2. Because We Were Friends
Chapter two
Because We Were Friends
Eoghan
I stared at the stem of blooming orchids on my desk - three blooms in total.
Three. Fucking. Years.
It had been three fucking years since I had touched her skin, or felt her sweet curls rolling through my fingers. Over one thousand days since the last time I had tasted her lips. I wanted to feel her warmth beneath me. I wanted to taste the salt of her tears of pleasure again.
I had a son I had never seen - who I had never kissed. I had never held him in my arms, and my soul was hollower for it.
“Why do I still feel you everywhere, Kira?” I asked the ghosts that haunted this wretched house.
I could feel the touch of her skin, the feel of her curves beneath my palm. I still half expected to go upstairs and find her waiting in bed. I expected to see her in the shower, hidden behind the steam, slowly drying her hair with a towel, scrunching her glorious curls.
Even the Gallery was a mausoleum of misery.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would turn the corner and find her there, leading a crowd from piece to piece, fleecing them for their hard earned coin.
Even the sound of a woman’s high heels reminded me of her.
My mother’s ghost, which had haunted my vision before, had disappeared after my father died. I imagined that they went to their eternal resting place together, as they were meant to. Somewhere, my mum had soothed the monster of my father’s soul, and he had found peace, crossing into the afterlife together.
It made sense to me, even if it was old world superstition. If I were to die first, I would linger in the dark to make the crossing with my Muse.
My soul could not find peace otherwise.
“Where are you, my sweet wife?” I swear I could hear her laugh in the air. “How long must I wait to get you back?”
I stared at the glass of absinthe in my hand, swirling it before taking its sticky sweet liquid in my mouth. It had long lost any satisfaction or taste. It may as well have been gasoline. Since she’d disappeared, the world seemed dull and colorless, more sepia toned by the day.
I savored the loneliness, as I stared at my scarred palm, missing the diagonal line that would bind her to me. The longer she was gone, the more I regretted not handfasting, because somewhere in my soul, I knew that when she agreed to it, it would be eternal. We would spend our evenings together forever, even when parted by death.
She still had my blade, but that wasn’t enough to protect her. However, a diagonal line on her palm would have identified her as a member of the Irish families - here, or in Boston. It might save her life.
“Dairo sent me to check on you.” The familiar shadow of Shiny Flanagan darkened my office door. She looked around, her arms crossed. “It’s creepy seeing you in your dad’s office.”
I chuckled, taking out my blade from my hip and casually cleaning my nails with them.
“You’re free to leave,” I crooned, “And it’s my office now.”
She had been gone for almost ten years, and had walked in like she owned the place, even more so now that I had given her the rank Captain – a sort of underboss for the Irish. She’d put on her mantle like she’d put on a familiar pair of old blue jeans.
“Not until I get you out of your funk.” She crossed the threshold into the room. “Tell me, Eoghan, is the painting outside really made of blood?”
I smirked. Yes it was.
Could I terrorize Shiny? I doubt it. Who she was before she disappeared was very different from the warrioress she was now. She was a knight on the chess board, and I had been blind to not see it before.
“Who’s blood is it?” Shiny stepped forward, letting her strong arms dangle at her side. “Or is it more than one person?”
“It was just the one.” I leaned back in my seat, and steepled my fingers, contemplating the man below.
The twists of fate were interesting, to say the least.
“Unless you’re here to tell me where Kira is, I don’t want to hear it.” As much as I was still fond of her, I wasn’t up for her company. She didn’t seem to care. Shiny sat down, as arrogant as she had ever been, taking liberties that weren’t hers.
“Please, make yourself at home,” I said sarcastically.
“I will.” She moved her arse in the seat, rocking back and forth to really make sure that her cheeks left an imprint in the cushion. I could not stop her, feeling myself held back by what decency was left in my soul.
Was it decency or practicality? I wasn’t sure. If I tortured her, she’d never tell me where Kira was. If I killed her, then she’d take that secret to the grave. With Aoibheann now married to Jericho Vasiliev, Pakhan of the Bratva, I wouldn’t be able to torture my stepmum either. So the two women who had stolen away my Muse were untouchable.
They’d both been tortured enough…
Patience. I needed patience - a trait that was not inherent in my blood.
“What’s going through that noggin of yours, Eoghan?” Shiny asked, reaching out to pour herself a glass of my absinthe.
She’d been a drink thief in a previous life, and we had snuck in here to raid my father’s liquor cabinet until we were caught. My father tanned my backside for it.
“Dairo says you don’t go to Gallery Four anymore,” she said, after she downed the glass, and slammed the tumbler on the desk. “He says you’ve just sent him.”
“Why not? Those events are insipid.”
I had gotten into the habit of sending Dairo to the Gallery. And why shouldn’t I? He could slap on some dark contacts, a better suit, and stop talking like an English twat, and no one would know the difference.
“Have you even looked at a painting since she’s been gone?” Shiny almost looked sad for me.
