Page 19 of Iron Crown

Then he grew serious. “I do not think it was Eugenio who attacked your home today. It was dear Cosima.”

The implications of that were immense. She would have either done it with his support, or she had effectively cut her own father out of a position of authority. Was she now the head of the Mafia? If not in name, then at least in fact? And if she was, how the hell did she do it?

The Italians were a traditional sort, and while I had women in positions of power in my army, and we’d progressed into the twenty-first century, the Durantes had stayed rooted in the past, their women cloistered away to be married, bedded, and bred.

“You think she’s taken over?” That would change the game indeed.

The more Morelli told me of Cosima Durante, the more I feared her. Cunning, shrewd, and merciless, she was a worthyopponent, far more than Eugenio, who had floundered without the brains of his consiglieri to keep him afloat.

“You must speak to her, to find out. I do not know for sure.” Morelli looked down, to the side. “I have been away for so long, I do not have a grasp on what has changed.”

He had been saying these things more often now. He talked about his waning understanding of the outside world, and how his mind was becoming soft.

“I am becoming like Alonso Quijana, you see?” he once told me, picking up his copy of Don Quixote, reading the quote, “He has much time for books. He studies them from morn till night and often through the night and morn again, and all he reads oppresses him; fills him with indignation at man's murderous ways toward man… He broods and broods and broods and broods and finally his brains dry up.”

He said his memory was beginning to fade.

I was seeing it, the signs of his aging, which had accelerated under my abusive care. That filled me with guilt. Would it be so bad to release him? Would I be such a horrible man to let him go? That was what I wanted. That had to be what he wanted as well. Maybe it would be an olive branch to the Durantes.

“I could free you. Would you wish to talk to her on my behalf?”

“And what will happen then, Young King?” He laughed at me, always, in that professorial way one might when their bright pupil says something especially stupid. “I go back to Eugenio, perpetuate more of this bloodshed? Create more mayhem?Destroy more lives? I have had my reprieve here to do as I wish. To simply live in my books.”

He tapped his fingers on the paperbacks that had been his only company these past three years. His finger landed on the cover ofQueen Margot, by Dumas, where there was an image of a woman in white, her eyes distant and serene, as she held the preserved and decapitated head of her slain lover.

“My imprisonment has been like a retirement!” He raised his stemware, the burgundy liquid inside swishing along the crystal.

Our dinners were becoming more lavish over time, and he took a long sip of his drink. He gingerly set it down, and looked at me. His eyes almost pitied me.

“If you release me, Irish King,” he said slowly. “Cosima will take me with open arms. I am certain of it. She will celebrate. But I also know the coldness of her heart. Vendetta is an Italian word, and no one embodies it as well as my beloved.”

I sat with that information.

Cosima was a beautiful woman. She looked soft, and gentle. I would never have suspected that beneath the pink, and pearls, such a cold-hearted woman existed. A woman who would have ordered the execution of my family, given a chance. Who infiltrated my home to murder the woman whom she had once called a friend.

“I, love-sick that I am, would help her destroy you with the information I have gleaned over our…acquaintanceship,” Morelli said bluntly. “Do you wish to release me to her care,knowing that I would help Cosima burn your world to the ground for love of her? For my longing to please her?”

If all men could own their feelings as candidly as Morelli…

“She would plunge New York City into remorseless darkness,” Morelli whispered. “A darkness that would be felt for generations to come.”

He took another sip, his eyes distant. He had become like a seer, dispensing his words, his eyes unfocused as though he was communing with spirits unseen.

“I have grown fond of you, young man,” he said, his lips spreading into a smile, “And your family, even if I only know them from afar. I would dislike contributing to their untimely demise, and yours.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” I chuckled, feeling no insult whatsoever.

He was right. That would be the inevitable end of his release. I could see it as clearly as he did, even if I wished to remain blind to it, the way I was choosing to not feel the immense sorrow of this conversation. But the temporary satisfaction of granting a friend his freedom might harm my child. That, I could not allow.

“I understand Cosima, in some ways, I think,” I confessed. “Since knowing I had a son, this thought has been swirling and swirling in my head.”

As if to demonstrate, I raised my drink and swirled the wine within the glass, and we both stared at it, hypnotized by the movement of the vibrant color in the dim light of his desk lamp.

“We were doomed from the day we were born, set on a path that was not of our choosing,” I sighed, knowing that I probably sounded like a brat. A poor, pathetic, little rich boy. “When your path is chosen for you, the chance to dream is ripped away early, and often. When your path is marked with the blood of others, what choice do we have but to walk it to our doom? To go mad as we drown to death? To even relish in it.”

Cillian’s sweet face flashed through my mind. I could see him, his arms extended, his little fists opening and closing as he wanted to be held. I saw my son, and a dozen other children with hair as black as that of my true love. I could see them, small and full of life.

The dark cloud hovering above their head is the curse my father put on me, the curse Irefusedto pass on to them. It would die with me, even if I had to open my own veins to make it so.

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