5. Crate Him
Chapter five
Crate Him
Kira
B link looked uncomfortable, staring at my son through the rearview mirror. Cillian was eating nuggets in his rear-facing car seat, happily kicking the back rest with his little snow boots.
“I thought we were meeting alone,” Blink wrinkled his nose.
Blink stared down at his clothes often, disgusted with his flannel apparel, meant to blend him in with the rather humble population in Hollowbrook, known only for its touristic covered bridge that dated to the days of the pilgrims. The small bucolic town looked best in the winter.
“I’m sorry, would you like him to step out?” I crossed my arms and lifted my brow. Cillian babbled happily, his spit-covered fist in his teething mouth.
“Does he need to be changed?” Blink sniffed loudly, following my gaze to my son. “When does he stop defecating in his pants?”
“He’s two years old.” I rolled my eyes.
“That means nothing to me, Picasso.” He looked over his shoulder at my son again, before leaning back in his seat and staring out the windshield. “I was able to house train a dog when it was three months old. Why’s this one taking years?”
He always suspected that my son shit himself because of his overly sensitive nose - or paranoid nose. Diapers freaked him out. But I knew for a fact that my son was an evening pooper. He was as regular as clockwork, as long as we laid off the yogurt.
Blink was safe… for now.
I looked at my friend - at this point, probably my only friend - and colleague with amusement. “One day, you’re going to fall head over heels, and you’re going to end up with a dozen fat babies.”
“Why would you curse me like that?” His lip and nose curled in disgust, and I laughed. “And why didn’t you leave that ,” he nodded toward my son, “at home?”
“They tend to frown on leaving your kid home alone, to go have a meeting with a random man in the middle of the day,” I deadpanned. “What do you want me to do? Crate him?”
Blink pursed his lips as if he expected me to do exactly that.
“This is hardly a secure meeting.” His grumbling had become expected, now.
After three years, his irritation at my motherhood was just another gaping wound that would not heal.
I didn’t blame him. He was frustrated. So was I.
As much as I worked, and as hard as I worked, selling art online or in the fucking kiosk under the stupid bridge didn’t bring in the top dollars like Gallery Four. I couldn’t make it better because I had to stay hidden from the long arm of the Irish mob. Green Fields Enterprises was everywhere, all the time, and the best way to stay safe was to stay small.
Which was fine by me. But hardly useful if I needed to fund international operations.
“You think my two year old is going to tell secrets to his Tickle-Me-Elmo?” I said, vaguely getting agitated by this old song and dance. “Do you suspect Elmo of being a Russian spy?”
Blink snorted, as he stared ahead through the windshield.
“Can he speak?”
“Not in sentences,” I said, though I knew my son understood far more than he let on. Children saw everything. They knew everything. His curious black eyes always observed the world around him with a beautiful curiosity that I tried to encourage.
I didn’t know how I would deal with keeping my job from him as he grew up.
What would my kid think, always seeing me in back rooms, meeting with strange people? Listening to a radio at odd hours of night, waiting for an encrypted message? What normal life could I possibly give him? And was that life better than the one he’d have if he was raised as the son of the most powerful man in New York City?
“And how long will the meetings continue this way?” His exasperation felt like spiderwebs on my skin. “How long before he starts telling his little school friends that his Mummy meets with a strange man in a car?”
“Strange is right,” I grumbled, crossing my arms.
As if I hadn’t worried about that inevitability every day.
“I’m serious, Picasso!”
“I am, too, Blink!” I said in a whisper-shout. “I cannot touch my own bank accounts because it’ll alert Eoghan to where I am. The salary you give me is a pittance, and you’ve stuck me in this fucking shithole one-horse-town!”
“There’s more than one horse,” he mumbled, looking around.
He was right, strictly speaking. The single crossroads with barely named businesses was just a hub for the great ranches and farms in the surrounding area. It wasn’t unusual to see horses walking down main street as horse enthusiasts exercised their steeds.
We were about to have the conversation we’d avoided for years.
“We need more, Picasso,” he said, shaking his head. “We are so close to cleaning up Boston, and the Triangle Trade is almost gone! We need…”
“What do you expect me to do?” I almost whined. “Blink, I… I’m at the end of my rope. I don't know how to get more funds.”
I couldn’t bring in the kind of money I had when I was at the Four Gallery. A single night could wrangle me millions, if not more. With a delicate whip of my hand, and a sigh of admiration, I could fund an entire operation.
