42. The Kiss by Fracesco Hayez
Chapter forty-two
The Kiss by Fracesco Hayez
Eoghan
A n hour had passed. That wasn’t unusual. These gatherings always had a certain division of genders. The men might go to the office to smoke, or into the living room, where they spoke of business. The women tended to congregate in the garden with the children, or in the kitchen.
I had that uneasy feeling that I always got from staring at The Kiss by Francesco Hayez. The painting always drew you in towards the romantic center of the canvas - the amazing kiss between two people. But as your focus widens, and you see the men in the shadowy figures in the back, and the way the man has a foot on the step, ready to bolt, you realize it’s not a love story. It’s a tragedy.
It dawns on you slowly, just like the ballooning dread in my chest filled me, second by second expanding until I was frantic.
My palms were sweaty, when Aoibheann came out of the hallway alone.
“Aoibheann,” I called to her, interrupting the man I was making small talk with as a part of my family obligations. “Where’s Kira?”
Her eyes widened, and she looked around, as if she expected to see her there.
“I don’t know, Eoghan,” she said, her eyes wide, but not quite surprised. “I went to the ladies. Maybe she popped into the kitchen?”
I narrowed my eyes just for a moment. She was hiding something. I knew it. But it didn’t matter right now.
I bolted to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Then back to the living room, the walled-in garden, and then the bathroom. She wasn’t there. I went up the stairs, and inspected every bedroom. I even stormed into Shiny’s old room - it looked like someone puked Pepto-Bismol all over the place, it was so damn pink and princess-y.
But she wasn’t there. I even desperately checked beneath the beds, and in closets, but with every opened and closed door, dread sank deeper into my chest.
I went to the front, where Kieran O’Malley stood with his back to the door.
“Has Kira come through?” I demanded.
O’Malley almost jumped in surprise at my words.
“No, Mr. Green,” he said, his brows furrowing. “No one’s come out since everyone went inside.”
Where the fuck was she?
She was gone. She had run away. Or maybe she was kidnapped?
Fuck! If she was kidnapped, then…
“Give me your keys, O’Malley,” I said, reaching out a hand.
He didn’t hesitate to drop them in my hand. At best, she ran away, and I had to find her before anyone else did. At worst, she was kidnapped, and I needed to burn the world down until I found her.
Morelli’s threat rang in my head - “ Leave her alone before she ends up just like your mother. ”
Was that a fucking threat? Had he made it come true? Because if he had, I would bleed him dry, and hover him at the end of his life, and make him live days strapped to a bed with a fucking tube down his throat - alive, but helpless, beaten and broken every single fucking day, until he’s begging for death.
I drove O’Malley’s car back to the big house, and marched to the basement. I nodded at Bourne, who stood with his shoulder against the door, guarding the prisoner, his phone out in front of him, swiping on his screen.
I looked at Morelli, strung up by his muscular arms, the socket of one shoulder ready to pop out with the slightest tug. Covered in bruises and his own dried blood, he looked at me with a malicious defiance that made my blood turn cold.
I didn’t say a single word.
Not until he began to laugh.
I cleaned my nails with the edge of my iron blade. The one created when Dairo and I had pledged to be more than cousins - to be brothers. A pledge we kept to this day.
“If you were truly a smart man, you’d be begging me for your life, instead of trying to taunt me,” I said quietly, looking at my hand.
Morelli had lived a long time in the life. That was certainly a credit to him, and his ability to stay alive. But right now, he was acting like a fool.
“I won’t beg you for shit.” He spat on the ground. If he was at his full strength, he would have spat it right into my face. But, instead, it fell limply to the ground before me, and I stared at the spittle on the stone ground, and lifted a brow.
“Even better,” I said, finally raising my eyes to see the old man.
I didn’t hate him. Not yet, at least. He was just some old lawyer that worked for a man like my father - the madness was necessary to live in this existence, after all. So I couldn’t blame him for that. No more than I blamed myself for being born to a mad man.
“Where have your people taken Kira Green?” I asked, plainly. “This is the one chance you have to keep your life.”
He looked at me, puzzled, his white brows coming together before his face brightened into a menacing smile. Then he laughed. The sound of it echoed from the stones and grated on my ears like nails on a chalkboard.
