Page 9 of Iron Cross

“Cillian.” I said the name.My son’s name.

I had to keep my cool.

Kira had named him according to my wishes, which told me that she loved me. In some way, she respected me. If I hadn’t frightened her so much, if I had leashed the beast that existed in my soul, then she’d still be here, and I wouldn’t be half fucking dead with worry that the Italians would cause her harm.

I had agreed to a truce with the Bratva, orchestrated by Dairo, because I needed one less enemy, one less faction trying to find my weakness - my wife. Now, my enemies could do so much worse. They could harm the boy, my blood, before I even got a chance to hold him in my arms.

What unholy terror would they unleash on this world if they did that? What would I become? I’d devise tortures so heinous that Vlad the Impaler himself would shudder in disgust.

I wanted to shake Shiny by the shoulders and scream, “Give me back my son. Give me back my family!”

But I could not.

The more I yelled, the more she saw my father in me… the more I saw my father in myself. That part of me was not good enough to be with Kira, or Cillian. That man did not deserve to feel the love of a hearth and home.

Come back to me Kira,my soul cried out in earnest.

I had said it over and over again, until I was blue in the face. I ranted and raved at the sky, at the millions of portraits I had sketched of my wife, begging the face on paper to come alive andgive me my son!I wanted the lines to move, until they formed the face of my heir. But the still lines never did. They just looked blankly back at me with fear in those rich, dark eyes.

I had accepted my madness.

I fed it with absinthe, and tamed it with drawings of her. Of my wife. Of the son I had not met.

Shiny had seen my son. She had met him, but I hadn’t. I hated her for it. I resented her happiness in her marriage, when I was in abject misery in mine.

The beating of my heart stilled as the familiar despair crept up my body. I should be numb to it by now, but I wasn’t. Each time the pain of her disappearance struck, it felt like the first time. Like a fresh wound that opened again and again. A Sisyphean injury that would never heal.

“Dairo says I should tell you where she is,” she said, quietly.

A small firefly of hope lit the darkness of my soul. Dairo was still on my side, just when I had begun to fear that I was well and truly alone.

Shiny leaned forward in her seat, her eyes intensely focused on my own, as I waited. I waited until she smirked in amusement.

“I have… conditions.”

I bristled.

“Conditions?” I snarled, downing the syrupy sweet liquor in one go, and filling it up again. “I gave you your revenge. I gave you back your little sister. Hell, I introduced you to your fucking husband, and savedhislife.”

I gripped the glass, feeling it crack as my fist tightened with my anger.

“Fuck you, Eoghan,” she said. “You let me kill the man you and your father allowed to rape me.”

I clenched my jaw. I had not allowedanything.Though she had come through the house, disheveled, and weeping after her rehearsal dinner. As she ran to us, my father and her father both shouted her out of the room, uncaring about what some little girl had to say when they had such big discussions about warehouses and shipments.

Should I have known what had happened to her? What Keith Bourne had done to her?

Yes.

And I regretted not opening my eyes at the time. That was why I gave her the revenge she needed, before I made her pledge to be by my side. Before she took the blood oath of a soldier, and she came back into the fold.

Now, she was one of my captains and I still hadn’t made up my mind on if that was a good thing or not. Morelli told me that murdering together binds you like nothing else. I certainly felt bonded when Dairo and I watched her bury Keith Bourne alive.

“Ajax has trained your men for years, and taken the oath to Green Fields Enterprises. As for introducing us?” she snorted. “We met before.”

There was a glint in her eye.

“Howdid you meet?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. I had a feeling that whatever meeting they had was less than… chaste.

---