“What for?” I felt the slight buzz of the drink muddling my thoughts. “There’s plenty of art here.”
“Oh yes,” Shiny said in mock contemplation, with a sagaciously sarcastic nod. “Like the creepy blood painting, and the weird gold tree in the hall?” She shook her head, as though she had a right to be irritated with me. “You used to love the gallery.”
Of course she’d bring up that place. In a world full of secrets, what had happened at the gallery over a decade ago was one I shared with her, and only her.
“Go away, Shiny,” I grumbled, feeling the pulse in my ears as drunkenness threatened to cloud my head.
“No.”
“Then I’ll fucking kill you,” I said pointing my knife at her in an obvious threat.
She just laughed, throwing her head back so her short black hair flew over her broad cheeks.
“The only way you can kill me is to shoot me,” she said, lifting a fucking brow, as she nodded to the blade in my hand. “A knife fight would be too risky, Mister Green.”
I hated when she called me that, and she knew it. She had only called my father Mister Green, and it was a slap in the face that she did it now. And she was right.
As quickly as she’d started to laugh, she sobered. Leaning forward in the chair, her elbows on my desk.
“I saw your son a year ago,” she said, pulling me from my spiraling stupor. “He looks just like you.”
The bitch was only two days back from her honeymoon, and she was already torturing me. My jaw ticked as my long harbored resentment for her, and for Aoibheann, threatened to trigger my madness.
“Gold hair, black eyes,” she tapped her fingernail against the glass in her hand. “It was uncanny, really.”
“Cillian.” I said the name. My son’s name.
I had to keep my cool.
Kira had named him according to my wishes, which told me that she loved me. In some way, she respected me. If I hadn’t frightened her so much, if I had leashed the beast that existed in my soul, then she’d still be here, and I wouldn’t be half fucking dead with worry that the Italians would cause her harm.
I had agreed to a truce with the Bratva, orchestrated by Dairo, because I needed one less enemy, one less faction trying to find my weakness - my wife. Now, my enemies could do so much worse. They could harm the boy, my blood, before I even got a chance to hold him in my arms.
What unholy terror would they unleash on this world if they did that? What would I become? I’d devise tortures so heinous that Vlad the Impaler himself would shudder in disgust.
I wanted to shake Shiny by the shoulders and scream, “ Give me back my son. Give me back my family!”
But I could not.
The more I yelled, the more she saw my father in me… the more I saw my father in myself. That part of me was not good enough to be with Kira, or Cillian. That man did not deserve to feel the love of a hearth and home.
Come back to me Kira, my soul cried out in earnest.
I had said it over and over again, until I was blue in the face. I ranted and raved at the sky, at the millions of portraits I had sketched of my wife, begging the face on paper to come alive and give me my son! I wanted the lines to move, until they formed the face of my heir. But the still lines never did. They just looked blankly back at me with fear in those rich, dark eyes.
I had accepted my madness.
I fed it with absinthe, and tamed it with drawings of her. Of my wife. Of the son I had not met.
Shiny had seen my son. She had met him, but I hadn’t. I hated her for it. I resented her happiness in her marriage, when I was in abject misery in mine.
The beating of my heart stilled as the familiar despair crept up my body. I should be numb to it by now, but I wasn’t. Each time the pain of her disappearance struck, it felt like the first time. Like a fresh wound that opened again and again. A Sisyphean injury that would never heal.
“Dairo says I should tell you where she is,” she said, quietly.
A small firefly of hope lit the darkness of my soul. Dairo was still on my side, just when I had begun to fear that I was well and truly alone.
Shiny leaned forward in her seat, her eyes intensely focused on my own, as I waited. I waited until she smirked in amusement.
“I have… conditions.”
I bristled.
“Conditions?” I snarled, downing the syrupy sweet liquor in one go, and filling it up again. “I gave you your revenge. I gave you back your little sister. Hell, I introduced you to your fucking husband, and saved his life.”
I gripped the glass, feeling it crack as my fist tightened with my anger.
“Fuck you, Eoghan,” she said. “You let me kill the man you and your father allowed to rape me.”
I clenched my jaw. I had not allowed anything. Though she had come through the house, disheveled, and weeping after her rehearsal dinner. As she ran to us, my father and her father both shouted her out of the room, uncaring about what some little girl had to say when they had such big discussions about warehouses and shipments.
Should I have known what had happened to her? What Keith Bourne had done to her?
Yes.
And I regretted not opening my eyes at the time. That was why I gave her the revenge she needed, before I made her pledge to be by my side. Before she took the blood oath of a soldier, and she came back into the fold.
Now, she was one of my captains and I still hadn’t made up my mind on if that was a good thing or not. Morelli told me that murdering together binds you like nothing else. I certainly felt bonded when Dairo and I watched her bury Keith Bourne alive.
“Ajax has trained your men for years, and taken the oath to Green Fields Enterprises. As for introducing us?” she snorted. “We met before.”
There was a glint in her eye.