“You don’t know where she is?” He threw his head back and laughed, then coughed, when what little phlegm he had fell into his throat and his head flopped back down.
“Laugh all you want, old man.” My nostrils flared as I clenched my teeth. “You’ll end up dead before the day is done.”
His laughing didn’t stop immediately, to my irritation. It sputtered, and slowly faded, as his tired eyes seemed to find new life.
“We didn’t take your precious little Kira,” he chuckled. “She left you, boy!”
My fist clenched, as I felt the truth of his words. The Italians hadn’t taken her, which meant that she left on her own. But how?
“She ran away from you, like a smart girl,” he chuckled. “Or maybe a stupid one, since she’s still a fucking Green, and a woman at that.”
He threw his head back again and his laugh felt like razors on my skin.
“Don’t worry. My son Dario will find her, and he’ll do to her exactly what your father threatened to do to Cosa.” His graying eyes fell to me again, and he scowled. “Exactly what Vasiliev did to your pathetic mother.”
I stared at the man before me, as my hand clutched my knife tighter, the edges of the handle digging into my skin. The pain was raw, and beautiful. I fucking liked it.
“Do you know that Vasiliev sent us the video of what they did to your mother?” he sneered, as my heart cracked in my chest. “Do you know that I watched her get violated, again and again, as they cut her skin? As they carved her face and she wept… do you know how she cried for your father, before she went silent?”
I felt the prickles on the back of my neck as the hate seeped into my body. I felt the blackness of madness - the same madness that haunted my father - coloring my eyes.
I didn’t move as he kept on talking, as he spewed the details of my mother’s violation to me.
“Your father was too weak to protect your mother.” His accusing, judging eyes stared down at me with a frightening grimace. “You’re too soft to protect anyone, much less that girl.”
My head swirled. It wasn’t Morelli I saw before me. It was my father. My father who called me soft, and told me I was too weak. It was every snickering voice that said my art made me weak, every person who doubted me. Every person who told me that mercy was a weakness. That fear was the only thing men like Morelli and Durante would ever know.
So be it.
If I must be feared to be respected, then I would become Vlad the Impaler to strike fear into my enemies. I would do so gratefully. I would become the Devil himself, if it meant that I could keep my Kira safe.
In one fell swoop, I threw the knife and it whirled through the room, cutting the air as it twirled, lodging into his guts.
The old man grunted and then exhaled, quietly, as the blade went deep into the edge of his stomach.
“Bourne!” I called over my shoulder, and was greeted with his footsteps as he came down.
Blood blossomed from the cut on Morelli’s gut, seeping down.
I grabbed a glass, and placed it against his abdomen below the wound. I let the blood drip until it was full, then walked away.
Morelli looked at the knife in his gut, his eyes wide, and terrified - as he should be. Because my cruelty was far worse than my father’s and the Vasilievs. It was a level of cruelty that would make Vlad Tepes himself quiver in fucking fear.
“Make sure he stays alive,” I ordered my men as they looked at my victim with impassive eyes. “Get the surgeon in here if you must. I need him alive for much longer.”
I took the blood that would make my crimson paint and poured it into a larger container. Then I returned to Morelli, and collected more of his blood, and repeated the action three times.
“Why?” Bourne asked, as he stared with me in horrid fascination.
“Because I need his blood,” I said, flatly, feeling the madness stirring in my black soul. I took the container of his collected blood and placed it over the fire. “Keep this at a constant rate. Don’t let it boil. I need it to dry.”
Again, Bourne opened his mouth, to ask the question, “Why?”
I stopped in my tracks and stared in irritation at the boy. “Because I need it.”
I started up the stairs to get the rest of my supplies.
“I need it for my paint,” I said as Bourne’s mouth fell open, and he looked at me in shock.
With my easel, my canvas, oils, and mortar and pestle, I came back down to create my true masterpiece. The self portrait I had craved to make for decades. A likeness of my true self, from paint made from the blood of my enemy.
Vlad the Impaler was nothing compared to me.
