Page 30 of King of the Dawn

Jericho

A better man would let her go.

Hell, an even halfway decent man would leave her alone. Start preparing her for the worst path that she would walk when I set her free.

If you love something, let it go… if it doesn’t come back, then it was never yours… was that how the stupid saying went? Christ, I hated that sentimentality. Love poems and stories, and cute little phrases like love is patient, love is kind…

What complete and total nonsense.

Love is impatient. Love is visceral. It is primal and desperate. It is painful and cruel. It strangles you like a noose, tightening and tightening when the only relief is slipping from your fingers.

I watched my daughter and her husband fall in love. The image of it made me want to physically wretch all over the marble floors. But their love was neither patient nor kind.

Alastair started a war so that he’d never have to let Rose go.

That was love. My son-in-law was a piece of shit, but I knew that he loved my daughter. It was evident in the lengths he would go to make sure she smiled. That was the only reason I let him live.

Or maybe that’s requited love.

What Eve and I had was different. I was her knight. Little more than an errand boy with a blade.

I was better than her late husband. It wasn’t a hard standard to beat. So she worshiped me with her body, and showed her gratefulness in what she thought was love. I gave her a marriage that was better than her last, and she lapped it up, and thought it was happiness. I didn’t blame her.

By comparison, she was right.

But it was far from love.

Her words in the vulnerability of slumber cut through me like a fucking knife. I’m ready to be home…

Home was what she found in the pages of that book. The one I saw on her nightstand day after day, morning after morning.

Love was what she had when she ran her fingers over the worn out script. The love note left by Ryan.

I slammed the glass of Finlandia Vodka on the table. The loud thud wasn’t enough, so I threw it across the room. It crashed against the marble mantle, then smashed into a thousand pieces as it fell onto the floor.

“Dad?” Rose’s voice took me by surprise.

She stepped forward, her hands holding her growing belly.

She came and stood beside me, her hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, and let out a snort.

“Sorry kiddo,” I said with a grunt.

My daughter had changed since I first met her. When she was a closed off orphan, fighting in the underground MMA circuit, she was wiry, cold. Her words were as sharp as a razor. But her husband had softened her hard edges.

I patted the hand she put on my shoulder, and wrapped an arm around her.

“No word on Brock?” she asked.

“None.”

Rose had a thousand bots scouring the internet, government documents and servers for anything. A hit on his face on CCTV, a passport scan, a license plate, or anything that could possibly lead us to the man. But nothing had come up.

I wasn’t surprised. The fucking Greens weren’t just a mafia. They were well-trained, smart, and able to straddle both a legitimate world and the illegal one, with a sense of ease that made me want to wring their necks. If Alastair Sr hadn’t been so good at understanding how law enforcement worked, then Tanner Brock wouldn’t be evading us now. If their little shadow army didn’t have all this knowledge, then…

“We’ll find him,” Rose promised. “I’m talking to Eoghan…”

“Don’t talk to him!” I turned to my daughter, narrowing my eyes, remembering how Eoghan had threatened to kill her after we infiltrated his compound. Sure, Eoghan wouldn’t try to harm her now. Not when she was married to his best friend and cousin. Despite his “wedding present”, I still didn’t trust the man.

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