Page 48 of Iron Blade

“My point is, that you can tell my Uncle Alastair that I will not be coming back.” I felt his words like a fucking bucket of ice cold water. “I have found employment elsewhere.”

“Well, then…” I reached out to take the glass of absinthe in my hand. “That required a visit, did it?”

Dairo narrowed his eyes at me, then looked at the bar around us. An Irish pub, in the middle of Irish territory.

“Well, in truth, I came to see an Underground match, held over in the Russian territory, but…” He let out a long-suffering sigh. The man was a bloody martyr. “I also wanted to check on you.”

He swirled the martini in his hand, and looked at the liquid.

“Is everything okay with you, cousin?” he finally asked. He stared right at me with those unnerving arctic eyes, and I wondered what he was getting at. “I felt the need to… visit.”

Ah, so it was that strange intuition we had. That funny little feeling, like we were twins, tugged to one another. He could feel me, and I could feel him.

It wasn’t a perfect science, of course. But it was real.

The day he was blown in by a roadside, I had woken up screaming at the exact moment of the explosion, feeling a sharp heat on my side. The day I was stabbed in the hip by an Italian guard, he had called me, saying that a sharp pain in his stomach made him puke out his dinner.

I wondered what magic my mother had woven over our crib when we were babies, to link us in this way. Had she sprinkled us with wishes, asking us to be brothers?

“Is Uncle Alastair’s madness getting worse?”

I nodded, as I finished the cigarette, down to the stub. I crushed it in the glass ashtray, and pulled another one out of the pack.

“Aye, it is,” I admitted, as I let out the smoke.

He bit his lower lip, looking to the side. There was a woman at the counter in short shorts. Her lower ass creases were plump, appealing, and hanging out from beneath the roughly cut denim.

“I don’t think that’s what led me home,” he said, tapping a finger on the table. “What else is going on with you, Eoghan?”

I went into the pack of cigarettes, and pulled out another stick. I placed it in my teeth, lighting it with the zippo with a green clover etched on the side, and took a deep inhale.

“I… met someone.”

“You meet a lot of people,” he said with that dry British wit of his. It was the least likable of all his traits.

“Her name is Kira, and…”

“She’s Irish?”

“No, she’s not…”

“That’s a problem.”

“I know, but I don’t...”

“Alastair will never allow it.”

“For fuck’s sake man,” I said, slamming my hand on the table to stop his interruptions. “You don’t understand. She’s… she’s…”

He took his martini in hand and downed it in one long gulp.

I let out a long sigh. He knew as well as I did that for all my begging for Kira to marry me, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. And maybe that’s why I wanted her so badly.

I was expected to marry a nice Irish girl. Preferably one from the long list of Irish families that had been a part of Green Fields Enterprises. But I had no interest in any of them.

Kira was Mary… the Virgin and Magdalene. She was everything.

Without saying anything more, Dairo leaned back.

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