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Chapter thirty-one

Queen Margot

Eoghan

S he missed.

She held a single-action revolver in her hand. It was a pretty gun, to be sure, but it had a five-pound trigger pull on the first round. She worked so hard to let off the shot, she’d lifted the barrel, and her shot landed high, hitting the ceiling, and raining plaster over our heads.

Mrs. Green wouldn’t have missed such an easy shot.

The thought tickled me as my men moved forward, pulling the revolver from Cosima’s hand while the rest of my men spread along the walls. We had them surrounded.

Eugenio, Cosima, a woman who looked to be a nanny or housekeeper, and the child. Morelli’s child. Her defiant gray eyes looked at us as though we were scum beneath her little Mary Jane shoes.

I placed my gun in the holster, putting out my empty hands to the side as I shrugged. It was to show her that she was no longer a threat—she had no power here, and never would again.

“Cosima, Cosima, Cosima,” I cooed, unable to keep the small smile from touching my lips. “Put the gun down.”

As soon as she surrendered, my family would be back together. Peace would follow.

We’d beat our swords into ploughshares and, for once, Green Fields Enterprises would become a part of a grand, new world, above board, and in the fucking light.

The relief threatened to buckle me, and take me under.

But all of that hinged on this exact moment.

“You’re surrounded, and defeated, Cosa Du–”

“Don’t call me that, you Irish viper,” she said through clenched teeth. “I am Cosima Durante, and I will not kneel to a prick like you, Green.”

Oh, she was determined to be unpleasant, the gun pointed at my head, and she was aching for an excuse to fire.

“You shoot me, then my men will slaughter every single one of you.” I flicked my eyes to the desk where a woman curved her body around a two-year-old girl. “Including the little one. Is that what you want?”

I did not know if she loved her daughter with the same passion as I loved my son. Not everyone did. I was sure of it. But surely, the girl who had been friends with my wife would not have such evil inside her soul that she would be careless about her own blood.

If she cared more for Giovanni Morelli’s child than I did, she would do everything she could to save her.

We inherited a curse. They may look different and speak a different language, but the curse was the same.

We were made in the image of our parents, who would burn the world in exchange for power.

I wanted to get out of the darkness, but Cosima was in too much pain, and too far in her temper to see that this would be good for her too.

“Giovanna,” I said, sweetly, looking at the two-year-old that was clinging to a woman I assumed was a nanny. “Aren’t you sweet?”

My heart cracked in my chest. She was the same age as Cillian. The exact same age.

I would not want this for him.

“Don’t look at her!” Cosima said, her hand trembling. “Don’t speak to her! Keep your eyes off of her, you son of a bitch!”

Forgive me for what I am about to do…

I felt all expression drain from my face—a feat I had not exercised since the days of sitting at my father’s dining table. Old habits die hard.

“I knew your father,” I said, as flatly as I could, even as Cosima’s glare threatened to burn me where I stood.

If looks could kill, I’d be as dead as Morelli.

“You bastard…” Cosima said quietly, her eyes wide, her skin growing pale as she realized where this was going.

But her stubbornness kept her from knowing the truth. It kept her from anticipating what would come next.

“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, then throwing 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 M?le. 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 would not 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 I would treat 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.

But that would be a problem for a different time.

“I will not stop until you are paid tenfold for what you have done here.” Her eyes darkened, emptying of anything that could look like a soul, and I saw in her the same madness I saw in myself when I lost Kira.

It was devilish and cruel. “I will never, ever stop until you, your son, your wife, your–”

“I would watch your mouth.” My eyes flicked to the child who stood mute, her face pressed to her nanny’s thigh. “Do not turn this massacre into a downright slaughter.”

She laughed. It was a terrible, soft, and menacing sound. “You have left me with nothing to lose, Green.”

She pressed Morelli’s head to her bosom, his closed eyes, and slack lips on her breast. I tried not to look. I didn’t need sorrow to overtake me right now.

Morelli wouldn’t think that dignified.

“I have nothing left to lose,” she said again, her lips pulling back until her teeth looked like fangs.

I looked at the child again. I glanced at the nanny, who had a protective hand on the girl’s back. Did she forget she had a daughter? Or was she like my own father in his madness, who forgot he had a son?

