36. What did you do today?
Chapter thirty-six
What did you do today?
Eoghan
I did not relish the pain of another human. Not normally. But the moment he started prophesying about Kira’s demise… Well, that bastard was going to hang to his death. I would make it slow and painful, as if every pain on his skin could be one I save my wife from feeling.
The more he suffered, the less Kira would.
I changed clothes in the basement, rinsing myself with a small shower head off the mud room.
It was a ritual I had started since coming here, because the idea of sullying my wife with blood-soaked hands twisted my heart and soul. I always came back to her with clean hands.
But something was off this afternoon. She often ran to me with open arms when I got back to the room, but not this time.
“Did you have a good day?” she whispered, the sculpture of the golden Tree of Life complete, with a base of gold dust at the bottom. Small roots poked out, gracefully adding to the beauty of it.
Something was off. Something was very, very off.
“Aye,” I said, slowly. “I did. You?”
I took off my shirt, even though it was new, and went to the adjoining bedroom, to pick up another. It was a routine, really, just to make sure that I didn’t bring blood up from the basement.
While I was by the dresser, the sight of a bowl on the table by the door caught my eye. A bowl of bread. They weren’t from breakfast or lunch. They were assorted, meaning she had gone down to the bakery…
The bakery in the basement.
The basement.
My blood went cold.
I stood at the door of the studio, watching her fingers moving over the gold sand, piling it precisely to give the impression of earth.
“What did you do today?” I asked, my heart hoping for a confession. Why? I didn’t know. But if she spoke to me - if she told me, then I could do something about it. I could fix it. I needed a moment of honesty from her - just a sliver of it, and I would give her everything.
“Nothing much,” she said, cryptically.
The disappointment ran deep within me.
“Did you go to the kitchen?” she would have had to, to go to the basement.
She froze, her fingers stilling. Then she started moving them again and shrugged.
“I got hungry,” she answered.
If I wasn’t an observant man, if she wasn’t my great obsession, then I wouldn’t have noticed the hitch in her movements. But I was keen and obsessed. I noticed these things about my lying temptress.
“I’ll ask you again,” I said carefully, letting fear come out like anger. Though what I felt was hope - a hope that my Kira would speak to me. She would talk to me. “What did you do today?”
I knew the moment she abandoned her tactic.
She rushed to her feet, and tried to run around me to the door. She was slower than normal, likely from her lack of sleep, and the long days she spent in this room. I grabbed her easily by the shoulders, spinning her to face me.
“Kira, it’s not what you think!” I shouted, and she shook her head, trying to squirm from my touch. “Kira, let me explain!”
She squirmed out of my grasp and in a state of madness I let her go. I ran to the front door, opened it and beckoned a guard on the stairs. “No one leaves this room without my permission!”
My heart was aching with fear. I couldn’t let her leave. I couldn’t let her leave if she had seen something… if she had seen me in the basement. If she did, then it would be a death sentence for her. My father would make it so.
I was doing this for her own good.
I slammed the door shut and turned around, her eyes were wide with fear.
“Eoghan, please… you can’t leave me in here. You can’t…”
“I can, and I will!” I growled a quiet promise, bringing my face inches from hers. Close enough to kiss or bite.
I marched to her purse and grabbed her phone, staring at its screen. There was an image of Liberty Leading the People - the painting that seemed to start it all for us. I placed it in my pocket.
“Eoghan,” she said, her eyes wide.
The dread on her face was sinking me. I was drowning in the wash of emotions waving off of her in a single instant. Despite the anger coursing through me, and the desperation to regain some control, my body rebelled at the thought of hurting her.
But everything you will do will hurt her.
Hell, the fact that I wasn’t going to her and smudging that look from her eyes made me want to break the walls that constrained me. But if I stayed… if I stayed…
You’re doing this for her own good.
“Don’t fucking move,” I warned her with an angry finger.
It had all gone sideways. My wife was terrified of me. She stared at me the way Aoibheann stared at my father, and it ripped my guts in two.
I went to my studio, closing the door between us and I raged. I upended every canvas, threw glass at the walls, feeling the rage and satisfaction as it smashed into crystal shards on the floor. I snapped brushes in a single, clenched fist, and screamed like a beast.
When my studio was nothing but splinters, I collapsed in the mess I had made, falling on my knees, my head bowed and my fists clenched.
I broke everything until the only thing left was that golden tree. Even in my wildest anger, I did not want to harm it, or her. So maybe there was hope for a monster like me. Maybe I could still make it right. Maybe… maybe…
My poor, poor wife. What had I fucking done?
Then the sour taste of Morelli’s words flickered through my mind: You have doomed her.
I was a selfish, selfish man. I had plucked her from her life, and dropped her into the den of vipers that was Green Fields Enterprises, and now they were after her. They would kill her. They would rape and break and kill her if I let her out of my sight for one second.
She wasn't born into our life. She had waded in the water with Giovani Morelli, Cosima Durante, and me… but she was so blissfully unaware of the sharks that swam below the surface just out of her sight.
Would it have been better if I had walked away? If I had ignored the pull of her siren’s call? If I hadn’t inserted myself into her quiet world?
The answer came fast, and certain. It punched me in the gut with how certain it was.
It didn’t matter. Because I had no choice.
She was mine, ordained and given by fate, by God, or by spirits, I didn’t know. I also didn’t care. The answer didn’t change with her, because she was mine. That was it.
Mine to protect. Mine to love. Mine.
I would go back to our room tonight on bended knee, and beg for her forgiveness. If she was kind, she’d let me kiss her. She’d let me hold her in my arms, and let me explain.
I was terrified of my own fucking hands. I was afraid of ever laying a finger on her in anger.
There was a knock on the door, and I gritted out an angry, “What?”
It had better not be Kira. If Bourne had let her out of the room, then I would literally put his feet on the flames for insubordination.
Then again, if she had escaped him and come to find me, would I truly be that angry? That she had expended the effort to join me where I was? Certainly, that would mean she forgave me.
But it was the wrong woman on the other side of the door. Malinda with her red hair, in her black sheath dress and apron.
She looked at the studio with wide eyes, staring at the canvas where I had tried to paint her likeness, but then grew bored. Not like the dozens of sketches of Kira strewn about. Each one more evidence of my obsession, and my love. Each one damning her even more, as the weakness my enemies would exploit.
“What is it?” I sneered, as I picked up the sketch of Kira on our honeymoon. The one of her by the window, with a book on her lap.
“I heard an awful ruckus, Eoghan.” It grated my nerves that she called me by my first name, having never reset herself after I made the mistake of dipping my pen in her ink pot. An act of lonely desperation after my father beat me for having committed the sin of bearing my mother’s hair. “Are you a’right?”
She opened the door wider, walking in, as she stared at the chaos that surrounded me.
“I’m fine,” I snarled, hoping she’d leave. But then again, her familiarity was my fault. A fault I had not corrected. “And it’s Mr. Green, to you.”
Her steps halted, as she looked at me, her mouth open.
“Eoghan… I…”
“What did I just say?” I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to. There was only one person I wanted to see, and it wasn’t the housekeeper’s daughter.
From my peripheral vision, I saw her mouth drop open, then close again like a fucking guppy fish.
“Well?” I barked.
“Yes, Mr. Green.” She stepped back.
My resentment for Malinda grew tenfold. She went from being a fly that I had to swat away, to something more poignantly irritating. Like salt poured on a wound.
And Morelli’s words twisted through my mind once again: You have doomed her.
I clenched my fist. Morelli was wrong. I would make it so, or die trying.