by J. J. McAvoy
But I could feel.
And I felt the blood as it covered my thumbs.
Again, I felt that snake around my throat and got off him. I could barely see. But I noticed the knife in his hands as he screamed and shook, trying to get up. Rising off the ground, I kicked his wrist, crouching to pluck the knife out of his hands. He pulled out his gun, but it was too late. He fired, but he couldn’t see what was right below him, and when I came back up again, I drove the blade into his throat. Yanking it out, I stabbed it into his neck again, stabbing until he fell to the ground.
“Ma’am…” It was the last thing he gasped out.
It was only then that I stumbled back, lying back on the ground, trying to breathe. When I heard footsteps again, I held the knife.
“How messy, Calliope. I told you to fight. I never said you could kill him,” she said from above me. “Look at yourself. Covered in blood, on the ground, weak and pathetic.”
“But…alive,” I hissed.
“You won’t stay that way if you keep allowing your enemies to get this close to you. Don’t fight, kill. Don’t wait, kill. Strike first, or you will die, Calliope. To strike first, you have to be smart. You have to see the opening and take it. That’s how you stay alive…and not look so fucking pathetic. Now get up and dispose of this trash.”
“I can’t move.”
“Are you expecting help? You will get none. Because you have no one else but me. And that is not my job. So, you will get up because you have to. As I will send someone else, and either they will bury you both or you will have twice as much work. You have three minutes,” she said as her footsteps started to fade.
Slowly rolling over, coughing blood out before getting on my knees, I stayed there for a few seconds before rising to my feet. The whole world felt as if it were spinning, but when I looked to the door, there was no one else.
There was never anyone else.
I was alone.
I was always alone.
But that would change…right?
ETHAN
Being in love was nice…when it didn’t hurt.
And it often hurt.
It hurt so badly I wanted to tear out my heart just so I could get some relief. It felt as if it—my heart—was turning into itself and cutting me. What had I done? Why was blood on my hands? How much more blood was going to have to be on my hands because of it?
“Who?” Dino hissed as he and Vinnie came to the private ER section of the hospital. “We are not going to ask again, boss. Who?”
Rising from my chair, I stood taller, looking to him. “Remember who you are talking to.”
“And you remember—”
“Dino.” Vinnie placed his hand on his shoulders, and Dino stood straighter and just looked to the ER doors. “What’s her condition?”
“Currently alive but struggling. Story of her life,” I sneered, my fist clenched as I tried to keep my anger in check. “I chose the doctors myself. I know them. No one else is allowed to see her or be near her. If you see a nurse, fucking janitor, anyone, who goes by her room but the doctors who are in that operating room…put a bullet in their skull. Am I understood?”
“You’re going?”
“I have a meeting,” I spat out, walking down the hall.
“Alone?” Vinnie asked.
“They don’t have the balls to hurt me,” I muttered, walking into the private room she’d be brought into after the surgery ended.
I had waited until they came. There was only one way into that ER. And so I had waited at the door until they got rid of Fiorello’s body and came.
Now that I had a moment, I couldn’t help giving in, gripping the sink. I hurled, wishing the images of her bleeding out on the stairs all come out, too. Hunched over the sink, I vomited. And then afterward, I washed my face and stared at my own idiotic reflection.
I had made a mistake.
Thank God for the wind. I was sure my mother was aiming for her skull. But the wind, the heavy pressure cycle coupled with how far away she was pushed the bullet downward. It struck right at the base of where her neck met her shoulder.
The bullet shattered on impact, though.
It was meant to tear Calliope’s organs apart, even if Melody missed.
“Fucking fuckers fuck!” I screamed, punching the glass over and over again until I could barely feel it. Looking down, I pulled the shards from my trembling, blood-covered hands before inhaling and taking a step back.
I exited the room and moved to the elevators.
Smashing my bloody hands on the elevator doors, I went down to one place I knew they would be waiting…most likely for her body. Oh, they were going to get a body for sure.
Walking toward the only room with a light on, I entered to find them all there—my brother, my mother, and my father, around the dead body of Fiorello Orsini.
“Ethan—”
I didn’t wait. I ran up directly toward my father, stabbing him.
“Ethan!”
“Ethan! What the fuck?” Wyatt pulled me back as he fell to the ground.
“Ethan! What have you done?” my mother screamed.
“What? What!” I hollered at them. “You can step on my love, but I can’t step on yours? What kind of fucking rule is that?”
“He is your father!” she screamed as Wyatt rushed to his side, putting pressure on the wound.
“She is my wife!”
“Your fucking wife killed a member of our family!” Wyatt screamed back at me.
“Aunt Cora was already dying,” I hollered back.
“What?” Wyatt asked, his stupid eyes all wide and fucking confused.
“What?” I mocked him. Leaning over, I fucking mocked the shit out of him. “What? The family doctor didn’t notice? You went and did all that schooling, and you didn’t fucking notice little brother? You didn’t notice her cancer was back? What?”
