Page 97 of Iron Blade

He’d have to, if you have kids.

The thought sent a jolt up my spine. I had never thought about kids. I felt too poor to think about it. As devastating as my father’s death had been, the sheer misery of being helpless to save my child would destroy me in a way I’d never recover from.

But I wasn’t poor anymore. Eoghan had made sure of that.

So maybe it was time to think about it before it became a reality. He was certainly pushing for it.

Nausea crept up my throat, light and barely noticeable as the nerves of that thought crept into my stomach.

“Will you come?” he finally asked, his face downcast.

“Of course, I thought I’d be expected to.”

He hmmed, before finally turning to look at me. The way his gaze moved made me shudder in delight. He started at my bare toes, and his eyes followed my leg, to the curve of my knee. I sat on my side towards him, leaning on one arm, my top leg bent over the other, rounding at my hips.

Was I posing? Maybe a little.

His breath hitched as his gaze went to my bare breasts, gravity pulling them toward the ground - hardly the masterpiece of pert, feminine youth. But you wouldn’t know it from the way he looked at me, his tongue darting out to wet his lips.

“I never want to…” It was as if his head got lost in thought. “Ever…”

His voice trailed off as his eyes moved to my throat. I swallowed, feeling the heat of his scrutiny, and the tenderness between my legs from our most recent intimacy.

He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to.”

I leaned back, reclining with an arm over my head, spreading my knees in invitation.

“That’s what the safe word is for, isn’t it?”

Chapter thirty-four

Saw Them Off

Eoghan

“Idon’t love keeping him in the basement.” The brass knuckles on my hand were heavy, as I opened and closed my fist. I had to leave my wife in our king-sized bed to do this bloody task. “I think we need to move him to the shed.”

I didn’t bother hiding my identity from Morelli. Why would I? There was no intent to allow him to walk out of here alive. My father wanted to kill him, of course, but Dairo and I had requested we keep him alive, using him as leverage against the Durantes.

As a beloved member of the Durante family, even if only as a consigliere, he held an emotional value to Eugenio, and that was a powerful tool. My father didn’t agree until I promised to make sure he was in pain the whole time, with regular beatings.

God forbid my father beat the man himself, of course. I had to do it because he said it would make me less “soft”.

The mad bastard.

I looked at the old man, his hands strung over his head. His hands were purple from lack of circulation, the cuffs far too tight to let blood get to his fingers.

“Oi!” I said to Blaine Flanagan, my father’s favorite guard, “We’re going to have to tie him to the floor. It wouldn’t do to have to amputate his hands.”

It pissed me off that the cruelty of my father’s most trusted guards had no fucking logic. If we cut off his hands, then how would we tie him? By his feet? By his elbows? It was also unhygienic, this torture thing. Keeping a man in a cell was inherently filthy, so the chances of him dying from infection if I had to saw off his hand was high.

The point was that he stayed alive, not die due to neglect.

“Yes, Mr. Green,” Flanagan said with a solemn nod.

I hated the man. What kind of father didn’t burn down the world to find his daughter when she disappeared? Or did he know and not tell us?

No… that couldn’t be it. If he had known, his loose tongue would have told us where she was.

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