Poor thing.

“Make peace, Cosima,” I said quietly.

I would not kill a child. I would not be a party to it, the same way I could not let Yuliya Vasilieva be killed all those years ago. Even that was beyond a monster like me.

But the threat of it… that was within my abilities.

“Make peace, and think about your own legacy.”

“What legacy?” She came to her feet, that same angry smile, promising retribution and pain to me and mine, still in her features.

“Your fucking daughter!” I snapped.

She paled, as if she had remembered the girl just then. Like she had forgotten.

“She’s the last thing you have of Giovanni Morelli!” I reprimanded, feeling the anger of her disregard in my fucking being. “Do not add her blood to all that was spilled today.”

It was a warning that I hoped she’d comprehend.

I wasn’t seeing Cosima Durante before me, though. I was seeing my own father in his insanity, who had forgotten that his son was what he had left of the woman he claimed to love. I was seeing myself in the girl who clung closer to a nanny than she did to her own parent.

Giovanna and I were one and the same. But did that also make me the same as Anton Vasiliev, the man who had tortured and killed my mother?

“Surrender now.” That was Kira’s voice beside me, and I felt the relief of it as if she gave me the sweetest of caresses. As if her voice touched my brain with the comfort of her gentle tone. “Surrender now, and if you get revenge later, fine. But do not sacrifice your child for nothing.”

I stared at my wife, perplexed. I would never allow them revenge later. I would rather kill them now!

I felt that in my soul… until I looked back down on Giovanna. Her round, frightened eyes were the same as the rest of ours—of mine, of Yuliya’s, of my own son— we didn’t ask for any of this, but it was ours all the same.

“Mercy.” I heard Morelli’s voice in my ear.

His three fucking wishes in his final moments…

They were sacred, and only now did I feel the full burden of it.

Cosima’s lips pressed into a flat line. At least she wasn’t imagining wearing my guts as garters anymore…

“No one will ever accept such a thing. Only my death will appease your Irish. My people will never accept surrender. They will never trust you, or your leadership.” She scoffed. “I would never trust you.”

“You don’t have to.” Kira stepped forward, like the warrior queen that she was, looking between me and Cosima, her eyes calculating something.

I waited, wondering what answer my wife had come up with.

“Rose and Dairo married, tying the Bratva and Irish together in an alliance.” Her rich brown eyes flicked to me, and for a moment, I thought she was begging me to just back her play.

“Aoibheann and Jericho married, making the bond even stronger.”

I clenched my fist, my jaw tightening, until I started to give myself a headache. I could see the gears turning. I could feel her train of thought, and I did not like it. Not one bit.

“Those bonds are what defeated you today.” Kira tilted her head, just a little, her lips pressed together, her eyes pleading with me to not say anything. To not contradict her. To follow where she led. “Marriage is often the solution to a problem.”

My nostrils flared.

But she kept going, even as my eyes begged her to stop before she did something that we could not recover from.

A path that we could not take back. An inheritance that our son would resent us for in the future.

“Your daughter, and our son, are the same age. They are our heirs.”

Stop, Kira. Stop. Stop now!

“Betroth them.” I wanted to lunge forward and grab her face in my hands, and scream, ‘Have you gone mad, woman?’ “Let our children bind our families, and join our fates.”

Cosima was stone-faced, calculating. She looked at her daughter, who flinched at whatever she saw in her mother’s eyes.

Her nanny knelt down and, in a tender voice, soothed her in French.

The girl was multilingual. That wasn’t a bad trait to have in a daughter-in-law.

Cosima looked at me, and the malice in her eyes should have melted my skin off. It was a wonder that it didn’t. The look in her eyes told me one thing—that I would rue this day. That she’d make me regret this mercy.

That she would, even if she had to bide her time, she would get her justice—or what passed for justice in the mind of a Durante.

She stared at Kira, and that same vengeful smile returned to her lips, and I knew that a scheme had solidified in her mind. I didn’t need to wait to know that I would already regret this day.

“Very well,” she said, slowly. And I knew just as Kira did that she had no intention of entering the negotiation table with anything that could be seen as good faith. “You have a deal.”