Page 32 of Steel Rain

“You wound me, cousin,” Dairo gave a small tilt of his head and chuckled. “Yuliya Vasilieva is now my aunt-in-law, since I married her niece.”

“Ah, yes,” Eoghan chuckled, turning back to his terrified victim. “Funny that. How we can manage to broker peace between us and turn our eyes to the Italians. Such a miracle.”

“Marriage is a miracle,” Dairo said with a smile.

I hadn’t been sure about him in the beginning. I didn’t know if he was good enough for Rose. But he loved being married to her, and genuinely adored her. He was unwavering in that passion, and while she was more taciturn about it than he was, I think she returned his feelings.

Eoghan turned back to the man. He must have been an underboss or something. There’s no way they’d pay this much attention to a grunt.

“Morelli has a daughter, doesn’t he?” Another one of Eoghan’s veiled threats. “Pretty little thing, I’ve heard.”

He came to his feet, twirling the knife in his palm as if it was a fidget spinner.

“Kill me,” the man groaned.

I vaguely wondered if they would throw the man’s body in the fire. Then I dismissed the thought, because that would be insane. The temperatures wouldn’t get high enough to burn the evidence. They’d still have to chop him up and get rid of him later, and when rigor mortis sets in, then it just becomes another annoying can of worms.

“Nah,” Eoghan said in an annoying, long, nasal sound.

He came to his feet, and in one swift movement, opened his palm upward so that his knife flew up into the air. While it hovered, he changed his grip, grabbing it palm face down, then sliced it through the air, outward to his side. The blade lodged into the hanging man’s stomach in a sickening, sloppy, wet sound that could be heard over the man’s agonized screams.

The sound of metal suctioned into human flesh made my nose crinkle in disgust. The dying human body was a disgusting thing to behold.

“Tell Morelli that I am coming for him.” Eoghan’s voice was rough, and thick with barely restrained hatred. “We will kill him in front of his daughter’s eyes, and his legacy will end with him. I will destroy everything he loves for even thinking to come after what’s mine.”

Eoghan jutted his chin towards Dairo.

“Take him to Morelli’s doorstep. Pull the knife out when you get there. Make sure he only has enough blood to deliver my message.”

Alastair’s lopsided smile was nothing short of creepy.

“Make sure to bring my knife back to me,” Eoghan said with a small laugh as the man’s screams turned into pained moans as he began to accept the despair of his future, as short as it would be. “Only two of a kind, and I’ve only got one left.”

I wonderedwhothe other one was embedded in.

I didn’t know the extent of the Italian’s wounds until they cut him down and he fell like a heap to the ground. Broken arms. Broken legs. Probably broken ribs, and at least a few fractures on his skull. The man was walking dead.

Dairo wasn’t very gentle when he hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him out, groaning with the knife jutting out his side. He was helpless to defend himself as he was manhandled and removed from the room.

When the door clicked shut, Eoghan turned to me as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. The pristine white turned red as he wiped away the stains of his … recreation.

“Tell me how Shiny’s first day was.” Again, he said it like a request. But I knew it was a command.

A question from Eoghan wasn’tjusta question. He didn’t do anything just for the sake of curiosity. No. There were always second and third order effects in that ever-moving mind of his. And I wasn’t sure where any answer would land. The man would have made a great interrogator.

So, I stated something he already knew. “She’s a good fighter.”

Eoghan chuckled, darkly. “Oh, aye, she is that indeed. Who would have thought the little princess would have become such a vicious woman.”

Satisfied that his hands were clean enough, he dropped the filthy handkerchief into the fire, then motioned for me to follow him out of the room.

My host was a strange man. But you didn’t want to displease him.

“I still have a hard time believing that she was ever the princess type,” I remarked.

He took me down the hall, up the stairs to the main floor, then into the study he had in the front of his house. The one past the disturbing piece of art that had been painted with real blood. Unsanitary, and creepy. Just like the man himself.

His office looked like an old English library. The kind where men in tuxedos would have sat in chesterfield armchairs as they smoked cigars and harrumphed and rattled newspapers in their hands. There was even a sepia colored globe on his desk with painted dragons and mermaids in the oceans.

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