2. Chapter Two
Eve fell asleep on my shoulder when the man was nothing but a pile of ash. She fell asleep in my arms, quiet and exhausted.
But peaceful.
That was the important thing. A little bit of peace, where there had been none before.
I carried her up to our room, careful not to disturb her as I pulled the blankets back and tucked her beneath. I pulled the duvet up to her chin and pushed back her red hair so that it spread like flames behind her on the pillow. My sweet, little witch…
My heart wanted to beat out of my chest. I was a madman on a crusade, ready to take up my sword for her. But unlike those crusaders, there would be no salvation for me in the end. Just more battles to fight, probably alone.
That was the Vasiliev curse, after all. The one my sister and I had inherited with our bad blood.
It wasn’t lost on me that my daughter, now carrying her own children, would slip from my fingers when I had just found her. My sister, Yuliya, would one day find love that deserved everything that she was, and she would probably want to find her own place.
But Eve might stay. She belonged by my side. Hell, she was a reason to fight. A reason I had lost sight of a long, long time ago.
For years now, the fight was all I had. It was the only thing that pulled me out of bed in the mornings. But undeservingly, I had her. That was right. That was good. That was perfect.
I wanted to lay in bed with her but couldn’t.
The wedding was this evening, and there was a lot left to do, and many more dragons left to slay. I had tasted blood in the water, and I would not stop until the very last man was in my grasp, screaming in agony for what he had done to my wife.
I tucked her hair away from her as I leaned down to kiss her temple. “I’ll make it alright, Eve. I swear it.”
There was no task, and no vow more sacred than that.
I straightened as I combed my hair back, and squared my shoulders, ready to face my new allies. I walked down to the office, delighting in the smell of smoke and meat that lingered on my clothes.
It was the smell of fucking vengeance, and it was sweet.
I walked into my office – the one that linked to the arboretum. I should stop calling it my office, as much as it was our space. Mine and Eve’s. It was our new “common area”, and what now passed for a family room in this ancient house.
“Yuliya,” I called to my right hand.
My sister who sat at my desk with a pair of scissors. She was cutting a folded piece of paper with an evil smirk on her long face.
“Yes, isoveli?” She used the Finnish word for big brother.
“I want every single one of the men who harmed my wife strung up, beaten and burned,” I snarled. “I want their heads on a fucking platter and presented to my wife as a present. I want to decorate the walls with their blood.”
“That’s dark.” That came from the funny little Murphy boy. Sean, I think. But it was hard to tell. The leprechauns all faded into one for me. “I like it.”
I grunted and didn’t take my eyes off my sister.
The Murphys were competent men. They were good fighters, and as far as I could tell, were bringing the Boston Mafia out of their foundation of crime and creating a legitimate business - mainly with the help of the girl: Saoirse.
If I could sit down, and truly look at my mission - which was to shift the paradigm of organized crime within the United States - the Murphys were good to have beside me. But they were linked to the Greens. While the Green boy, Eoghan, was trying to create a legitimate business, I would never forgive his bloodline for what they did to my sister, and later, what they did to my Evie.
That was two precious jewels that the family tried to smash. I would not allow them to have a third.
My eyes darted to my daughter, sitting beside her Green – that yellow-haired Alastair with eyes as blue as a fucking cornflower. I was just waiting for him to screw up so I could bury him six feet under.
My sister unfolded the papers in her hand to reveal eight perfectly cut out human silhouettes.
“I’ll go to Green tomorrow, and see what he knows,” said my sister, as she stood and went to the fireplace.
“No!” I bellowed, coming to my feet. “I want you nowhere near that fucking family.”
Yuliya lifted her eyebrow and turned her eyes towards my son-in-law. She smirked at him, and he smiled back.
Alastair shrugged, placing his hand on my daughter’s shoulder with a possessiveness that made me want to punch him in the throat.
“Too late,” Yuliya chuckled. “Isn’t that right, beloved nephew-in-law?”
“Have you forgotten what the Irish did to you?” I reminded her, not caring that Alastair was here, and caring even less that I was surrounded by Irish. I did not care that Eoghan declared to be my ally. What his family did to Yuliya would never be forgiven. “You’re not going within a hundred miles of them!”
Alastair had the good sense to look chagrined. He hadn’t been in the country when the Greens kidnapped, starved and beat my sister. He wasn’t around when they strung her up in the docks for me to find, broken, bleeding and near the brink of death. I had checked, and double-checked that fact. If he had been, I would have poisoned his tea.
But that didn’t purify him of the sin his family had committed against the only person who had mattered to me at that time.
Yuliya had been a pre-teen, and already a fucking warrior.
“Those potato-sucking bastards can’t be fucking trusted, and you know it! With their blood oaths, secrecy, and bullshit superstitions!” Rage boiled in my limbs. An old, dormant hatred for all the Irish bubbled up into my throat again.
I had failed to protect my sister once. I would not do it again. Over my dead body.
“That’s rich coming from the Bratva,” one of the Murphy boys snickered, before my sister cut him a look that made him go silent.
I stared at the offending Murphy and growled.
“The Irish escalated these wars, remember? Children had been off-limits in New York until the day they took you.” Just to make my point, I stared down at the Murphys gathered, their collective mouths clamped shut. “Do you forget what they did to you? How they broke your legs, your arms, and starved you? You were covered in so many bruises, I could only recognize you by the color of your eyes.”
I did not care that the Murphys were here to hear it. It was a legend, like many of the other mob exploits. Old man Alastair Green kidnapped my sister, beat her and starved her, and strung her up by wires that held her up by the thumbs. She still bore the scars today from where the wires had peeled her skin, almost amputating to the bone.
