Page 4 of King of the Dawn

I stared at the offending Murphy and growled.

“The Irish escalated these wars, remember? Children had been off-limits in New York until the day they took you.” Just to make my point, I stared down at the Murphys gathered, their collective mouths clamped shut. “Do you forget what they did to you? How they broke your legs, your arms, and starved you? You were covered in so many bruises, I could only recognize you by the color of your eyes.”

I did not care that the Murphys were here to hear it. It was a legend, like many of the other mob exploits. Old man Alastair Green kidnapped my sister, beat her and starved her, and strung her up by wires that held her up by the thumbs. She still bore the scars today from where the wires had peeled her skin, almost amputating to the bone.

My sister lifted that angular brow, her crystal blue eyes sparkling. “I’m not likely to forget, big brother. I know what they did to me. I was there.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said, quieter.

“I know.” She leaned with her shoulder on the mantle, the funny little linked paper dolls outstretched in front of her. It was a contrast to her black and red rehearsal dinner tuxedo. “I am able to do what needs to be done for the mission. The mission you thrust upon me.”

She was talking in code. It wasn’t just me and her, the bratva heirs… it was the greater mission at hand.

“Do not forget, isoveli, that your wife is Irish.” She stepped toward me, and I recognized the fact that she said wife and not fiancée. Not my bride to be. She had accepted Eve as a part of me. A part of us. Just another point she was making without hammering it home. My sister might look like a blunt instrument – a warrior, through and through. But she had finesse when it was needed. “Your best friend is also Irish.”

I didn’t miss the way her thumb folded in on her left hand, swiping at something on her palm. Something I still refused to confront and acknowledge after ten fucking years.

“We have a purpose, Jericho. You gave me that purpose. Do not falter on me now.” She plucked a pen from my desk, and started to doodle on a random piece of paper. “Don’t let your personal feelings get in the way of the bigger picture.”

I would have been less dumbstruck if she had cold cocked me in the face.

Her implication was clear. I had allowed another woman into my head, when my sister had always been enough.

“I think that maybe you spend too much time protecting women from the wrong things, when you could do so much more by fulfilling what we had always planned…”

The protectiveness I felt for Eve seeped into how I felt for my sister and daughter too.

The world has never been kind to women. In the history of humanity, their gender was primed to be abused by the very people who beat their chests and claimed to be protectors. I knew that and had seen it with my own eyes through multiple combat tours, and war zones… Eve brought it all home, because she had been stripped down to defenselessness in a way neither Rose and Yuliya had been.

“The man who took me and tied me to those pillars is dead. Eve killed him, no?” Yuliya gave a small smirk, as if this fact made her proud. Then she smiled. The little sadist. “She killed him slowly, quietly. And it was long, and agonizing as his mind and body betrayed him in his last moments.”

She smiled in sheer delight, like a kid at an amusement park.

Then she jutted out her large chin and pursed her lips with pleasure. “My sister-in-law’s revenge was my own. I’m just disappointed I didn’t get to watch.”

I wiped a smile from coming to my own mouth. I was fucking proud of my wife. I was proud of how she killed old Alastair Green. It made me love her even more. I had delighted in telling my sister about how the old man had perished.

I kept few secrets from my sister. The moment I knew that Alastair Green Sr. had died of poison, at the hands of my wife, I told Yuliya, and she had almost high-fived me with excitement. I had to stop her from running to Eve, and asking for every minute detail - Did he go mad? Was he in pain? Did the gold poisoning work slowly and build over time? How much did it hurt when he took his final breath?

I had raised a little sadist.

“Alastair Green Sr.’s namesake is now my beloved nephew-in-law,” she looked over at Alastair, who stood beside my daughter, Rose. “Eoghan Green is the ally we want. He has proven himself, isoveli. Let him help us.”

I looked between my son-in-law and sister, as I contemplated her reasonable request.

My gut still turned at the idea of her being anywhere near the son of the man who had tortured her. The image of my ten-year-old sister, proudly standing with chapped lips, and disheveled hair on the Russian-owned dock, blood running down her arms, wasn’t one I would ever forget. When I cut her down and held her, she said one thing to me: “I told them nothing. They did not break me.”

My sister had been taken from us as a child. I never saw that kid again. The bleeding, but not broken ten year old I pulled from that dock was a hardened warrior, far more capable than half the men I trained in the CIA.

“They did not break Eve either.” Yuliya’s eyes turned in my direction, her voice heavy with implication. “Do not forget what this was all for.”

I looked at the Murphys. The mafia men and criminals who were now houseguests in my father’s mansion.

Did they wonder at Yuliya’s cryptic words? No. I didn’t think so.

They were busy amongst themselves, whispering in conversation. My sister had spoken too quietly, and only those who had been allowed in past my façade could hear her.

It was a gentle reminder that we weren’t just the younger children of the former pakhan, but also agents in our own right, here to do more than just run a criminal organization. We were here to poison the whole thing to the ground, and plant something else in it’s place. That was what this was all for.

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