Page 116 of Iron Blade

“She ran away from you, like a smart girl,” he chuckled. “Or maybe a stupid one, since she’s still a fucking Green, and a woman at that.”

He threw his head back again and his laugh felt like razors on my skin.

“Don’t worry. My son Dario will find her, and he’ll do to her exactly what your father threatened to do to Cosa.” His graying eyes fell to me again, and he scowled. “Exactly what Vasiliev did to your pathetic mother.”

I stared at the man before me, as my hand clutched my knife tighter, the edges of the handle digging into my skin. The pain was raw, and beautiful. I fucking liked it.

“Do you know that Vasiliev sent us the video of what they did to your mother?” he sneered, as my heart cracked in my chest. “Do you know that I watched her get violated, again and again, as they cut her skin? As they carved her face and she wept… do you know how she cried for your father, before she went silent?”

I felt the prickles on the back of my neck as the hate seeped into my body. I felt the blackness of madness - the same madness that haunted my father - coloring my eyes.

I didn’t move as he kept on talking, as he spewed the details of my mother’s violation to me.

“Your father was too weak to protect your mother.” His accusing, judging eyes stared down at me with a frightening grimace. “You’re too soft to protect anyone, much less that girl.”

My head swirled. It wasn’t Morelli I saw before me. It was my father. My father who called me soft, and told me I was too weak. It was every snickering voice that said my art made me weak, every person who doubted me. Every person who told me that mercy was a weakness. That fear was the only thing men like Morelli and Durante would ever know.

So be it.

If I must be feared to be respected, then I would become Vlad the Impaler to strike fear into my enemies. I would do so gratefully. I would become the Devil himself, if it meant that I could keep my Kira safe.

In one fell swoop, I threw the knife and it whirled through the room, cutting the air as it twirled, lodging into his guts.

The old man grunted and then exhaled, quietly, as the blade went deep into the edge of his stomach.

“Bourne!” I called over my shoulder, and was greeted with his footsteps as he came down.

Blood blossomed from the cut on Morelli’s gut, seeping down.

I grabbed a glass, and placed it against his abdomen below the wound. I let the blood drip until it was full, then walked away.

Morelli looked at the knife in his gut, his eyes wide, and terrified - as he should be. Because my cruelty was far worse than my father’s and the Vasilievs. It was a level of cruelty that would make Vlad Tepes himself quiver in fucking fear.

“Make sure he stays alive,” I ordered my men as they looked at my victim with impassive eyes. “Get the surgeon in here if you must. I need him alive for much longer.”

I took the blood that would make my crimson paint and poured it into a larger container. Then I returned to Morelli, and collected more of his blood, and repeated the action three times.

“Why?” Bourne asked, as he stared with me in horrid fascination.

“Because I need his blood,” I said, flatly, feeling the madness stirring in my black soul. I took the container of his collected blood and placed it over the fire. “Keep this at a constant rate. Don’t let it boil. I need it to dry.”

Again, Bourne opened his mouth, to ask the question, “Why?”

I stopped in my tracks and stared in irritation at the boy. “Because I need it.”

I started up the stairs to get the rest of my supplies.

“I need it for my paint,” I said as Bourne’s mouth fell open, and he looked at me in shock.

With my easel, my canvas, oils, and mortar and pestle, I came back down to create my true masterpiece. The self portrait I had craved to make for decades. A likeness of my true self, from paint made from the blood of my enemy.

Vlad the Impaler was nothing compared to me.

With horrified eyes, the surgeon and my two men stared at me in mortification as I toiled for hours, draining Morelli of blood, drying it into a fire until it was solid, and could be beaten into a powder. Then I mixed it with oil, using a glass mortar until I could scrape it into a jar. With rapt fascination and horror, Morelli watched, half-alive, as I used his blood to paint my enormous canvas draped on the floor right within his view.

I smiled, as a tune popped into my mind, and I began to sing it as the blood and scent of copper filled my senses, and my vision cleared as the devil upon the canvas smiled back at me, becoming clearer, one brush at a time.

Black is the color of my true love's hair…I love my love, and well she knows,I kiss the ground whereon she goes.And on the day, whene’er it comes,She and I will bleed as one.

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