With horrified eyes, the surgeon and my two men stared at me in mortification as I toiled for hours, draining Morelli of blood, drying it into a fire until it was solid, and could be beaten into a powder. Then I mixed it with oil, using a glass mortar until I could scrape it into a jar. With rapt fascination and horror, Morelli watched, half-alive, as I used his blood to paint my enormous canvas draped on the floor right within his view.
I smiled, as a tune popped into my mind, and I began to sing it as the blood and scent of copper filled my senses, and my vision cleared as the devil upon the canvas smiled back at me, becoming clearer, one brush at a time.
Black is the color of my true love's hair…I love my love, and well she knows,I kiss the ground whereon she goes.And on the day, whene’er it comes,She and I will bleed as one.
“You’re a sick fuck, Green,” Morelli’s voice finally had a flutter of fear, as he watched the canvas come to life, just as I did.
Oh, he was right. I was a sick son of a bitch. A monster. A demon. “Do you think she’ll like it?”
I looked at him and smiled, wiping my hands on a white towel that turned red with the color of the canvas.
“We don’t have her. At least we didn't plan to take her,” Morelli finally confessed. “I don’t know where she is, and we don’t…”
I waved him off, because I already knew all this. I wasn’t bleeding him because he and his Italian ilk had taken Kira from me. I was bleeding him because I was a monster, and it was time the world knew it. It was time to rule with fucking fear.
“It’s not done yet, though,” I lamented, looking at the large canvas with a grin. “There’s so much more left to do.” I sighed, stretching my neck one way, then the other. “So much paint left to make.”
There was only one visage in the enormous canvas that did not suffer, and did not scream. One face that looked on my devil with sadness and pain. In the top most corner, was an angel dressed in white, looking over her shoulder with a sorrow that broke my heart. Kira. But she didn’t have a crown of orchids and leaves. No. Her crown was that of thorns, and blood dripped down her face.
I had made the mistake of thinking she was a helpless orchid - a perfect white bloom in the darkness. But I was seeing clearly now that I had been right. She was a rose. A white rose dipped in blood, stained red with thorns as thick as iron nails.
The blood on her face was the pain I had placed on her sweet skin because I was a beast. I was a monster. I would cause her pain, and that was my tragedy. To love and hurt. To protect while causing harm.
I had painted her obscured, hidden in the darkness. But I could see her. I could see her wedding dress, even when I drew it in shadow.
For weeks, I painted in the basement, draining Morelli as the surgeon placed IVs into him, so he wouldn’t die.
And with every passing day, I hummed a melancholy tune, the words changing every time.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair, She’s disappeared to my despair. I’ll make her a painting from bloody lines And suffer death a thousand times.
I finished the last stroke at what would have been twilight, seen by the glow of the hearth.
To the melody of Morelli’s pained groans, I signed my name on the corner.
“Do you think she’ll like it, Morelli?” I asked, standing over my great masterpiece.
Morelli’s half closed eyes stayed the same - in that strange, tired, catatonic void.
“I think she’ll like it,” I said, staring down at the painting with my hands on my hips. “She’ll think it’s a masterpiece.”
“I remember your little Kira,” Morelli said, his voice ragged. “My nephew helped her with a little loan a few years ago.”
I stiffened, remembering…
“He said she would suck his dick.” Morelli let out a laugh that made him sound drunk, or insane. “I was going to go with him that night, to get the little pretty thing on her knees.”
I didn’t move. I barely breathed.
Morelli was pale, his skin pasty, as sweat and piss covered what few clothes, now little more than rags, clung to him. He was hallucinating, surely.
“It’s hard to forget a name like that. Kira Kekoa.” He said the name with glee. Had I mentioned her name to him before? Her maiden name? Or did he know her from before? Had Cosima introduced them? I wasn’t sure. I could hardly remember, I had been painting for so long. I hadn’t slept.
My heart stopped, when his laugh started again, bouncing off the walls and into my ears, pressing against my brain like my head was caught in a vice.
“Every time she couldn’t pay the loan to save her pathetic, good for nothing father, she’d get on her knees,” he laughed. “When I went to visit his office, there was no sign of him, or her. His office was clean, I could still smell the fucking disinfectant. Bleach!”
