1. Underpaying the Boatman
Chapter one
Underpaying the Boatman
Eoghan
Present Day
I was convinced that anyone who wanted to live on a boat is either a habitual drunk or insane. The ship tilted and swayed beneath my feet, and I had to keep my knees bent to stay upright. Damn the ocean.
Damn the water. Damn the entire shipping industry. The moment Green Fields Enterprises could go legitimate, I would sell the Docks on Dutch Street and be done with all maritime endeavors.
Give me mountains over beaches any day.
I stared at the heavy, loaded weapon in my hand. I wasn’t too keen on guns. They were too heavy, too… impersonal. There was something about the weight of a gun that made me think of a prisoner’s shackles. Maybe it was the rough texture of the damn things, made to be easy to grip, unlike the smoothness of the iron blade on my hip. It was so… unsophisticated.
I preferred to kill with the edge of a knife. It was closer, more intimate, and more noble.
The squawking of sea birds in the black sky drew my attention, as the creatures with wide, white wings circled above. Albatrosses, maybe? They circled high above, cawing as they floated on the wind.
I looked back down at the man on his knees before me, his face sullen, the fight drained out of him.
“Where is Kira?” I placed the barrel of the gun against the kneeling sailor’s head, nudging cold steel upon his warm flesh.
He sputtered. “I-I-I… I don’t know who that is!”
A lie.
And I took it as an insult.
I pulled the trigger. His head fell back at the impact, before he fell to the ground, dying in a puddle of his own blood. I went to the next in line, and placed the gun at his forehead as well.
“Where is Kira?” I asked.
It was a useless exercise. They would die no matter what they uttered. But the information would be useful and I left no stone unturned.
“I… I… I thought she ran away… she…” He stammered what he knew of the legend of my missing wife. It was nothing I had not heard before. She’d run away. Eugenio Durante was willing to pay a bounty for her, alive, preferably. Dead, if they presented her corpse.
Durante had no idea what manner of death I would bring down on the city if they so much as harmed a black hair on her sacred head.
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, boyo.” I slapped him with the pistol. Not hard. Just enough to make a point. “Tell me something I don’t know!”
He flinched, recoiling more from my voice than the gun.
One did not have to shout to frighten a person. That was for lesser men like Durante.
I was the monster of the underground. The king of hell itself. They would cower before me.
“I don’t know anything else,” he wept.
I fired into his head, his skull cracking like an egg, the crimson blood mingling with his comrades on the deck.
Dairo stood over my shoulder, his arms crossed as he watched the procession before him. He was almost bored of this little charade. He even looked at his watch, his eyes cold, as he tapped his foot.
I, on the other hand, was fascinated by the act. The bullet entered the skull causing a small hole, but exploded through the back of the head in a blossoming mess of brain, blood, bone, and hair. The exit wound was always the real damage as the bullet cracked through bone. His blood splattered beautifully on the metal deck, a work of crimson on gray.
Then, the next. On and on, until every hand on deck was killed.
I cleared my weapon, switched it to safe, then holstered it at my hip.
“Burn it all down?” Dairo asked, amused as always.
“Send it to the bottom of the ocean.”
“I swear, we’re going to end up with cocaine-addicted fish one day,” he said, flippantly. “We’re an environmental menace.”
They had no news of Kira, which meant they were no closer to finding her than I was. That, at least, was good. She was still safe.
I could still find her, and protect her.
“Cousin,” Dairo said, grabbing my bicep. “It’s been three years. How do you know she’s even alive?”
This was a question he would ask me over and over again. A question I had no answer for other than I knew, in my heart, that she was out there, breathing. My soul was still full. If my Muse did not walk this earth, then my heart would no longer beat.
But I had great news now.
“Because Shiny says she’s seen her,” I said. Sure, she had said she hadn’t seen Kira for a year, but that was two years more recently than I had. “Fate wouldn’t bring Shiny back if I was not meant to find Kira.”
“ You brought Shiny back, not fate.” Dairo shook his head. “Your magical thinking will be the death of you, I swear.”
“Ah, you think that, don’t you?” My skeptical English cousin had lost his roots, and no longer believed in fates. But he was wrong. “Fate gave me a gift when she placed Shiny in front of us. It was not dumb luck that made Kieran O’Malley rescue Ajax LeBlanc.”
I had made vows that were blessed by every power imaginable. The witch, Aoibheann, had even said so.
Though I had no news of Kira, God, or gods, or fates were on my side. Whatever mystic power there was in the world was leading me to my beloved in small but significant ways. When I was losing hope, and wondered if I had to force myself to move on, I went to an Underground fight, and who did I spy in the ring? None other than the treasonous Shiny Flanagan, the woman who had been last seen with my sweet Kira.
I was going to torture the answers from her when Morelli tapped my forehead with his professorial glare, and told me to be patient. To bring her into the fold, to win her alliance. Only then would she give me answers, and like he was the Oracle of Delphi, all he said came to pass. I whipped my own back raw to prove to Shiny that I would do anything for my bride. I even swore to let her go.
Morelli was right.
Patience and truth won. Because Shiny told me that I had a son.
“Eoghan.” Dairo stepped into my space, bringing his voice low so that the men around us - our men, and the Italian dead - could not hear. “This is the largest cargo we have taken. We sink it, and surely Durante will declare a real war.”