He shook his head. “I checked her medical reports, and the autopsy—”
“Are you new to this family, dipshit?” I looked at the woman beside him. “Melody, sweet mama bear of mine, what did your autopsy say? Liam, hang in there, tell Wyatt what your autopsy said since the moron doesn’t know we can fucking fake those! Medical records, we can fucking fake those! Why? Because we own the goddamn motherfucking hospital! Guess who was head of the board here?”
I knelt into the little family huddle they were in around my father. “Come on, guess little brother. Who was on the board here at this hospital?”
He didn’t say anything and instead focused on our father. So, I knocked on the floor in front of him.
“I didn’t gut him; he won’t bleed out. Come on, answer me, little brother, since you are making such big moves with big people now. Tell me, who was on the board?”
“Ethan, enough, we know it was Coraline—”
I held out my hand to her. “Melody, do not let me focus on you, or one of us will really die here today. I promise you, Calliope will wake up and heal despite the bullet you used, so it cannot be me.”
She huffed. “Melody? This is how you talk to your mother after everything I have done for you, everything I sacrificed for you and—”
“Sacrificed for me or your own ego?” I laughed bitterly. “All of you kept saying I was blinded by Calliope when the truth is you all are the blind ones! Calliope hasn’t been trying to destroy the family, you idiots. She’s been trying to destroy her own! In doing so, she has to save this family, but you all refuse to see it! All of you refuse to fucking see because we protect differently than you!”
My mother thought she had sacrificed?
She might have, but not like Calliope.
Not at all like Calliope.
7
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
~Oscar Wilde
ETHAN
Sitting on the floor, I breathed in slowly, trying my best to calm down, but in all honestly, I wanted to take a bat to everyone’s head. I wanted to smash things against their skull
so badly if someone put a bat in my hand, I might actually swing.
My fucking head hurts.
“You expect me to believe she’s trying to save the family,” Melody scoffed. “Are you sure you know everything she has done. All the information she sent to her grandfather. What she’s done to—”
Lord, give me strength.
“Which grandfather?” I asked, shifting my head to look over at her before pointing in front of me. “That grandfather? The one with the hole in the back of his skull.”
“She killed him because we backed her into a corner,” she replied beside my father as Wyatt stitched him up. She sat with her back against the rows of steel drawers, refusing to hear me.
“Yeah, that’s one way to look at if you only ever want to look at things superficially,” I replied. What was wrong with them? “Another way could be that she—no—we used you.”
“What?” Liam snapped, trying to breathe through his small bit of pain. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Now you ask? After you send bullets flying, now you fucking ask?”
“Who sent those bullets first,” Melody snapped. “You act as if you forget that you sent dozens of assassins at us. What do you think we’ve been doing for the last year? Every fucking knock on the door, every movement at night—we have been fighting for our lives—”
“Yes, Melody, I know. We planned that part together.”
“And you have the nerve to act as if we betrayed you when you started this by—”
“You started this!” I snapped, feeling my anger explode again.
She froze, her eyes widened, and I couldn’t stand it. “Ethan, I know you were hurt—”
“Fuck being hurt!” I cut in because she still did not get it. “Yes, your leaving hurt us. Yes, it hurt me. And yes, part of me resents you for it. You abandoned all of us for your own selfishness. However, I got over it. I met Calliope; then, I had my daughter. I understood more because I wanted to escape sometimes, too. Your leaving fractured this family. But this family is always fracturing! I am cleaning up your messes, as you cleaned up your father’s, and so on, and so on. That is just the way it is. Do you really think I am so juvenile, so weak, that I would throw this family into chaos because my mommy and daddy abandoned me?”
She didn’t answer, so I just spelled it out for her. “You faking your deaths was not the problem for me! You not staying dead was the problem. Who leads this family, you or me?”
“Ethan, we left everything to you—”
“Really, then why the fuck are you both here?”
“Ethan, we wanted to protect you,” my father said slowly.
“Again, that is the problem! That is why we are at this point! You want to protect. So, you think your way is right and so you force your way. If you wanted to protect me, you shouldn’t have taken off! Protect me from the shadows? Are you gods? Thank you for your protection. But it becomes a problem if it is not what I ask for, what I need, or what I set up. You cannot be the leader of the pack and have someone else wipe your ass at the same time!”
“So, you wanted us just to watch you—” Liam croaked.
“Rule number six, sometimes in order to win, you have to lose,” I reminded him.
“Now, he remembers the fucking rules,” Wyatt muttered.
“I never forgot them! I just cannot live only by them. Rules from two generations ago don’t always work! I can’t be a puppet! And that is what they want,” I said, and my father’s green eyes snapped to me. “You do not wish for me to rule the family. You want me to be the puppet while you both rule from the background. I can never do that. Nor will I ever. If you want a puppet, keep using the one you have. Wyatt, bow down to their glory.”
“What did you fucking say?” he had the audacity to holler at me.
“Did you not hear me, traitor?” I was done mincing words or holding back. Every time I did, they did something stupid. “Can you not see how you look like a puppet? How dumb you looked going around doing their bidding over the last two months. Pretending as if you were going to work the late shift at the hospital so you can plot behind my back with them. All of that for what? What did you do? Melody pulled the trigger; Liam worked the skeptics and ground game. You, Wyatt, you were the errand boy. When they said go, you went. When they said come, you ran toward them. Taking orders from Mommy and Daddy, became Mommy and Daddy regret retiring…that’s what you betrayed me for.”
