21. I Have No Fucking Idea
Chapter twenty-one
I Have No Fucking Idea
Kira
T he word of the day was… I have no fucking idea.
Rule number one was to be as ordinary as possible.
We played a role, and wore a mask to the outside world. We were two-dimensional characters, with no nuance or depth. We were actors on a stage, with lines and no backstory. We were the secondary characters in the thing we called life.
We valued our covers more than anything else.
That had been true to me once, before life grew inside me.
My son was scared. Clinging to my leg in terror, and I had had enough.
There are no rules when it comes to being a parent. I’d commit gleeful homicide for my son. I’d sacrifice a bus load of nuns, orphans and kittens if I got to spare my boy from unhappiness. Of that I was certain. And I would navigate my way from this hell too. I had to. I was a mother. That was my job.
“I’ve got to go,” Sinead said quietly to me. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure how much I trusted her anymore. I had thrown my lot with her years ago, but that had been because of Aoibheann. She had been the ghost of Christmas future - a sign of what I would be if I stayed here.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, shaking my head, holding my son close.
For all his evil, I knew that Eoghan would never harm his son. I was almost certain of that. He was not like his father in that way. I was sure of it.
Right?
We arrived at the familiar guarded gate with the iron spades. The Soldiers seemed different than before. Not in uniform, but in… something else. Like a militia had turned into a military. They were fitter, more efficient, crisper in their salute. The drive up the long drive was silent. But the foreboding I’d had the last time wasn’t there, maybe because I knew Alastair Senior wouldn’t be waiting at the top of the grand staircase.
As I stood on the cobblestone of the circle drive, in front of the grand red brick mansion on the top of the hill, I wasn’t so sure. The house was as imposing as it had been before, but there were noticeably more guards in every direction. Their uniforms were more polished, their boots more shined. Each one nodded at my husband, and greeted a curt, "Mr. Green."
Then, to my utter amazement, the same courtesy was extended to Sinead, who they all called, "Lieutenant Flanagan."
Sinead grabbed my arm before I walked up the steps to the porch and she said, quietly, “If you need anything, you can call me. You know that, right?”
“I don’t,” I said honestly. “You’re on his side now, aren’t you?”
“I’m on your side, Kira.” She came in close, stroking her fingers through the blond hair at the back of Cillian’s neck. “I wouldn’t have helped him bring you here if I didn’t think that you were in trouble.”
Again, I wished that I had Blink’s talent for reading expressions. I wished that the lessons he’d taught me had made a greater impact because my instinct screamed that she was telling the truth. Every fiber of my being wanted to believe her, but how could I? How could she be on my side, if her loyalties were so obviously to Green Fields Enterprises?
I didn’t answer. Instead I simply nodded.
That must have been good enough because she walked away, phone to her ear.
“I’m coming home, honey,” she said to whoever picked up. “Be there in a bit… love you, too.”
I held my son to my chest and he clung on, suddenly tired after having such a taxing morning.
I followed Eoghan in silence because I was not a fucking idiot.
He held the grand door open for me and I stepped through the threshold, expecting the same bleak darkness of the foyer that had been there three years ago. Would my son grow up in this haunted mansion? The same one that had been the sight of my husband’s misery? Would that be the curse of the Greens?
I gasped when I saw the changes.
The mansion had metamorphisized. The dark green of the walls had been replaced with a warmer brown tone. The board and batten that had been a dark wood stain was now a glossed black. On the wall outside of what had been Alastair Green’s office stood an enormous canvas reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens’s Falling into Hell . The red of it was startling. But worse yet was the face that the devil wore - the face of my own husband. The only bit of white was a vision, a half nude form bathed in an ethereal light, looking over his shoulder with sorrow in her eyes.
It was an image of me.
And all around us, through my sorrow and his sadism, were the people he hated. Eugenio Durante, Anton Vasiliev, and even the man who had held the debts over my head. The debt of my father’s death.
“Do you like it?” Eoghan whispered, coming behind me, his lips to my ear.
I almost jumped but he didn’t give me a chance. He wrapped an arm around my waist. He held me, and I held our son. A happy fucking family.
“Compositionally,” I said, with a heavy swallow, “it’s beautiful. The technique is flawless, the way the colors blend in the mist is…”
“But do you like it?” he asked, as he bit the shell of my ear.
I shut my eyes, tucking Cillian’s head under my chin. His warm, sweet, baby scent infiltrated my nose. The slight perfume of his pink shampoo and bubble bath reminded me of innocence. Of what I had wanted to preserve.
As I stood at a macabre recitation of Dante’s Inferno, I was facing the very thing I had hoped to protect my boy from.
“What did you make the paint from?” I asked, knowing the rumors, but wanting him to say it.
To hear his voice admit what it was. To confirm the cruelty of it was true.
“Blood,” he said, as though he was reciting a normal ingredient, like oil, cinnabar or hematite, or sansodor. “I was in a madness when you left, and I did what I had to. I—”
I pulled from his arms, twisting out, while holding my boy close.
I looked at him, as he glared back, his eyes black. I didn’t know what I was looking for. An apology? Remorse? Regret?
I saw none of that.
His mouth parted, and he almost grinned.
“My sweet Muse, how little you know me.” He took a step toward me, and I stepped away. “I would do whatever it took, commit whatever sin I had to, to keep you and our son safe. I would kill, torture, maim… I would commit genocide to save our babies.”
“You bled a man for paint, Eoghan. Don’t tell me you did that for me–”
“I did that for you!” he yelled, and our son squirmed in my arms. “I did that so that no one would think to come after what I love. And I love you, Muse. I love you with every fucking fiber of my being. I love you and that boy more than I care for my fucking life, so I did that for you. I have no regrets bar one.”
He stepped closer, his arm reaching out to grab the nape of my neck, as he pulled me in. He put his lips against my forehead.
“I’m sorry that I frightened you.”
It was the only thing he could have said to melt the walls I tried to put between us.
“Forgive me, Kira,” he said, as he brought his palms to my cheeks, placing a kiss over each eye. “Forgive me for scaring you away. Forgive me for not taming the monster inside me. Forgive me.”
I swallowed, unable to speak. I shut my eyes against the tears that were coming.
“What will you do to me now?” I whispered.
For all his kind words, I knew men in power. I knew what they did to those who defied them.
Now would he do the same to me?
“That’s up to you,” he said, kissing my nose. “Sweet Muse.”
Then he stepped away, walking up the large staircase to the upper floors.
With him out of my immediate vicinity, my eyes were able to focus again on my surroundings. Other than the walls changing and the new painting, there were other changes. On every possible surface was a vase, and in each one were long, elegant stems, with simple white blooms.
White orchids.
Hundreds of them in this room alone, and more on small end tables lined the hallway. They were all new too.
“The… the orchids…” I began to say. “Are they from…”
“Your office,” Eoghan called down from the top of the stairs, looking down at me, his hand in the flannel jacket. “The very same ones.”
From when I made you love me…
The thousands of orchids he had given me were still alive. A stark reminder of what he had been, before everything.
“You saved them.” I hadn’t thought about those blooms in years. But they had lived in my absence.
I looked up at him, at the top of the stairs, wearing clothes that did not suit him. Even in his disguise, how had I not recognized him for what he was? How had I missed the signs? How had I not realized that the only person who had made my heart flutter had been the same one I had been bound to all along.
He loved me. I did not doubt that. That was never the problem.
But I was also a fool, and I knew it. I had been blinded before.
How could a woman think clearly, when a man’s eyes looked at her the way his looked at me? With complete tender admiration and care? As though the world existed because I was in it?
How could any woman resist such a thing as that?