But now, I had to be satisfied with Non-Fungible Tokens and online dealings, along with some cash from in-person sales. Selling art, to launder money… but even laundered money needed a source.
Blink wiped his hand down his face, his long fingers landing on the five o’clock shadow that I knew he hated. He’d been getting lazy about his grooming - a sure sign he was under more pressure than he could handle.
“You know we care about you. You know that we have faith in you, but…”
But. But. But…
I hate that word.
I hated that Blink almost had something that sounded like a feeling in his cold, calculated being.
But… they didn’t care. They didn’t have faith that I could turn it around. I didn’t either.
As right as he might be, it didn’t lessen the sting. Three years of containing everything inside me made it impossible to hide how I felt now: Like a failure.
“Blink…” I said quietly, knowing what would come next.
“He hasn’t stopped looking for you!” Blink whispered harshly, staring straight ahead. “He’s brought Sinead Flanagan back into the fold, and made her a captain. I don’t know how long she’ll keep the secret of your whereabouts from him. We might need to move you again.”
That was a death sentence. It took me weeks to get to the place where I could sell art. To get to a kiosk that became a tourist spot, and get an online store to pull in any kind of funding.
“The Italians are circling you,” Blink continued. “His obsession with you is common knowledge, and they truly think that catching you will be the way to bring him to his knees. Or worse.”
“Worse?” I asked, annoyed that he wasn’t into his usual straight talk.
“They want to recreate what happened to Isla Green.”
A cold shiver went down my spine as the memories of those photographs came front and center in my mind. Isla Green, broken. The mortician’s report on the condition of her body. The madness that I saw first hand in Alastair Green. The family curse my son might inherit.
“That would make him more ruthless,” I said, quietly, trying to compartmentalize the roiling feelings in my stomach at the mention of Eoghan’s name. “It wouldn’t weaken him. It would unleash him.”
If the murder if Isla Green unleashed his father’s cruelty, then I had no idea what would happen if the same was done to Eoghan’s wife. To… me.
If they starved, beat, tortured, and assaulted me .
I sometimes felt so disconnected from who I was that I couldn’t connect the danger with my existence.
“Eugenio Durante’s foresight has suffered since the loss of Giovanni Morelli.” Blink leaned back in the seat as Cillian babbled an approximation of the ABCs in the back.
Giovanni Morelli could still be in Eoghan’s basement, being tortured and beaten. No one had found a body, and Cosima was still looking for him.
As much as I tried not to read the intel reports and news broadcasts… I couldn’t help myself.
I needed to know what was happening to the life I left behind. I told myself it was for my safety, but that wasn’t why I devoured every morsel of information. It was because I missed my monster.
“She’s primed to stab her father in the back, and take over the Mafia. Frankly, if it weren’t for you, darling, I would try to make those two marry—”
“I’ll murder you.” I don’t know where those words came from, or why my fists clenched, until my knuckles turned white.
Blink could do it. He could make those two marry. He had a way of forcing people to act in accordance with plans as if he had the fates in his back pocket. He could tilt people to do what he wanted, and they’d never know they were sideways until it was too late.
But surely… Eoghan… would never have another. He’d sworn to me.
But what was a promise, after three fucking years of silence?
“They’d never do it,” I said, trying to cover up the rising bile of jealousy before it burned my throat and choked me. “They don’t like each other.”
“They’ve never actually met, darling.” I hated it when Blink called me darling. He only ever did it in the most condescending way possible. “They’re both of similar age, attractiveness…”
“No!” I slammed my fist into the steering wheel, and turned to my friend, ready to break his face. But he just stared at me with those amused eyes.
“Fine words for a woman who left him.” His flat delivery of his zinger pissed me off even more.
Blink, of all people, understood why I left. Blink, of all people , should know how important it was to have good parents. To have parents that could teach you right from wrong. I couldn’t do that in the old house.
“You know why I left him.” I tried to stay calm, even as my nostrils flared and adrenaline made my fingered twitch. “With a father like that…”
I couldn’t finish the words. I never could.
“A child needs a moral parent,” Blink said, his jaw clenched. “At least one, to turn out decent, right?”
He agreed with me, even if he heard the unintended insult.
That was something he and I agreed on, having both only had one decent parent, even if his died early. But Blink also had the misfortune of one awful parent. His story was part of why I had to get my Cillian out of there.
