Page 92 of Steel Rain

He looked up at my hair, then down my dress. He nodded in approval.

“I thought so!” Malinda said, placing a hand over her heart and blushing as if he had given her a compliment.

“You’ve done well,” Eoghan said to her, with a slight nod.

“I agree,” Dairo smiled at me. “You look good.”

“Come on, Shiny.” Eoghan stepped beside me, presenting me with his elbow as if he was about to escort me somewhere. I wrapped my hand around his arm as he walked me out of the room. “Let's have a drink until your groom gets here.”

“I’ll just hang out in here, then?” Dairo called after us, his voice laced with humor.

“Go talk to Sibby, and get her to come down!” Eoghan called over his shoulder as we walked down the hall, past the great big self-portrait of him as Satan, shepherding sinners into hell. We walked into his office. The office that had once belonged to his father.

The Greens were so proud of their knowledge of the classics. Eoghan the painter, Dairo the musician. Each of them was a composer, in their own way. Each one a very adept killer too. But they killed for different reasons. Dairo in the British Special Forces. Eoghan on the streets of New York.

He closed the door behind us, and it wasn’t until the doors firmly clanked shut that I realized I was in a trap.

“Drink?” he asked, as he went to the wet bar, and pulled out a bottle of Redbreast 27, an old Irish Whiskey that one should really keep for special occasions.

“That depends on …”

“Quite the happy ending isn’t it?” he interrupted.

He poured a glass and put it in my hand, and I had to catch it before it spilled on my dress.

Then he poured himself one and downed it in one gulp.

He refilled his glass, and then took the seat behind the desk. It was a red, leather high-back. Quite grand, and beautiful. It went with the heavy, large desk, and all the old furnishings. This was the study of a sophisticated, and powerful man. Not the boy who used to take his easel out on the porch and paint the scenery. My friend was gone. I had to remember that.

“You look good as a bride,” he told me, rocking back and forth in the chair. With a small point of his finger, he gestured for me to sit down in the seat in front of him. I did, but I wouldn’t take my eyes off of him. “I didn’t know what Keith did. Not until now. I didn’t know when you came into your father’s office that day either. I was … distracted.”

“By what?” I asked.

“We were at war with Anton Vasiliev, and … it was the same day I made my bones with the clan.” That was code. It was the first day he ever executed someone. “A Russian man. He was one of the men who drove my mother here, in her last moments, and kicked her out of the car. I recognized him from the cameras.”

He looked pensive.

That man had been at large for almost six years. Eoghan would have been about twenty-four at the time. His first execution was at twenty-four years old.

“To this day, I don’t know why he would be in front of our gates without a mask. Why would he let himself be seen?” He tapped his temple. “That was the mystery that kept on swirling around in my head. Even as I slit his throat.”

He went silent for a moment, staring at his whiskey.

“Was it a mistake, or a trap? I still don’t know.” He sipped at his glass. “But that’s no excuse for having not seen what had happened to you. For neglecting you. Or my stepmother, for that matter.”

His eyes flicked up towards me, and there it was … a small spark of the kid I had grown up with. The one with good intentions, and a gentle heart, and loved his mother, and liked to look at the colors on a flower.

“I’ve made my apologies and amends to Aoibheann,” he said. That surprised me. “She’s forgiven me.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I never thought Aoibheann could ever forgive any Green. Her abuse had been the worst. Far worse than mine. I knew it the moment I walked into this big house before my mother’s funeral, and saw the scars peeking through her collar.

I hatched the plan to get Aoibheann out. It was a simple one. I parked the car near the backdoor of the kitchen, and came in the way I had a million times before. Aoibheann was going to lie down on the floor, with a blanket and my heavy duffel bags on top of her, and I’d just … drive her out. It was risky, but the cameras would catch nothing, and the guards would wave me on through. I was practically a Green myself, after all.

So when she handed me Kira in her place, I knew something bad was going to happen. I saw it in her eyes. But I took Kira. I took her because …

“Where’s Kira?” he asked without ceremony. Was he reading my thoughts?

“Somewhere safe.” I answered.

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