Disinfectant? I wanted to ask, but I had to let the madman ramble, before he came to his senses, or died.
“I didn’t remember her until after Cosima brought her to lunch,” he sneered. “My sweet angel, with that fucking serpent whore. ”
Another man would have beat Giovanni Morelli to death. Another man would have lost their temper, and broken the man in a rage.
But that was not the man my father raised.
Instead, I watched his eyes flutter closed. His head drooped, as his arms slackened. The man was falling asleep.
“So your nephew, ” I said with derision, allowing a bit of the acid in my gut to spit out into the air. Then I smirked, feeling the cold fury of the devil himself taking over my limbs. “He's the reason my darling wife lost her only family.”
The reason she didn’t love me.
I looked up at the man, and thought about his nephew, the old loan shark. I knew that was part of the Italian Mafia racket, but never thought to associate that with the orchid bloom that was my darling wife.
She had told me that she would never be powerless again. She’d never be in a position to owe anyone. And now I knew why, and I conveniently had the man responsible… well, the uncle of the man responsible. I imagine that the nephew was long dead. Maybe even by my wife’s hand.
But I’d think about that later.
Instead, I wanted to get my pound of flesh.
A pound of tenderized, slow-roasted, and finely aged pound of flesh.
“She’s nothing but a whore,” Morelli said, his voice fading into unconsciousness.
“Hmm,” I said, pensively. “I think you will regret saying that.”
“The moment she said…” he wheezed. I had killed enough men to know that he was starting to give up on life. That simply wasn’t going to do. “We were going to take her, and…” He wheezed again, coughing, and hacking as his lungs gave up.
Morelli was exactly the kind of bastard to make his last words ones of spite. People like him were absolutely devoid of beauty, love and art. So I would give him a taste of his own medicine.
“We would do to her what the Russians did to Isla,” he chuckled, low, and exhausted. “Too bad she got away… it would have been…”
His voice faded away into silence.
The Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Vlad Tepes, Hades - they were all men who led demons. The literature called them evil. But that was just angelic, religious propaganda.
The Morningstar’s real job wasn’t just to torment, but to torment the sinners and devils that roamed the earth while they were living. The Devil balanced the scales and punished the wicked. He provided an incredible service, like a judge, bailiff, and prison guard.
People disliked him because he enjoyed his work, and had endless job security.
“You can call me the Devil now,” I said more to myself. “I am the Punisher.”
How perfect was my self portrait?
An image of me as the Devil himself, shepherding the souls of the damned into the underworld, and torturing them along the way.
I stared down at the canvas, marveling at the detail and the faces of all the men my devil was welcoming to the bowels of the underworld: Anton Vasiliev, the head of the Bratva, and his father Yuri Vasiliev who was already dead, but certainly in Hell. There was Cosimo Durante, the head of the Mafia, and Morelli at his side. There was the Italian loan shark who had harmed my sweet Kira. The other souls were kept in shadow, facing away and suffering beneath my menacing hold.
Except for one more, that I had placed there on a whim, but now it felt like a heavy decision. My father’s face was on a naked man, covered in wounds of his own making, as he walked himself into the gates of Hell. Walking of his own volition to his doom.
I wouldn’t wait for them to die, to render my verdict and punishment. I would do it while they were alive. It was a public service.
I stayed up for hours more, draining him of blood, checking just long enough to see that his weak heart still beat. He and I had miles left to go before we were finished, and he needed to be alive and alert for at least a part of it.
The morning hours turned into evening, and O’Malley’s light footsteps announced his presence in the hall before he opened the creaky metal door and gasped at the blood-soaked horror he walked in on.
“Keep him alive,” I told O’Malley, as I leaned down to roll up the dried canvas, so I could take it upstairs to where it would finally take a place in the light of day. “He’ll stay in this purgatory until Kira comes home.”
I already knew where this painting would go. It would be a testament to the new management of Green Fields Enterprises. It was a beacon that would tell the world that I was not a man to fuck with, and that I was madder than they could have ever imagined.
“When she’s found,” I told my men, feeling the tickle of copper touch my nose. “I’ll decide what to do with him.”
The Story Continues in Iron Cross , part 2 of the Will of Iron Trilogy