11. A Selfish Love
Chapter eleven
A Selfish Love
Eoghan
“ A lfredo Durante?” Morelli said, his brows knitting together like two friendly caterpillars, kissing in the middle of his brow. “In a Bugatti?”
There was a flicker of amusement in his eyes. His head turned when he heard the squeak of Algernon in the corner of the room. He smiled to himself, as though Algernon had told him a joke. Who was he? Dr. Doolittle?
“Aye,” I said, leaning back against the cold wall, wondering if maybe he was starting to lose his marbles. “I’ll bring you another blanket, next time I come down.”
That, or I’d have Kieran O’Malley, my most trusted guard, bring one down. He was the only one that knew of Morelli’s presence. I didn’t even trust Dairo or Shiny with the information. If the knowledge of Morelli’s presence ever leaked, I could slit O’Malley’s throat for betrayal. It would hurt me to do so, but I could do it. I couldn’t with Shiny and Dairo.
See? I’m becoming more wise already.
“Alfredo Durante doesn’t have a Bugatti,” he said.
“You don’t think there’s a chance that he could have bought the car in the past three years?” As useful as Morelli was, he had been cut off from the outside world, outside of what I told him.
Surely that lessened his omnipotence.
“There’s no foreseeable way he’d be able to afford that car, no matter what.” Morelli shook his head, looking absolutely sure. “That car was Cosima’s.”
He hmmed quietly and I waited, knowing that he’d have to process his thoughts.
“Cosima sent him. She wouldn’t be able to pay him money with Eugenio knowing. She paid him with her car.” He chewed his bottom lip, his eyes squinting as he tried to parse together something in his mind. “She’s still looking for me. She’d have no other reason to search for Kira.”
I let out a long exhale. I swore, I watched Morelli’s eyes sparkle with joy. A joy that he had no business having in such a dank living space.
“If I release you, then, maybe she and I can strike an alliance,” I offered. “I could give you back to her.”
He tapped his temple, and shook his head - a gesture he made to tell me I was being short sighted. He called me too emotional.
“No, young King. The things I love most about my angel, Cosima, are the very things that doom me.”
“What on earth do you mean?” I said, shaking my head.
He smiled, sadly. “I have also been selfish in my love. I should never have told her I felt the same. I should never have taken her in my arms, or into my bed. I am thirty years her senior!”
I shuddered, repulsed by the age difference, but knowing him as I did, I forgave it.
“I don’t have too many more years left in me,” he said, his bony back slumping against the cold stone.
“Incarceration has been hard on you,” I whispered, guilt gnawing at my chest.
“Incarcerated or not, I am an old man. But because I have been gone, Cosima will blame my death, even if it is by a car accident, on you.” He was staring at his fingertips, before steepling them together. Then he touched the cross at his chest again. “I adore her viciousness. Her fierce love and loyalty. But…”
He let out a long sigh.
“The things I love will also be her unhappiness.” He chuckled, almost sweetly, as he fisted the cross in his hands. “Vendetta is an Italian word. And her blood is Italian.”
He bit his lower lip, his eyes growing sad and watery.
“You must kill me, you see,” he said, shaking his head. “If I return to her alive, she will spend her life loving me. Dedicated to me. And I have no years to give her, even if you were to release me right now. Even if you had never captured me. That is not what I want for sweet Cosima.”
I wasn’t sure if I'd ever call his Cosima sweet, but he was a man in love. Delusion was a part of that state, was it not?
“If you kill me,” he said, with an almost pained sigh, “then she has a chance to move on. To find love. To find a partner strong enough to fight beside her, to love her, to give her a family.”
“And that is what you want? For her to… move on?” I swallowed, feeling the bile creep up my throat because that is the last thing I wanted for Kira. The idea of her moving on was so reprehensible that I would murder anyone who ever came close. I would dip them in lye and watch them melt, slowly, until they were nothing. Completely erased from all existence.
I would kill every person in this world, until Kira had only me to turn to.
“Make me feel better, young King. Tell me of your misery with your wife,” he said with a winsome smile.
Bastard.
But at least in this I could bring him comfort.
“She’s falling in love,” I said bitterly, clenching my jaw as if the very words I uttered offended me. “With another man.”
There was a steady drip of water somewhere in this basement. There was no leak. Just the damn humidity that built underground. The squeak of Algernon in the corner was becoming all too familiar.
Morelli speared a fork into the roast beef and potatoes of his dinner, as he hmmed at me. “And how does that make you feel?”
I’d had to come home to handle a small matter with the business, as Dairo had sabotaged another of Durante’s shipping containers. This time, it was traveling by commercial rail and, somehow, went missing from the station. There was blowback and alibis that had to be made, and I had to be here to orchestrate it.
Thankfully, with Dairo as a body double, we were twice as efficient, and I could indulge in my little… sessions.
“Are you my therapist now?” I lifted my brow and watched as he balanced a plate on his crossed legs, a glass of red wine on the floor in front of him.
Sometimes, he made me feel centered. Like I could know true north based on the logic in my mind.
But not today. Today the entire world felt like it was twisted on its side, moving, off-kilter.
“In the strictest sense of the word, a consiglieri is a lawyer, but…” He shrugged as he picked at his food with his fingers. We had dispensed with the ceremony years ago. The only thing he found holy was the wine that I provided. He always drank with the greatest reverence. “A consiglieri is an advisor. A mentor. A therapist, as well, I suppose.”
I pulled one knee up as I leaned against the opposite wall.
“What did you think when you watched her falling for another man?” Morelli’s words grated at my skin.
