12. Chapter Twelve
Abetter man would let her go.
Hell, an even halfway decent man would leave her alone. Start preparing her for the worst path that she would walk when I set her free.
If you love something, let it go… if it doesn’t come back, then it was never yours… was that how the stupid saying went? Christ, I hated that sentimentality. Love poems and stories, and cute little phrases like love is patient, love is kind…
What complete and total nonsense.
Love is impatient. Love is visceral. It is primal and desperate. It is painful and cruel. It strangles you like a noose, tightening and tightening when the only relief is slipping from your fingers.
I watched my daughter and her husband fall in love. The image of it made me want to physically wretch all over the marble floors. But their love was neither patient nor kind.
Alastair started a war so that he’d never have to let Rose go.
Thatwas love. My son-in-law was a piece of shit, but I knew that he loved my daughter. It was evident in the lengths he would go to make sure she smiled. That was the only reason I let him live.
Or maybe that’s requited love.
What Eve and I had was different. I was her knight. Little more than an errand boy with a blade.
I was better than her late husband. It wasn’t a hard standard to beat. So she worshiped me with her body, and showed her gratefulness in what she thought was love. I gave her a marriage that was better than her last, and she lapped it up, and thought it was happiness. I didn’t blame her.
By comparison, she was right.
But it was far from love.
Her words in the vulnerability of slumber cut through me like a fucking knife. I’m ready to be home…
Home was what she found in the pages of that book. The one I saw on her nightstand day after day, morning after morning.
Love was what she had when she ran her fingers over the worn out script. The love note left by Ryan.
I slammed the glass of Finlandia Vodka on the table. The loud thud wasn’t enough, so I threw it across the room. It crashed against the marble mantle, then smashed into a thousand pieces as it fell onto the floor.
“Dad?” Rose’s voice took me by surprise.
She stepped forward, her hands holding her growing belly.
She came and stood beside me, her hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, and let out a snort.
“Sorry kiddo,” I said with a grunt.
My daughter had changed since I first met her. When she was a closed off orphan, fighting in the underground MMA circuit, she was wiry, cold. Her words were as sharp as a razor. But her husband had softened her hard edges.
I patted the hand she put on my shoulder, and wrapped an arm around her.
“No word on Brock?” she asked.
“None.”
Rose had a thousand bots scouring the internet, government documents and servers for anything. A hit on his face on CCTV, a passport scan, a license plate, or anything that could possibly lead us to the man. But nothing had come up.
I wasn’t surprised. The fucking Greens weren’t just a mafia. They were well-trained, smart, and able to straddle both a legitimate world and the illegal one, with a sense of ease that made me want to wring their necks. If Alastair Sr hadn’t been so good at understanding how law enforcement worked, then Tanner Brock wouldn’t be evading us now. If their little shadow army didn’t have all this knowledge, then…
“We’ll find him,” Rose promised. “I’m talking to Eoghan…”
“Don’t talk to him!” I turned to my daughter, narrowing my eyes, remembering how Eoghan had threatened to kill her after we infiltrated his compound. Sure, Eoghan wouldn’t try to harm her now. Not when she was married to his best friend and cousin. Despite his “wedding present”, I still didn’t trust the man.
But my daughter just rolled her hazel eyes, then pursed her lips. She planted a fist on her hip and looked at me, as if she was waiting for me to calm down.
“Where does it end, Dad?” Her brown eyes looked at me with a sadness I wasn’t sure I could understand.
“What do you mean, kiddo?”
“I mean, we’re supposed to be the good guys, right?” Rose said, her brows furrowing in concern.
“Of course, we are.”
“Good. Because that’s what you told me.” She was playing with a small vase. She was holding a pen out in the light that shone down from my lamp. It cast a straight shadow over my desk. “You said we work in the shadows, where the light can’t touch.”
I knew what she was saying. This had been my pitch to her when she was running away from the bratva. It was how I first sold her on this life as a freelance agent.
“We’re supposed to bring down organized crime. We needed to end the triangle trade.”
“What is your point, kiddo?” I was growing impatient with her, and I was never impatient with my own kid. Or my sister for that matter. But I was getting annoyed with both.
“My point, Dad…” She shook her head. She was looking at me like I had grown another head, or something. She was livid. “Is that I don’t think slitting the throats of men at your wedding serves that purpose…”
“Rose Marie!” I so rarely ever said her full name. It was Rose, Rosie, Juju, or any other number of endearments.
I expected her to pause and understand that this was about to be a reprimand, but I had another thing coming.
“Now we are conducting a manhunt not to bring this man to justice, not to bring him to the authorities, but for one reason only.” Her voice trailed off as she stared me down. My own kid. She might not be my flesh and blood, but she was my child nonetheless. Was she too old to be grounded?
“What?” I said impatiently, when the silence rang on too long.
“Revenge.” She shook her head, as if the word disgusted her. “It’s one thing to hunt and fight to protect, but you want this man for revenge.”