“If you had told even an ounce of the truth—” Wyatt hissed.
“Rule number nine, a secret is only a secret if one person knows it,” I shouted out, causing his fist to clench in annoyance.
“I am your brother—”
“And if you acted like it for fucking once, if you proved to me just once! If you’d been on my side for once! Then maybe I would have trusted you. But I can’t trust you, Wyatt! I tried over and over again, and each time you disappointed me. You run away. You look for excuses. You come to me and say ‘Ethan, what do you need me to do?’ I tell you to wait, the easiest motherfucking thing to do, and you go plot to kill my wife.” I clapped slowly for him. “Bravo, little brother, this one is a new level for you and me.”
“You never answered how you used us,” Melody said, her voice now very calm. “What do you mean? Why have we been fighting the last year? You wanted to keep us so busy you could rule on your own now? That is what all of this was for? You to rule freely.”
“The plan was simple. We needed to get rid of all the people associated with the Orsini family. You wanted to help, so we gave you work.”
MELODY
I could not believe it.
That was why he had done this?
No. No, there was more to this there had to be. And yet Ethan, the little boy I had screamed bloody murder, nearly died, and was kidnapped trying to bring him into this world, nodded. Admitting to me, his mother, that he had used me as bait?
“How could I use you as bait?” he asked, sitting farther from us, wavering between blazing rage and calm anger. “I can see it in your eyes, that’s what you want to ask. I don’t know how many times I have to say it to be clear. I will use anyone or anything to make sure this family thrives. I used myself as bait, my wife as bait, anyone. Why? Because you taught me that nothing else matters but surviving.”
“And you thought the best way to do that was to throw assassins at us?” I nearly screamed. Was my child insane?
“Who can survive without sacrifice? Was I supposed to fight them myself? Who was going to run the business? Who was going to keep up appearances and give recycled, shitty speeches to money-hungry, dimwitted, arrogant pigs in fancy museums? Who was going to make sure the rest of this family didn’t shoot themselves in the face, or poison one another over things they barely understood?” he shouted that last part over at Wyatt. For some reason, he wasn’t as pissed with us as he was his brother even though he refused to let us off, either. “How do you expect me to do all of that and go fight off killers every day? Maybe I could figure it out if you all weren’t on my back. If you had just sat at a beach somewhere quietly. But you didn’t, so Calliope and I needed a plan.”
I thought back on how we had gotten here. How I knew what she was doing. “She let us see the files and text messages she was sending,” I whispered.
“We let you see everything.”
“And you used Aunt Cora—”
“Say Aunt Cora one more time, Wyatt, and I will stab you, too,” Ethan snapped again at his brother, and each time he did, each time they both went after each other, I just remembered how they use to be as kids, sitting together at their desk. Ethan showing Wyatt how to write…what happened? “I did not know about Aunt Cora at the time. I merely trusted my wife. And guess what? I was right to. Because the next morning, she showed me why. She did not tell me first because Aunt Cora wanted no one to know. No one. She did not want treatment again. Her cancer had spread into her lungs and even her brain. She wasn’t going to make it until Christmas. Don’t you think it
was weird when we later told the world she died of cancer, not one of her doctors in this hospital, where she spent so much time, came to you ask why she didn’t get treatment?”
Wyatt looked away, blinking slowly. His mouth opened and closed a few times. “I spoke to them.”
“Did any of them tell you she didn’t have cancer?”
He didn’t reply; he shook his head. Ethan was on a roll it seemed…and clearly in pain.
“And you, Melody, what do you know of Calliope? What else made you hate her so much that you couldn’t trust me?” he asked me. “What has she done that you haven’t done? You sacrifice for me, right?”
“Are you saying I didn’t?”
“I will never doubt that you did,” he replied gently, his face dropping. “Let me tell you about Calliope since you think you know her, but you don’t. It took me years to piece it all together. I had to be patient; I couldn’t just shoot.”
“Will you get on with it?” Liam grumbled, sitting up from the floor, holding his side. I looked at him, and he frowned. “What? My ass is getting numb. And why am I always the one getting injured nowadays?”
I looked away from him to Ethan, whose eyes were now closed. “Ethan, go on.”
“Are you sure? Because if Liam has any other remarks, I think he should get it in now, for the sake of his ass.”
Liam’s eyebrow raised, and he turned back to me. When I didn’t say anything, he looked back at his son. “Hey, little asshole, just because I’ve been quiet does not mean I agree with you. Or your methods.”
“For the tenth millionth fucking time, I do not give damn if you agree with them because you are technically dead. It is me who leads, not you! Once upon a time, you were the great Liam, the Mad Hatter, now you are an old man in a morgue with a soft ass.”
“I’m going to hurt him,” Liam whispered to me.
“Careful, I do not think Wyatt does hip replacements,” he shot back.
I snickered.
“You think this is funny.”