out of her skin, throwing a metal pan into the air. It came down hard in a clatter, as she placed a hand over her heart as if she’d had a heart attack.
“God! Are you okay?” I went to her, just as an older woman rushed to her side, dumping a rag to the ground to clean up whatever stew she’d been making.
“Sorry, Miss…” the girl said, catching her breath. “Oh my God! I mean… Missus! Oh God. Please don’t tell Mr. Eoghan…”
Her eyes darted around, landing on Malinda, who stood like she was his mistress, trying to assert herself in front everyone. Was she going to be a problem? Probably.
But I had faith in the infatuation of my husband. I could have her fired in an instant.
I was becoming confident in this life, the more my husband spent his evenings plying me with loving words about us, and our future. Our children – all twelve of them, if he had his way.
My youth had been spent with just me and my father. The idea of having a big brood of children underfoot wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
I looked at the fiery haired Malinda, as if daring her to try and strike that future from me. Not that she could. She was long forgotten when she was out of sight. I would have Eoghan talk to her about her skirts though - they were entirely too short. It was practically obscene.
“I won’t tell my husband you called me Miss,” I said to the girl who had dropped the pan, though I didn’t take my eyes off of my enemy. “But I was just looking for something to snack on. Crackers and bread will do.”
Of course, there would be. What the hell were the pantries for?
“Oh, Miss, I can bring it up,” the girl said, with a curtsy.
“No, I have two working hands. I can just bring it up to our room.”
The women looked back and forth at each other, suddenly sharing a secret that I didn’t understand.
“It’s down in the basement, Miss…us.” Malinda said, her voice dripping with brittle anger. “I’ll go fetch it.”
That sounded like a dare.
“No thanks,” I said, probably just to be contrary. “I’ll get it. Please just point the way.”
“The bread, crackers and such will be down in the basement, to the left. We’ve got a little pantry there, with a stone hearth that the Greens prefer to use. They think it gives the bread a bit of that old world flavor…” Malinda was giving way too much detail, and it all reeked of a woman who wanted to tell me that she knew better than I did.
I smiled. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Miss.”
She didn’t correct herself.
Malinda pursed her lips as if she had gotten something on me… fat chance.
For a moment, I was filled with dread over what I could find in an old house’s basement. A cask of Amantillado? Skeletons? A long, frightening crypt, with the skeletons of old, extinct dragons? Maybe some mutant turtles, mentored by a sagacious rat?
She pointed to a door, and without giving any of my strange thoughts away, I opened it and saw that stone steps lead down to a lit hallway. Well, that was a good start. It smelled like all basements - stagnant water and stone. I stepped down without a look back at the girls, even though I could feel a sense of insecurity wafting from them - plus Malinda’s malice.
The way to the bread pantry was simple enough. There was an open room to the left, the wooden door left ajar. The walls, true to Malinda’s word, were stacked with bread stuff, labeled in metal containers and other air-tight containers. Rice, grains, and yes… bread that looked like it had just popped out from the large belly hearth on the far end, and laid down on a wooden thing with a large handle to reach into the fire.
It smelled delicious. Just like a real bakery. And they had everything. Croissants, and bagels, and everything smelled fresh. Despite the moisture outside of the pantry, this room was somehow tended and dry, perfect for conserving baked goods.
I was thinking with my stomach, no question. I was wound up with a hunger that I had never experienced before, and I was not sure what to do with myself. With my dirty hands, I reached down to grab a slice of hot, multigrain bread, prying it apart with my fingers…
I’d normally be more respectful, but my cravings were on such an all time high! Plus, I was going to be in charge of this house one day, so they’d have to just deal with it.
I didn’t even like bread most of the time, but I attributed everything to the sex. The incredible, intoxicating amount of sex.
