Page 104 of Iron Blade

“I can, and I will!” I growled a quiet promise, bringing my face inches from hers. Close enough to kiss or bite.

I marched to her purse and grabbed her phone, staring at its screen. There was an image of Liberty Leading the People - the painting that seemed to start it all for us. I placed it in my pocket.

“Eoghan,” she said, her eyes wide.

The dread on her face was sinking me. I was drowning in the wash of emotions waving off of her in a single instant. Despite the anger coursing through me, and the desperation to regain some control, my body rebelled at the thought of hurting her.

But everything you will do will hurt her.

Hell, the fact that I wasn’t going to her and smudging that look from her eyes made me want to break the walls that constrained me. But if I stayed… if I stayed…

You’re doing this for her own good.

“Don’t fucking move,” I warned her with an angry finger.

It had all gone sideways. My wife was terrified of me. She stared at me the way Aoibheann stared at my father, and it ripped my guts in two.

I went to my studio, closing the door between us and I raged. I upended every canvas, threw glass at the walls, feeling the rage and satisfaction as it smashed into crystal shards on the floor. I snapped brushes in a single, clenched fist, and screamed like a beast.

When my studio was nothing but splinters, I collapsed in the mess I had made, falling on my knees, my head bowed and my fists clenched.

I broke everything until the only thing left was that golden tree. Even in my wildest anger, I did not want to harm it, or her. So maybe there was hope for a monster like me. Maybe I could still make it right. Maybe… maybe…

My poor, poor wife. What had I fucking done?

Then the sour taste of Morelli’s words flickered through my mind: You have doomed her.

I was a selfish, selfish man. I had plucked her from her life, and dropped her into the den of vipers that was Green Fields Enterprises, and now they were after her. They would kill her. They would rape and break and kill her if I let her out of my sight for one second.

She wasn't born into our life. She had waded in the water with Giovani Morelli, Cosima Durante, and me… but she was so blissfully unaware of the sharks that swam below the surface just out of her sight.

Would it have been better if I had walked away? If I had ignored the pull of her siren’s call? If I hadn’t inserted myself into her quiet world?

The answer came fast, and certain. It punched me in the gut with how certain it was.

It didn’t matter. Because I had no choice.

She was mine, ordained and given by fate, by God, or by spirits, I didn’t know. I also didn’t care. The answer didn’t change with her, because she was mine. That was it.

Mine to protect. Mine to love. Mine.

I would go back to our room tonight on bended knee, and beg for her forgiveness. If she was kind, she’d let me kiss her. She’d let me hold her in my arms, and let me explain.

I was terrified of my own fucking hands. I was afraid of ever laying a finger on her in anger.

There was a knock on the door, and I gritted out an angry, “What?”

It had better not be Kira. If Bourne had let her out of the room, then I would literally put his feet on the flames for insubordination.

Then again, if she had escaped him and come to find me, would I truly be that angry? That she had expended the effort to join me where I was? Certainly, that would mean she forgave me.

But it was the wrong woman on the other side of the door. Malinda with her red hair, in her black sheath dress and apron.

She looked at the studio with wide eyes, staring at the canvas where I had tried to paint her likeness, but then grew bored. Not like the dozens of sketches of Kira strewn about. Each one more evidence of my obsession, and my love. Each one damning her even more, as the weakness my enemies would exploit.

“What is it?” I sneered, as I picked up the sketch of Kira on our honeymoon. The one of her by the window, with a book on her lap.

“I heard an awful ruckus, Eoghan.” It grated my nerves that she called me by my first name, having never reset herself after I made the mistake of dipping my pen in her ink pot. An act of lonely desperation after my father beat me for having committed the sin of bearing my mother’s hair. “Are you a’right?”

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