My sister lifted that angular brow, her crystal blue eyes sparkling. “I’m not likely to forget, big brother. I know what they did to me. I was there.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, quieter.
“I know.” She leaned with her shoulder on the mantle, the funny little linked paper dolls outstretched in front of her. It was a contrast to her black and red rehearsal dinner tuxedo. “I am able to do what needs to be done for the mission. The mission you thrust upon me.”
She was talking in code. It wasn’t just me and her, the bratva heirs… it was the greater mission at hand.
“Do not forget, isoveli, that your wife is Irish.” She stepped toward me, and I recognized the fact that she said wife and not fiancée. Not my bride to be. She had accepted Eve as a part of me. A part of us. Just another point she was making without hammering it home. My sister might look like a blunt instrument – a warrior, through and through. But she had finesse when it was needed. “Your best friend is also Irish.”
I didn’t miss the way her thumb folded in on her left hand, swiping at something on her palm. Something I still refused to confront and acknowledge after ten fucking years.
“We have a purpose, Jericho. You gave me that purpose. Do not falter on me now.” She plucked a pen from my desk, and started to doodle on a random piece of paper. “Don’t let your personal feelings get in the way of the bigger picture.”
I would have been less dumbstruck if she had cold cocked me in the face.
Her implication was clear. I had allowed another woman into my head, when my sister had always been enough.
“I think that maybe you spend too much time protecting women from the wrong things, when you could do so much more by fulfilling what we had always planned…”
The protectiveness I felt for Eve seeped into how I felt for my sister and daughter too.
The world has never been kind to women. In the history of humanity, their gender was primed to be abused by the very people who beat their chests and claimed to be protectors. I knew that and had seen it with my own eyes through multiple combat tours, and war zones… Eve brought it all home, because she had been stripped down to defenselessness in a way neither Rose and Yuliya had been.
“The man who took me and tied me to those pillars is dead. Eve killed him, no?” Yuliya gave a small smirk, as if this fact made her proud. Then she smiled. The little sadist. “She killed him slowly, quietly. And it was long, and agonizing as his mind and body betrayed him in his last moments.”
She smiled in sheer delight, like a kid at an amusement park.
Then she jutted out her large chin and pursed her lips with pleasure. “My sister-in-law’s revenge was my own. I’m just disappointed I didn’t get to watch.”
I wiped a smile from coming to my own mouth. I was fucking proud of my wife. I was proud of how she killed old Alastair Green. It made me love her even more. I had delighted in telling my sister about how the old man had perished.
I kept few secrets from my sister. The moment I knew that Alastair Green Sr. had died of poison, at the hands of my wife, I told Yuliya, and she had almost high-fived me with excitement. I had to stop her from running to Eve, and asking for every minute detail - Did he go mad? Was he in pain? Did the gold poisoning work slowly and build over time? How much did it hurt when he took his final breath?
I had raised a little sadist.
“Alastair Green Sr.’s namesake is now my beloved nephew-in-law,” she looked over at Alastair, who stood beside my daughter, Rose. “Eoghan Green is the ally we want. He has proven himself, isoveli. Let him help us.”
I looked between my son-in-law and sister, as I contemplated her reasonable request.
My gut still turned at the idea of her being anywhere near the son of the man who had tortured her. The image of my ten-year-old sister, proudly standing with chapped lips, and disheveled hair on the Russian-owned dock, blood running down her arms, wasn’t one I would ever forget. When I cut her down and held her, she said one thing to me: “I told them nothing. They did not break me.”
My sister had been taken from us as a child. I never saw that kid again. The bleeding, but not broken ten year old I pulled from that dock was a hardened warrior, far more capable than half the men I trained in the CIA.
“They did not break Eve either.” Yuliya’s eyes turned in my direction, her voice heavy with implication. “Do not forget what this was all for.”
I looked at the Murphys. The mafia men and criminals who were now houseguests in my father’s mansion.
Did they wonder at Yuliya’s cryptic words? No. I didn’t think so.
They were busy amongst themselves, whispering in conversation. My sister had spoken too quietly, and only those who had been allowed in past my fa?ade could hear her.
It was a gentle reminder that we weren’t just the younger children of the former pakhan, but also agents in our own right, here to do more than just run a criminal organization. We were here to poison the whole thing to the ground, and plant something else in it’s place. That was what this was all for.
“I haven’t forgotten,” I told her, my jaw clenched. I would be chastened if it had come from someone else. But in the end, she was still my little sister.
She smirked, as if she knew that was a lie. How easily I had forgotten my mission. How easily I had gotten lost in the identity that bore the name of my birth. The very identity that was nothing more than a cover now.
Every day since, she proved that she was, indeed, unbroken. Strong. Capable. Level-headed beyond what I or my partner-in-secrecy, Corbin McClellan, could have ever dreamed.
When Corbin and I started Paradigm, the government organization of former spies that would break down organized crime from the inside, we could not have devised a more perfect agent than my own sister.
“You should not be the one to speak to Green,” I clenched my fist. “It is not good for you.”
Like Eve, she was not broken by the cruelty of Alastair Green.
“After all we have done together, brother...” She lifted the paper dolls in her hand, before she threw them in the fire with a menacing grin. “You should know me better than that.” She placed a hand on her hip, her tall frame glowed against the firelight.
“I will come with you.”
“Why?” Yuliya rolled her eyes.
“The woman wronged is my wife…”
“Fiancée,” one of the Murphy boys added. I wasn’t sure who, but I wanted to punch him in the throat.
I paid them no mind.
“I am your brother,” I stared into the flames, watching the white paper crinkle and curl as they were broken by the flames. “And because it will be fun.”