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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 I refused to pass on to them. It would die with me, even if I had to open my own veins to make it so.

“Children like you, like her, the way you two were raised in this life…” Morelli shook his head. “Like my nephew Giorgio? Ha! I would not wish that upbringing on anyone. No child should be raised in such brutality.”

I was relieved to hear that he agreed with me. It validated my deviation from the path set before me.

The bridge I would burn as soon as I could.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said quietly. “I do not want Cillian to grow up this way. I want him to be whatever he wishes. To grow up to be an artist, architect, doctor, or poet. Whatever it is his heart desires. I do not wish him to inherit this…”

I gestured to the cell around us, and the house above.

To all the things that entrapped us in misery.

“For that reason, you cannot give me back to Cosima,” Morelli said sadly. “If she has attacked you, in your home, to act against your wife, Kira, who was once her friend? She has let herself become her father. My poor, sweet, beautiful girl has placed his crown on her head.”

His frown deepened the wrinkles around his mouth. I could see them through his unkempt beard. In all these years, this was the saddest I had ever seen him, and yet…

“You still love her,” I said it as a statement, not a question.

“I will never love anyone but her.” Morelli shrugged, as though he had accepted that fate. “Do not let her win this war. The tragedy she will bring will not only hurt others but also herself as well. I would protect her from her vices, if I could, but I cannot. She is the maker of her own tragedy.”

He reached out, his cold fingers lightly landing on my hand, holding onto it with surprising strength. “Spare her, no matter what. I beg you, do not harm her. Do not…”

He cut his own plea off, took a deep breath, and withdrew his hand.

“I will not kill her if I can help it.” I needed him to understand that. “For your sake, I will not harm her. I will… I… I swear, on the life of my Muse, I will try to spare her.”

I meant every fucking word, even as the inevitability of death hung above our heads like the sword of Damocles, waiting to open our skulls.

“That is the best we can be given in this world,” he said quietly. “I look back on who I was before our strange acquaintanceship and I wonder… I wonder if I could have been something different had I never met Eugenio. Ah! But we cannot change the past, eh, Irish?”

“Your imprisonment has made you fatalistic,” I chuckled. “When you have nothing but your dramatic books for company. We are all living the same fate, the same tragedy.”

I indicated the stacks of classics on the desk in front of him—nothing but well-worn, dog-eared stacks now, with notes of his thoughts in the corners.

He chuckled with little humor. “The die was cast long ago. I think it started with Anton Vasiliev, when he murdered your mother.”

I frowned, thinking about Mum, her blonde hair, her kind smile. The way she loved children, flowers, and humming songs as she went about her day. Black is the color of my true love's hair…

She had some gift for the prophetic, I suppose, as she had sung me that song each night. How that song had hummed in my ears the moment I laid my eyes on sweet Kira.

“Your mother—she was a good woman, wasn’t she?” Morelli said, though the question wasn’t really for me. “Everyone thought so. That’s what made Anton Vasiliev’s crime so heinous.”

“Yuliya Vasilieva was also innocent when my father took her.” The secret of that horrid situation threatened to burst from my lips, but I swallowed it like bile. A secret I had kept from my father, from Dairo. A secret I didn’t allow to stay in my mind.

Two people could keep a secret, if one of them were dead. Morelli had been one foot in the grave for three years.

“If she had been killed, we would have descended into madness and so much violence. It was a good thing her brother found young Yuliya, and prevented more of these gruesome deaths.” Morelli’s bushy brows pinched together.

“It only took one lucky break to end the cycle. I wonder if we will be so lucky this time.”

“It was no luck,” I whispered.

Morelli looked at me, tilting his head and lifting his brow, telling me to speak on.

Did he know? Did he read me so well that he could detect the secret I’d kept so long, to utter it out loud would be as unnatural as putting a finger down my throat to spill my guts?

“So many secrets and deceptions, in this world that we live in,” I lamented, lost in my own thoughts for a moment, remembering all the ways these families intertwined, and stabbed each other in the back.

“Indeed,” Morelli said, with a smile. “Have you told your wife you have me down here?”

I froze. My face must have given him the only answer he needed.

“When you present my corpse to Cosima, which might be the only way you will get her to surrender, even temporarily, what do you think your lovely Kira would say?” Morelli tilted his head to the side, entertained by this morbid train of thought.

“You were the reason she ran in the first place,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not eager to go through that again. At least not yet.”

I looked away, guilt choking me again.

“I’ll tell her,” I promised, “One day.”

Morelli shrugged, as if to say not my monkey, not my circus.

“Hmm,” Morelli said, his lips lifting into an expression of paternal pity. “You know secrets have a way of festering.”

They absolutely did. But this one was a festering I would bear, until I couldn’t anymore. Kira might die if she ran from me again, and I wasn’t willing to risk it. If I were nothing but a husk of a human, festering full of maggots made of lies, then so be it.

We sat for a moment of silence, trying to ignore the heaviness of our predicament.

“The war comes,” Morelli said ominously. “Are you prepared?”

“As well as I can be.”

Morelli nodded. “Good.”

My heart ached, because I knew that our time was drawing to a close. We would not be here next year. We may not even be here, drinking together, next month. I felt the weight of the sands of time, like I was in the hourglass itself, crushed beneath each grain as it descended.

“With great sorrow, I congratulate you on regaining your wife and child,” Morelli said, his eyes glassy, though resigned. “Our time together is running out, Young King.”