“And what about it?” I clenched my fist, because I knew what she would say next. I knew it with every fiber of my being because I was her teacher. I was her mentor.
I wanted to give in to the parental need to scream: “Just do as I say!”
But instead, I tried to hold on to my sanity, and let her say her piece.
“The law is reason free from passion … Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.” Great. My child was quoting Aristotle to me. How the turns have tabled… I chuckled at my mental sarcasm.
It felt good to be sarcastic again, even if no one else got to hear it. Kiddo must have thought I was laughing at her, because her eyes narrowed.
“This is not justice,” she finally said.
I leaned back in my seat, staring her down and wishing she would be the kind of woman to cower. But she wasn’t. I knew that. Anyone with a working brain cell knew that.
“You want this kind of blood on your hands?”
“One kind of blood is as red as another,” I answered, feeling the rage building inside me. A rage I tried to tamp down because I was in control of this.
Her eyes were unwavering as she placed a hand on her belly. It was growing, in a small way. I started to notice an extra roundness in her arms and legs. Nothing that would be outside the norm, if you didn’t know her. But those twins were making their presence known in many ways.
“Will they still be fighting the same battles?” She asked, looking down to where she was holding her children inside. “Will we go so far off course that Jericho and Jocelyn will still be dismantling the same organizations that we set out to stop?”
I felt myself melting into my seat. I thawed like a snowman, caught in a warm front.
“Jocelyn?” I asked, tilting my head.
“I wanted them to have the same initials. Jocelyn sounds nice,” My daughter smiled. She often petted her stomach, loving the little things she carried in it. The little kickers. “Joss and Jer.”
I liked the nicknames. Of course I did. She could call them Leopold and Lobe, and I’d love them.
But she was right. I didn’t want my grandchildren fighting the same fights I had. Not when there were so many more wars and conflicts that they could start and end on the side of good.
“Anyway…” My daughter was being a brat. I chuckled, wondering if it was a blessing or a curse that I had missed her teenage years. “I was thinking that I could take Evie out to dinner.”
“Why?” I bristled, suddenly worried. “And where? Who would you take for security?”
My daughter let out a loud “Uggggghhhhh”, then waved her hands as if she was waving the frustration out of her body.
“Because she’s my stepmother, and the apparent grandmother of my babies,” she said. “She hasn’t left the house much since the wedding. Don’t you think she should? It’s not healthy to stay cooped up.”
“She stayed in the Green Mansion for nearly sixteen years. I’m sure this isn’t worse…” I didn’t want her out of my sight. “And aren’t you supposed to be on bed rest?”
“Modified bed rest!” She added extra emphasis to the word, and I smirked. “I’m allowed to stand up, waddle somewhere, and sit back down, over and over again, until it’s bedtime. Then, I am allowed to lay on my side to sleep, and to try not to claw my own skin off.”
“What’s wrong with your skin?”
“I don’t know! It itches all the time, and it feels… weird. The doctor says it’s hormones.” She huffed. “It feels like my body is betraying me.”
“Your body is creating life. There’s bound to be some discomfort.”
“You would say that.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re a man.”
My daughter looked at me like that was a ridiculous thing to say.
“And you want to be like her late husband? Keep her trapped here forever?”
I flinched. She had a point. I just didn’t want to admit it. I couldn’t let fear get in the way of Eve having a life of her own. I couldn’t let my possessiveness hold her hostage. That was not the way I operated. I stared at my daughter, and her blossoming belly. The one that held my grandkids.
She didn’t know that I was going to let the caged bird free. She didn’t know that her “stepmother” was only here on a temporary stop before she flew away to greener fields and better climates. I wouldn’t tell her because Rose would lose her mind. She’d tell me I was an idiot, then she’d tell Eve that she was a terrible person for having come here at all, and taken up any of our time.
She’d take it as a personal rejection. It was best that I just allowed her to think that things were fine. I’d deal with the fallout when things were done.
“I’d feel better if we had some fidelity on Brock,” I finally said, trying to excuse away my desire to keep her under my roof. As if every second she spent in my house could help lessen the blow of when she finally left. As if I was savoring her, even when we were in separate rooms.
Marriage was turning me into a sentimental fucking fool.
“We’ll find him,” said Rose, before she turned to leave the room, and leave me to my misery.
“Remember that she’s not like you,” I said, without looking at her. I heard her footsteps stop, as she waited for the rest of what I’d say. “She’s nothing like you and Yuliya. She’s been groomed to be helpless. No one ever taught her to defend herself…”
“You don’t give her enough credit–” Rose tried to cut me off, but I plowed right over her.
“So when she’s with you, she’s your responsibility.”
It was a warning. A plea. A hope that she would understand the gravity of responsibility.
“I’ll care for her like she was my own family,” Rose said. I heard her footsteps resume, and the open and close of the large, engraved door of my office. “I’ll treat her better than you do Alastair.”
With that little jab, she gave a laugh and closed the door.
Was she too old to be grounded?