“ How did you meet?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. I had a feeling that whatever meeting they had was less than… chaste.
That phantom feeling of her being my little sister seeped to the surface. I wondered if I’d be able to beat her husband for it. The answer, of course, was no. The man was a trainer of fighting champions and a champion himself. He’d turn me into mince meat, and I didn’t mind saying so.
“Do I need to kill him?” I asked, leaning forward. “Do I need to do to him what a good brother would do to any man who…”
She laughed, “You can try.”
Fair enough.
“Well aren’t you just a cute little couple,” I mumbled, envious of their love. Of their partnership. “The couple who murder together, stay together.”
She must have noticed, because she visibly softened. “Our spies in the Mafia say they’re looking for her. They think they have a lead.”
The glass in my hand shattered, the shards cutting into my skin. Blood, bright and thick slipped between my fingers, pooling at my palm before dripping on the table.
Shiny ignored my little spectacle and kept talking.
“I think she’s in danger, and we need to bring her and the kid in.” She poured herself another glass and downed it, wiping errant drops away with the back of her hand. “So, for once, I will do what you want me to.”
“Have you forgotten you’re my captain? That you’re under my command?” I lifted a single brow. It was an act that should have paralyzed her, but she didn’t even blink.
She wasn’t doing this for me. She was doing it for them. For Kira.
I respected that.
For the past three years I had been out of my mind, paying anyone who might have the slightest information on my wife. Then murdering them if they didn’t come through. The streets of New York City were running red with the blood of fake informants, and everyone knew Kira was gone. I was in such a haze that I didn’t fucking think. I wasn’t of sound mind to suspect or assume that others would try to find her, so they could bring me to my knees.
Morelli, my consiglieri, warned me. Then our spies confirmed it.
In my search for her, in my love, I painted a target on her back.
My insanity would be my downfall if I did not temper my desperation. If I did not stop myself from seeing the world in red.
So I did as Vlad Tepes would do.
I created an army that would rival the National fucking Guard. I doubled our revenue, tripled our ruthlessness. We made an alliance with the Bratva, sending away my stepmother in marriage. The only man insane enough to defy me was Eugenio fucking Durante.
The last of the plan would be to reach out to Cosima, my love’s former friend, and strike a peace so that my son did not grow up like us. So that my son did not have the sword of Damocles over his head the way I had. The way Cosima had.
The way Yuliya Vasilieva had.
My son would grow up in peace, and tranquility. He would create, and not destroy. He would see sunrises where all I saw were blackened nights, and we would beat our swords into ploughshares, until we could build something on this land of ours. We would bury the past, and grow from the fertile earth a new future.
I had promised that to myself. I had promised it to Shiny on her wedding day, when she told me I had a son.
“If you bring her in, she’ll just figure another way out,” Shiny said. “And if she runs away a second time…”
The danger would be infinitely more.
“How do you plan to convince her to stay?” Shiny was asking a valid question, but the first thing I imaged was that I would lock her up and throw away the fucking key. I’d hold the boy hostage, if I had to. If I had time, I could make her love me. I could make her —
“Christ, you have no idea how you’re going to do it, do you?” Shiny said, reaching forward to refill her glass. “I won’t help you if you hold her captive.”
She rubbed her forehead, as if trying to push off a tension headache.
“I would never imprison her!” I protested, not because I had a plan, but because I… could come up with one. Maybe.
I downed my drink in one gulp, feeling the familiar burn of it on my soul.
She let out a long breath, then chuckled. It was a sad, almost resigned sound. “I’ll tell you where she is, and we’ll come up with a plan that doesn’t involve black bagging her and throwing her in a cell.”
“Any plan we make for Kira will not work.” That was my cynicism coming to the surface. A mood I had sharpened to razor sharpness in my lonely state. “She is not a woman to be controlled.”
She was a queen to be revered. A goddess to be worshipped. One word from her, and I would obey.
“Then we’ll try something else until something works.” Shiny leaned forward and grabbed my hand. “We’ll figure it out.”
I felt the dizziness of alcohol on my mind as I swallowed away despair.
I forced my eyes to focus as I looked at Shiny. I blinked until the double I was seeing turned into one, and I could scrutinize her expression.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked, suspiciously.
She hadn’t liked me since coming back into the life. She didn’t want to be here most days, if it weren’t for her husband. Dick-whipped was what she was.
“You don’t know?” she said, tilting her head, her arrogance clear as day. “Let me remind you that you’ve sworn to let her go, if that’s what she wants.”
I groaned, irritated that she was right. I had told her that I would do anything to get Kira back. I had whipped my own skin to tell her that I would tear my flesh off the bone if that was what it took. She had gotten a blank check, and all she asked was that I would do my wife no harm. And even then, she waited until now to tell me.
I shook my head. Or at least I thought I had. My hand was still bleeding when I finally grabbed another glass and filled it.
“Because we were friends,” she said, coming to her feet. “I haven’t forgotten.”