I moaned as the buttery goodness melted in my mouth, and the nausea that had marked the exhaustion I’d felt in this house suddenly disappeared. Just to save myself the embarrassment, because I’d have to face Malinda upstairs soon, I grabbed a large bowl and filled it with breads - croissants, a bagel, some white bread, a strange little grainy loaf with a hard shell.
I was just about to climb the stairs back to the light of the kitchen when I heard a sickening sound. A sound I hadn’t heard in quite some time.
The unmistakable hit of bone and flesh, over and over again, punctuated by the grunts of a person in pain. I froze, wondering what the hell that could be. Maybe they had a slaughter house down here? The cries of animals were strangely similar to those of humans… right?
I stepped out of the enclave of the bakery room, into the damp and cold. I closed the door slowly with one hand, and stepped into the expansive hall. I looked around. The sound kept going. It was a sickening, angry sound that made me wince in sympathy, because I had heard that noise before.
In fact, I had been on the receiving end of it during training, after I had been captured during the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) part of my training. How to withstand torture, basically.
I had been beaten, but a small part of me knew that they wouldn’t kill me. What I went through was also nothing compared to some of my companions who were tapped for the real deep-cover work. Their training lasted months, and they were waterboarded within an inch of their life.
This was something else entirely.
I walked with quiet steps toward the noise, to the only other room there was. To my left was an open wine cellar, the casks and bottles out on display. Like the bakery, there was a room behind a wooden door. But this one was fully closed. The closer I got, the more my stomach dropped.
I didn’t dare open the door. I didn't want them to see me. But I did listen, completely stock-still, holding the plate in my hand just in case I was caught - then I could make the excuse that I wasn't snooping. I was just looking to find something that went with my bread… right? That was plausible. If it wasn’t, I could make it so, the way I made shitty art look like gold.
It took a while before anyone spoke. What I heard chilled me to the bone.
“You’ve doomed your woman.” Choked and barely audible, the voice was familiar to me. As familiar as his warning, telling me to run.
“Run away, Miss Kekoa. Run far, far away,” he had said.
I froze in fear, when a familiar laugh crept through the cracks in the door.
“Oh, you Italians… so arrogant, even when you’re on the brink of death.” The familiar Irish accent crawled through, curling its way around my heart and squeezing it like a vice.
The glee in his voice as he beat another man - the sadism? It was unrecognizable to me, but it was definitely him.
This was what Eoghan did. It was what made him sweat, and change clothes before he returned to me. This was the thing he did in the mornings when he left my side.
I backed away from the door, clutching the bowl of bread in my hands, summoning everything Blink had taught me. Everything my training had engrained.
I walked slowly, purposefully to the door, and schooled my features. Numb. Like a ghost, I walked up the stairs, nodding to the girls in the kitchen, lifting my bowl of bread with a slight smile. Then I went straight to my room - our room.
His room.
I dropped the bowl on a table by the door, then rushed to my purse, fumbling to find my phone.
I brought it up to my ear as it still rang.
“Where is he?” Cosima’s voice was heavy with tears. She was definitely crying. “What have you done with him?”
“Who?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. This was all the confirmation I needed.
“Giovanni, of course!” Her crying turned into anger, boiling over too fast for me to control it. “What have you done to him? Tell me where he is? Kira… I’ll…”
“I’ve made a mistake,” I gasped out, shaking my head at my own insanity. I couldn’t believe what I had done.
Far from the Mafia boy trying to end their life in crime, he was in it - it wasn’t just money laundering, until they could get out of the criminal activities to something legitimate. He was just like his father.
I walked into the studio, and looked at the sculpture we worked on together. It glistened beautifully in the light, twisting together. I swallowed, remembering how that was meant to be a symbol of our intertwining lives, coming together to make something whole.
This was meant to be a symbol of our union, the longer we toiled over it, soldering the metal together to make each individual leaf with precision and care.
The basis of a good lie starts in belief. Start with something true, and build from there.
I hardened my heart like the gold at my fingertips, letting it happen one strand at a time.