Was this the first time Kira had fallen for someone else? How many had come after me, wishing to woo her and her child further from my grasp? The question made bile crawl up my throat. Three years was a long time. Had she fallen into the arms of others? Had she taken a lover?
Murder. That was the only thing I felt. The need to murder any man who had her adoring eyes on them. I wanted to kill every person who had made her smile in my absence. Anyone who had ever lessened her burdens or looked down at my son like he was their family… I would dispense with them at the bottom of the sea like Durante’s cargo.
“Like…” I sniffed the air as if a malodorous gas was poisoning my lungs, because there was. “Like I would kill any man that even looked at her with lust.”
“Jealousy is not a wise trait to cultivate,” he said with a nod. “Do you love her enough to ever want her to move on, though? If you were, to say…”
He did that slashing gesture across the throat again, and made the croaking sound.
“I’d have to be very, very dead to ever want her to move on.” I crossed my arms, wondering if this conversation had a point, or if it was one of his many intellectual exercises. “And even then, I don’t think so.”
“Ah, young King,” he said with a chuckle, “Then your love is a selfish one.”
That pierced me through the gut. It was like he’d fired a rifle right into my chest.
“Bullshit.” I scowled.
“If it was a selfless love, you would want her to have whatever she needed to be happy—”
“She’s happiest with me. ” I knew that down to my soul. “No one could love her more than me.”
“I did not say that anyone could.”
“You think I'm selfish, then?”
“Of course you are!” He laughed, his hands pointing to the room around him. “It doesn't make you a bad man. I think many leaders must be at least a little selfish. But your love might not be the most complete, and pure form of the thing.”
I watched as he reached into his shirt, pulling out the metal cross I’d given back to him. He had a habit of rubbing his thumb against the name engraved on the back. He did it so much that I worried he’d wear it smooth, losing the name he adored.
“We love our women fiercely,” he said, with a solemn, pastoral nod. “But we love them differently.”
I crossed my arms, glowering at the man and wondering if I should bleed him again for his insolence. Then I dismissed the thought.
“You want Cosima Durante to get married and be happy?” I sneered.
His face soured, but then he shrugged.
“I would want whatever could put a smile on my lovely Cosa’s face.” He looked at me with those somber, gray eyes. “Dying is the best thing I could do for her.”
He let those words linger in the air, heavy and stale.
There was that feeling of darkness twisting around my hand, twitching my fingers toward the blade.
I killed my enemies with that blade. I already knew that Morelli would not die from it. I had not concocted a plan to save his life. Not yet. But I knew I would need to, and soon.
The fateful hour, like the Ides of March, was fast approaching, and I had to have my pieces in place before then.
“Have you ruined Eugenio Durante’s shipping?” His change of topic helped me breathe again.
“I have,” I said, with a nod. “Cosima has stepped up, it seems, and made the Italian restaurants and laundromats legitimate, though, I'm assuming they still clean money.” I had watched the Mafia Princess closely. How she pushed the businesses to be on the straight and narrow. In many ways, she and I were on the same path, trying to lead the people we inherited out of the darkness. “Schools, education programs, childcare, businesses…”
“Prosperity leads to peace.” Morelli did that sometimes, where he would say a phrase that I was certain he wasn’t uttering to me. As though he were making a comment to God, or to the woman who was not present. He smiled to himself, as pride beamed in his eyes. “Clever girl.”
“Our spies inside the Mafia say that people are hoping that Eugenio will die soon, so that she can ascend. The backing for her seems downright unanimous.”
Morelli nodded, a small smile on his cracked lips, a sprinkle of crimson from a cut where the flesh broke.
“That is not unlike what happened when the tides turned from your father to you. Though I do not believe she will be so lucky as to watch her progenitor fall down the stairs.” Did he suspect that my father was murdered? It was a suspicion I had harbored, and now it was all but confirmed.
The witch had had her way. How my eyes had opened in three years - the world looked so different now that time had shed light on so many dark places that existed in this house.
“She will try to gain supporters, and rally them around ousting her father.”
“She hates Eugenio that much?”
That surprised me, since Cosima had always been the perfect, obedient daughter. At least in public.
She played the role quite well. I was impressed.
Morelli shrugged. “There is no love lost there. Not like you and your father.”
“I haven’t loved my father in years.” Bitterness coated my words like poison.
“But you loved him once, didn’t you?” A single bushy, silver brow went up towards his hairline, which was growing more sparse and brittle with time. “That is not the case for Cosima. Eugenio has been a bastard since long before she was born.”
“What could he have possibly done to make her hate him so?”
I hated my father, but the idea of double-crossing him would not have occurred to me. I never considered deposing him.
Not unless he ever hurt my Kira. He never had the chance to.
“I tell you this in confidence, young man,” Morelli said, casually waving to indicate the cell around us. “Use it to speak to her, if you must, but tell no one. When my Cosa was a young, naive girl, she fell in love with a boy in her class. She was maybe… eleven or twelve at the time.”
My heart was already beating fast, as I tried to conjure the story before he finished it, so I could prepare myself for the darkness that might be there.
“She was in love, or at the very least, had a crush, as young people might,” he said, then he chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “They were caught holding hands and a bodyguard, loyal to Eugenio, told him about it. I tried to calm him down, but he was incensed! The boy was the son of a soldier and nothing more, but he had it in his head that his daughter was his property. She could not so much as speak to someone he did not approve of, and to make this lesson clear, he took the boy and beat him.”
“That… doesn’t sound so bad.” Beatings were rough. I’d experienced my share of them, certainly. But they were often just a part of life.
“That was only the beginning,” Morelli said gravely. “And he made her watch all of it.”