Page 60 of Iron Crown

I swallowed the last of my emotions, and silently reached into my pocket.

“Do not neglect your loved ones in the search for power,” Morelli said, as he tapped the photograph of Cosima and the baby in the hospital, minutes after birth. Cosima looked dazed, but happy, as the sleepy babe rested in her arms.

“Do not seek power over peace.”

Morelli would never tire of lecturing me…

He’d be preaching until his last breath.

“They say that Cosima has two nannies, who speak French and Italian to your daughter. She wants her to be multilingual from the beginning.” I had memorized these things so that I could ease his passage into the afterlife. I needed to allow him a slow and quiet fade into the blackness.

“You see there?” Morelli said, as he looked at the small casement window that had a view of the base of a shrubbery. “There is a robin on the window, tapping its beak on the glass. Do you see it?”

I looked, but there was nothing there. Nothing but the evening mist.

“It has brought its chick to the window, too,” Giovanni said, getting up and going to the window.

He smiled, as if he was basking in sunlight,and turned his face to the window.

“It is Cosima and the baby, come to see me,” Morelli slurred with a sad, whining laugh.

He reached out his hand, his finger outstretched, though he was still too far from the glass to touch it.

“I see them! Do you see, young Irish? Do you see them?” He turned to me, his face so full of joy that I could not contradict him.

I watched in rapt and pained fascination, as his mind altered from its acuity and drifted into a space in between—a place between dreams and waking—a place of magic, imagination, and euphoria.

That was my mercy to him. He would not die by a blade. He would die in painless chemical joy.

“I see them.” I nodded as a hot tear fell down my cheek.

Morelli turned away again, looking at the window, before he went back to his seat, his fingers tracing the photos he’d left there.

“Yes!” I could hear the joy, and sorrow, in his voice as he picked up a single photo of Cosima with a toddler on her lap. “My girls have come for me.”

“They love you,” I said, because that is what I would have wanted to hear. “They love you, and they have come for you.”

“Yes… Yes… little Giovanna and Cosima—” He smiled, and in his mind, he was truly with them. My last gift to him. “Cosima… sweet Cosima.”

His head fell forward as he yawned. He turned his head to the side, laying his cheek down between the photos, his one hand still on the image of mother and child.

“My girls…”

His eyes shut slowly.

His breathing evened out, low and slow as the paralytic took hold. He could feel no pain now. I had been certain when I had this cocktail made, and cursed the doctor that if it did not work exactly as described, then I would haunt him for the rest of his days, and make his family suffer so long as I was capable of breathing.

In fear, he added some compound that added a sense of euphoria—I saw it the moment that he said that there were birds in the window.

If I left him, he would fade away.

But that wasn’t good enough. Not for the war we were fighting.

He had to die on my blade. But he didn’t need to feel it happen. He did not need to know.

He didn’t need his final moments to be of agony and pain. This was better. This was right.

I placed the blade to his slender throat. The first slice made me blubber like a child, as the air escaped his throat. But after thesecond and third cut, when the blood pooled about him, I could concentrate on my task of severing his head from his body.

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