Page 41 of Iron Cross

Not unless he ever hurt my Kira. He never had the chance to.

“I tell you this in confidence, young man,” Morelli said, casually waving to indicate the cell around us. “Use it to speak to her, if you must, but tell no one. When my Cosa was a young, naive girl, she fell in love with a boy in her class. She was maybe… eleven or twelve at the time.”

My heart was already beating fast, as I tried to conjure the story before he finished it, so I could prepare myself for the darkness that might be there.

“She was in love, or at the very least, had a crush, as young people might,” he said, then he chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “They were caught holding hands and a bodyguard, loyal to Eugenio, told him about it. I tried to calm him down, but he was incensed! The boy was the son of a soldier and nothing more, but he had it in his head that his daughter was hisproperty. She could not so much as speak to someone he did not approve of, and to make this lesson clear, he took the boy and beat him.”

“That… doesn’t sound so bad.” Beatings were rough. I’d experienced my share of them, certainly. But they were often just a part of life.

“That was only the beginning,” Morelli said gravely. “And he made her watch all of it.”

Chapter twelve

What’s the First Rule?

Kira

“What the fuck is the first rule of Paradigm?” Blink said the moment he slammed into the passenger seat of the car. Our meeting spot was at a dead-end road, near a farm that had been abandoned for some years. No one came out here. No one but the likes of us.

I didn’t answer, feeling the heat of the same despair I’d felt when they threatened to take away my boy.

“She said I was a nanny,” I said.

Could I have laid off the sarcasm? Yes. But she had lecturedmeabout how to take care of my son, then called me the nanny. Thenshecalled the police over a clearly sarcastic joke.

“And?” Blink said, his serpentine eyes completely unsympathetic. “You could have lost him!”

He turned in his seat, his thick, gloved finger pointing to my boy in the middle seat.

“You could have been arrested and separated from him,” he said, his voice clipped and livid.

He pulled off his gloves and I saw his unmarked fingers. The fingerprints he had burned off of his own hands a long time ago.

“You’re not like me,” he said, holding up his hand. “You have fingerprints and each one would lead back to Kira fucking Kekoa, and not Anna Jones! And then where would you be? Eoghan has alerts for your name in every precinct in the Northeast. You could have lost him. Is that what you want?”

“Of course, it isn’t!” I yelled, but he didn’t back down.

“Well, that’s where you’re heading if you don’t start being more careful, Kira.”

He slipped his hands back into his gloves, his demonstration over, apparently.

“What’s rule one?” he asked again, and I bit my tongue, clenching my teeth.

I refused to participate in this farce. We both knew the first rule and he didn’t need me to say it to play into his little… demonstration.

He looked at me, his creepy eyes unblinking as he waited. I waited in turn, the two of us stubbornly staring at each other as the silence grew between us.

The damn staring contest would have gone on for hours, were it not for the sudden, and loud, snoring that came from the back seat. Cillian was slumped, his head pressed against the side of his headrest, a little green snot bubble forming below his nostril, whistling and snorting with every breath.

“Is he alright?” Blink asked, his brow furrowed in concern. “Is he supposed to sleep like that?”

“Yes, of course he is. Two year olds sleep a lot.” It was really ridiculous that Blink knew so little about children.

“But his head… it’s like it’s about to roll off his shoulders.”

“Yes, Blink,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Their heads tend to stay attached to their body. Just be careful if you see a green ribbon around their neck. You don’t want to pull that off.”

Blink looked at me again, his eyes unblinking. It was off-putting, and I wondered how he was able to keep them lubricated. He must go through eye drops like crazy.

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