Page 6 of Iron Cross

“Bloody it is,” I chuckled. “Bloodier it shall be until I have won, and brought my wife back home to me.”

He took a step back and shook his head. “And now, you’re rhyming.”

Then a very real concern creased his features. He looked at me, assessing my person from head to toe.

“Are you sure the madness has not taken you?” he said so quietly that I was reading his lips more than hearing him.

The madness, as we called it, was the cruelty that turned Alastair from beloved father and uncle, to a brutal tyrant. The madness that shriveled his soul when he watched the breath fly from my mother’s lips for the last time. The madness of lost love.

“No!” I said it with too much conviction, though I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t know if my father’s madness had blackened me as well, but I didn’t care. If the madness served the purpose of protecting my family then I would use it. I would suffer it. I’d endure until they were safe. Then I would open my veins on a canvas, and put myself, and them, out of my misery if that was what was needed.

But I couldn't tell Dairo that. Dairo would think the madness was certain, and who knows what he would do. Shackle me to a cell like Morelli, perhaps.

I didn’t think he was capable of mutiny. I trusted him. But trust could only go so far…

“I am doing this to protect my family. Surely you can understand that?” This was a tactic I had employed since he’d started a war with the Bratva to win his bride.

Wife. Children. Love. Now that he was a father, his family turmoil was all that preoccupied his brain.

“Cousin.” He turned to me, and I mentally braced myself for what he would say. I clenched my fists, reminding myself that I could not, in fact, punch out my second in command, no matter what he said. “I like the woman fine, but she left you when you were barely through your honeymoon. Is she worth all of this?”

He gestured to the blood, and the floating metal scrap heap that we would send to the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe he gestured to the Mafia men on their backs, staring blankly at the night sky.

He could be gesturing to the sad state of my own fucking existence. As if I did not know it already. As if I did not live with the heaviness of my life each and every day. A burden that far exceeded any I had felt before.

“She is worth an ocean of blood!” I gritted through my teeth. “She is worth burning in hell for all eternity.”

“Why, Eoghan?” Dairo shouted over my declarations. “Explain to me why!”

“Because she is the only light in my existence!” I paced away from him before turning around again, running my hand through my hair. “Because she has given me a son! Surely you can understand that. As you would lay your life down for Rose, even when she is cold towards you.”

Since the birth of their twins, Rose had pulled from his embrace. I saw it not so much in her, but in the longing gaze of my cousin as he desperately wanted to reach for her, but did not.

He looked at me as though I had just plunged my blade into his heart.

“It’s different,” he said, quietly. I wasn’t sure if he believed it. “She loves me. I know it. She has pledged herself to me, borne my children, and been by my side. Can you say the same of Kira?”

“If Rose left you, would you love her less?”

Dairo squinted, as though the question had thrown him off. He shook his head. “No.”

“I am no less constant than you.” Once upon a time, Dairo and I had been in step, of the same mind. But life had a way of prying old bonds apart.

He hadn’t lived in that damned haunted mansion with the ghost of my mother whispering in the halls, and the beast that was my father had me beneath his boot. He did not know what it was to only have the witch, Aoibheann, as company. Kira was the first time air filled my lungs. I would never breathe again, until she was back in my arms, alive, and safe.

Because her blood could not be on my hands.

It might not be the most humanist notion I held, but I knew not all blood was the same. The blood of my enemies did not run as thick, or as tragic, as Kira’s. My murdered foe did not condemn me to the pits of Hell, like the spilling of the blood of an innocent child. Not all life held the same value. My life was nothing compared to the life of my son.

“Come, cousin,” I said, as I threw two coins onto the deck, a pittance for Death to take them over the River Styx into Hell. The Greeks would have put two on each corpse, placing them on their eyes, but I wasn’t willing to offer that much for an Italian crew.

In my last act, I would underpay the boat man for their fare across the river to Hell, to add insult to their pathetic injury.

“Poetic to the last,” Dairo said as we heralded our men away from the ship and to the waiting boats that would speed us back to shore.

I was the last man on deck and set off the charges, jumping overboard as the first explosion lit the black sky orange, reflecting on the equally black waves.

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