“We are already at war.” I smirked with sadistic glee.
“A cold war, yes,” Dairo hissed, giving me a warning reprimand, but knowing it would fall on deaf ears. “But this will turn it into a real one.”
“A cold war is a real war, cousin.” I clasped his bicep with my other hand, and the two of us stood toe to toe, arms interlocked like brothers. “Prosperity only comes with real peace, and peace only comes when one side has won. You know your history as well as I do.”
“Eoghan… we are not nations fighting for territory. This is the bloody mafia.”
“Bloody it is,” I chuckled. “Bloodier it shall be until I have won, and brought my wife back home to me.”
He took a step back and shook his head. “And now, you’re rhyming.”
Then a very real concern creased his features. He looked at me, assessing my person from head to toe.
“Are you sure the madness has not taken you?” he said so quietly that I was reading his lips more than hearing him.
The madness, as we called it, was the cruelty that turned Alastair from beloved father and uncle, to a brutal tyrant. The madness that shriveled his soul when he watched the breath fly from my mother’s lips for the last time. The madness of lost love.
“No!” I said it with too much conviction, though I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t know if my father’s madness had blackened me as well, but I didn’t care. If the madness served the purpose of protecting my family then I would use it. I would suffer it. I’d endure until they were safe. Then I would open my veins on a canvas, and put myself, and them, out of my misery if that was what was needed.
But I couldn't tell Dairo that. Dairo would think the madness was certain, and who knows what he would do. Shackle me to a cell like Morelli, perhaps.
I didn’t think he was capable of mutiny. I trusted him. But trust could only go so far…
“I am doing this to protect my family. Surely you can understand that?” This was a tactic I had employed since he’d started a war with the Bratva to win his bride.
Wife. Children. Love. Now that he was a father, his family turmoil was all that preoccupied his brain.
“Cousin.” He turned to me, and I mentally braced myself for what he would say. I clenched my fists, reminding myself that I could not, in fact, punch out my second in command, no matter what he said. “I like the woman fine, but she left you when you were barely through your honeymoon. Is she worth all of this?”
He gestured to the blood, and the floating metal scrap heap that we would send to the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe he gestured to the Mafia men on their backs, staring blankly at the night sky.
He could be gesturing to the sad state of my own fucking existence. As if I did not know it already. As if I did not live with the heaviness of my life each and every day. A burden that far exceeded any I had felt before.
“She is worth an ocean of blood!” I gritted through my teeth. “She is worth burning in hell for all eternity.”
“Why, Eoghan?” Dairo shouted over my declarations. “Explain to me why!”
“Because she is the only light in my existence!” I paced away from him before turning around again, running my hand through my hair. “Because she has given me a son! Surely you can understand that. As you would lay your life down for Rose, even when she is cold towards you.”
Since the birth of their twins, Rose had pulled from his embrace. I saw it not so much in her, but in the longing gaze of my cousin as he desperately wanted to reach for her, but did not.
He looked at me as though I had just plunged my blade into his heart.
“It’s different,” he said, quietly. I wasn’t sure if he believed it. “She loves me. I know it. She has pledged herself to me, borne my children, and been by my side. Can you say the same of Kira?”
“If Rose left you, would you love her less?”
Dairo squinted, as though the question had thrown him off. He shook his head. “No.”
“I am no less constant than you.” Once upon a time, Dairo and I had been in step, of the same mind. But life had a way of prying old bonds apart.
He hadn’t lived in that damned haunted mansion with the ghost of my mother whispering in the halls, and the beast that was my father had me beneath his boot. He did not know what it was to only have the witch, Aoibheann, as company. Kira was the first time air filled my lungs. I would never breathe again, until she was back in my arms, alive, and safe.
Because her blood could not be on my hands.
It might not be the most humanist notion I held, but I knew not all blood was the same. The blood of my enemies did not run as thick, or as tragic, as Kira’s. My murdered foe did not condemn me to the pits of Hell, like the spilling of the blood of an innocent child. Not all life held the same value. My life was nothing compared to the life of my son.
“Come, cousin,” I said, as I threw two coins onto the deck, a pittance for Death to take them over the River Styx into Hell. The Greeks would have put two on each corpse, placing them on their eyes, but I wasn’t willing to offer that much for an Italian crew.
In my last act, I would underpay the boat man for their fare across the river to Hell, to add insult to their pathetic injury.
“Poetic to the last,” Dairo said as we heralded our men away from the ship and to the waiting boats that would speed us back to shore.
I was the last man on deck and set off the charges, jumping overboard as the first explosion lit the black sky orange, reflecting on the equally black waves.
Durante would have insured all the legal wares. But the illegal wares were worth a hundred times more. He’d be on the chopping block for that.
Good luck, Durante. You filthy scum.
That night, I went home and drew Kira as the maiden carved onto the bow of the ship, her long curls disappearing into its rails, as her luscious figure arched forward, leading a crew over the troubled water of a rough sea. I drew her face with utter care, capturing the exact curve of her cheek, and the twinkle in her eye.
She had a brave face, as she always did in the one thousand and one images strewn along the floor of my office, and in the corners of old books, the bottom of a ledger, and scribbled in ink on the bleach-white linen of a dinner napkin.
But today, her eyes had a sparkle of mist. A hint of fear as she looked up at me from the page.
Save me, her expression cried. Protect me, Husband.