Page 71 of Iron Cross

Then, to my utter amazement, the same courtesy was extended to Sinead, who they all called, "Lieutenant Flanagan."

Sinead grabbed my arm before I walked up the steps to the porch and she said, quietly, “If you need anything, you can call me. You know that, right?”

“I don’t,” I said honestly. “You’re on his side now, aren’t you?”

“I’m onyourside, Kira.” She came in close, stroking her fingers through the blond hair at the back of Cillian’s neck. “I wouldn’t have helped him bring you here if I didn’t think that you were in trouble.”

Again, I wished that I had Blink’s talent for reading expressions. I wished that the lessons he’d taught me had made a greater impact because my instinct screamed that she was telling the truth. Every fiber of my being wanted to believe her, but how could I? How could she be on my side, if her loyalties were so obviously to Green Fields Enterprises?

I didn’t answer. Instead I simply nodded.

That must have been good enough because she walked away, phone to her ear.

“I’m coming home, honey,” she said to whoever picked up. “Be there in a bit… love you, too.”

I held my son to my chest and he clung on, suddenly tired after having such a taxing morning.

I followed Eoghan in silence because I was not a fucking idiot.

He held the grand door open for me and I stepped through the threshold, expecting the same bleak darkness of the foyer that had been there three years ago. Would my son grow up in this haunted mansion? The same one that had been the sight of my husband’s misery? Would that be the curse of the Greens?

I gasped when I saw the changes.

The mansion had metamorphisized. The dark green of the walls had been replaced with a warmer brown tone. The board and batten that had been a dark wood stain was now a glossed black. On the wall outside of what had been Alastair Green’s office stood an enormous canvas reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens’sFalling into Hell. The red of it was startling. But worse yet was the face that the devil wore - the face of my own husband. The only bit of white was a vision, a half nude form bathed in an ethereal light, looking over his shoulder with sorrow in her eyes.

It was an image of me.

And all around us, through my sorrow and his sadism, were the people he hated. Eugenio Durante, Anton Vasiliev, and even the man who had held the debts over my head. The debt of my father’s death.

“Do you like it?” Eoghan whispered, coming behind me, his lips to my ear.

I almost jumped but he didn’t give me a chance. He wrapped an arm around my waist. He held me, and I held our son. A happy fucking family.

“Compositionally,” I said, with a heavy swallow, “it’s beautiful. The technique is flawless, the way the colors blend in the mist is…”

“But do youlikeit?” he asked, as he bit the shell of my ear.

I shut my eyes, tucking Cillian’s head under my chin. His warm, sweet, baby scent infiltrated my nose. The slight perfume of his pink shampoo and bubble bath reminded me of innocence. Of what I had wanted to preserve.

As I stood at a macabre recitation of Dante’s Inferno, I was facing the very thing I had hoped to protect my boy from.

“What did you make the paint from?” I asked, knowing the rumors, but wanting him to say it.

To hear his voice admit what it was. To confirm the cruelty of it was true.

“Blood,” he said, as though he was reciting a normal ingredient, like oil, cinnabar or hematite, or sansodor. “I was in a madness when you left, and I did what I had to. I—”

I pulled from his arms, twisting out, while holding my boy close.

I looked at him, as he glared back, his eyes black. I didn’t know what I was looking for. An apology? Remorse? Regret?

I saw none of that.

His mouth parted, and he almost grinned.

“My sweet Muse, how little you know me.” He took a step toward me, and I stepped away. “I would do whatever it took, commit whatever sin I had to, to keep you and our son safe. I would kill, torture, maim… I would commit genocide to save our babies.”

“You bled a man for paint, Eoghan. Don’t tell me you did that for me–”

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