Page 92 of Iron Crown

“I’m sorry for your loss.” I flicked my fingers, gesturing for my men to hand a bag over.

Forgive me, old friend.

Theater. War was theater. Even the act of extracting a surrender, even in a time as perilous and hopeless as the one Cosima was in, would be a complicated act. Politics, monologues, speeches… that’s all this was.

O’Malley handed me the bag. It was nothing more than one of those old physicians' bags from when doctors used to make house calls. I’d left it with one of my men who was to stay in the back, safe from the melee, or so I’d hoped. One of our youngest soldiers, who I don’t think ever saw the gruesome contents.

I wish things were different.

I opened it, the snap holding it shut coming apart easily, before I scooped the insides, grabbing the contents by the hair, thenthrowing it at Cosima. With wide eyes, she caught my offering with one hand. She dropped the gun onto the table when she saw what it was, and almost let it go, letting out a small scream.

But then she held it with both her pale hands, her face ashen.

“Gio…” she said on a sigh. “No…”

I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t look at the gruesome prop that had been made with the demise of a friend. I only glanced long enough to sigh in relief that they had shaved him, cleaned his teeth, combed and cut his hair… what dignity could be preserved in this barbaric act had been done. That was the least that I could offer him, except for the tomb on my property, where his body rested in a catacomb, his pet mouse, the poor Algernon, keeping his body company.

“Gio…” She fell to her knees, and where I expected her to weep, to wail, to cry at what gods there may be, she simply stared.

Then her eyes hardened, her face resolved like Queen Margot, or Margaret of Valois, holding the head of her lover, Joseph Boniface de La Môle. Despite the regal stubbornness, I recognized something of myself in her. Something that Morelli knew to be true.

In her eyes, in her fire, there was the undercurrent of love for the face she held in her hands.

I had no doubt that today’s massacre would mark her the same way the deaths of St. Bartholemew’s day marked Queen Margot.

Unlike the fabled Medici queen, though, I would bet my life that Cosima Durante would not go quietly into retirement. She wouldnot devote herself to her literary foundation and die within its walls. She would not do me such a courtesy. Morelli had warned me, but it was different seeing it with my own eyes.

With her distracted by memories, or pain, I walked to a distracted Eugenio. Was he also mourning the loss of Morelli? Or was he mourning the loss of his empire, which would not last now that his advisor was gone? The man who had propped his throne and held his crown on his head was surely dead, much like he was as well.

With my blade in hand, I grabbed him by the scalp, and ran the sharp end over his throat.

No one stopped me. Not that my men, mingled with the Russians, would have allowed it. But no one even tried to intercede.

There fell the patriarch of the Durantes, with no one to mourn him.

Not even his own daughter.

I looked at the girl—Giovanna. Her wide eyes stared at her fallen grandsire.

The poor thing should not have witnessed that. But this life wasn’t kind to anyone—not even the young.

For a moment, I saw a flash of recognition, or maybe that was my own insanity seeing things that were not there. The girl looked at me, and I saw her father in her gray eyes. The wisdom, the foresight. The poetry.

But that was a lot to see in a creature too young to speak in a full sentence.

Or maybe it was my own premonition that this child would be the end of something.

“Surrender, Cosima,” I said to the widow—and Iwouldtreat her as Morelli’s widow, even if only in my own mind. “Surrender and we can continue in peace.”

Her eyes lifted, and though she was defeated, on her knees, with her lover’s head in her pale hands, there was still fight left in her. I respected that. How could I not?

“Fuck you, Green,” she said.

Foolish woman.She will never know when she is defeated. She will never lay down her cards, even in the face of death.

“Vendetta is an Italian word.” A smile crept over her features so cruel and menacing that it made me shiver.

What I felt wasn’t fear. It was something else entirely. A foreboding that comes from witnessing an oncoming storm. Though there is distance, and time to evacuate, there is still the unsettled feeling of witnessing a destructive force of nature pull its punch before it unleashes the full torrent of its fury.

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