“Andres… I…” I stuttered, letting the words die on my lips.
I wanted to assure him he was a good man, but his deepening frown silenced me.
“We need to bring someone else in.”
There it was. He finally said it. The words sliced like a blade. A sign I wasn’t good enough. Another sign that I was failing. But it was worse, because other people knew about it.
Three years ago, I would have been more resilient about the criticism. I would have rolled off my back like water off a swan. But I was a different person now.
I was a mom, and nothing I ever did would be good enough. That fact whittled me down until I was a wisp of a person.
It started the moment I passed out, and gave birth via c-section when I was unconscious. Then it went downhill from there - from barely being able to breastfeed, to then being able to, but being incapable of comforting, swaddling or calming him without placing a tit in his mouth.
But I could be better. I could try harder. I had to.
What other choice was there?
“I can turn it around.” My hands fisted on my lap.
“Picasso…”
“Blink!”
“You have a child, for fuck’s sake,” he said, his hand slamming down on the dash. “You live in a safe house in the middle of Hollowbrook! Darling, you have enough going on.”
“I can be a mom and still get my work done.”
Millions of moms had done it before. Millions more would. Maybe even billions. I could too. I wasn’t special.
Though I was failing at everything I touched.
The look in Blink’s eyes was the biggest slap in the face.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said quietly. “I’m begging you, don’t treat me like I’m your enemy in this Kira.”
What was the expression I saw crossing his face?
“I need you with us. I need you by my side, because our bosses are shuffling and moving, and I… want… you there.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging on the onyx locks. “You’re my friend, Kira. Maybe the only real one I have. Please don’t treat me like I haven’t been going to bat for you each step of the way.”
“But you can’t bat for me now, can you?” I said quietly, feeling the hopelessness of it all.
So long as I was in hiding, I was useless to the cause I cared for.
Blink closed his eyes, exhaling through his nose.
“I know as well as anyone what falling for the wrong person can do,” he said, quietly, staring out the window. “I don’t fault you for it. It’s a failing we both have.”
I knew that.
I knew how his heart had broken, not unlike mine.
Did I consider us friends? I wasn’t sure. Not in the typical sense, I suppose. We didn’t hang out outside of work. I had no idea what his favorite color was, but there was a certain closeness with our occupation.
But his expression today was decidedly less collegial. It was the look of a man who had no faith in me, in my ability to fund our growing operations. It was the look one gives a person being phased out of the organization that you helped to build, because I was no longer effective. Soon, I’d be redundant.
“We’ll bring someone in just to help. For now. Okay?” Blink said.
But he blinked. Blink… blinked.
His reptilian eyes that always seemed to stay open but now he blinked rapidly as moisture coated the darkness of his pupils.
Then he broke his intense eye contact because he was keeping something from me. I could feel it.
Realization was slow, and painful.
“You can’t,” I said, my heart unexpectedly breaking for him. “You can’t go to her. She’ll just hurt you.”
“I have no choice.”
A small, mewling cry pulled my attention from my colleague, and the sad exhaustion re-entered my body as my pride, my joy, and my greatest burden cried for my embrace.
“Take care of yourself, Picasso,” Blink said, as he came to his feet, popping his collar up against the cold of my stove-heated apartment.
I didn’t respond as he opened the door.
“The call for my replacement,” I said, before he could slam it shut. “Is it from you? Or from the higher ups?”
His lip straightened into a flat line. I knew Andres “Blink” Lutkus.
He was the one who needed me phased out. Replacing me was his choice. It wasn’t the bosses I had never met, and knew nothing about - the hidden puppet masters of Paradigm. The betrayal was far closer to home.
There was nothing else to say.
“You’re already dead set on it, aren’t you?” I whispered bitterly. “You’re probably going to see her right now.”
Blink shut his eyes, just for a moment, before those unemotional orbs turned back to me. “It’s temporary.”
“Sure it is,” I whispered bitterly. “You’re probably looking forward to visiting her, you fucking moron.”
Blink wasn’t capable of looking confused. Reptiles weren’t built for expressions. But I assumed that’s what he felt.
“Let me know how it goes,” I said bitterly. When he made no move to shut the door, I screamed, “Go!”
“Go!” My son echoed, his face perplexed but serious, as he looked at Blink.
My mini man was turning into my own little support system, in his own way. He always backed me up.
“One day, you’ll thank me for what I’m doing,” he stated, flatly.
“Fat chance.”