by J. J. McAvoy
My hands froze.
“Make sure they never get her. Ever. Because they will go after her. She’s just young enough that they can break her and rebuild her—”
“What happened to you living for me? I demanded.
She chuckled, lifting the washcloth again. “I didn’t say I was going to die; I just said if I fall.”
“Don’t fall.”
“Yes, boss.” She smiled, lifting her head to look at me. “You don’t fall, either.”
“I’m not the falling type.”
“And yet you fell for me, didn’t you?” she shot back, and when I rolled my eyes, she kissed my lips. “I am so close and yet so far.”
“You and me both,” I said, taking the water handle and pouring it onto her hair.
She closed her eyes, bending her head back for me.
“Your parents?”
I didn’t answer.
“Maybe they will figure it all out now, that I am here and chose to step aside,” she said, squeezing and twisting her hair.
“They’ve gotten this far because their egos will not allow them to see anything but what they want to see.”
She brushed water from her face to look at me. “You have their ego.”
I held the water closer to the front of her face.
“Really?” she said, closing her eyes, grinning at me. “Aren’t you a little old to be this petty.”
“I learned from you.” I grinned, taking the water off her face and kissing her lips.
She kissed me back, wrapping her hands around my neck, our bodies pressing up against each other as I pushed her against the wall. “Now that you are here, there is a lot I’d like to teach you,” I added as we broke apart.
Her answer was to lift one leg and wrap it around my waist. “Then teach me, boss, I love learning.”
“Here’s something. Did you know certain shampoos can be used as lube?”
An evil grin spread across her face. “Yes, I did. Do you want to know how I learned?”
My jaw set, damn her, gripping her hand, I flipped her body around. “Sometimes, I swear you do this on purpose. Just admit you like it rough and stop trying to piss me off.”
“I admit nothing, boss. What are you going to do about it?”
Smiling, I let her go. “Go on with my shower and leave you alone.”
Free from my grip, her body turned back so fast that I couldn’t miss the look of rage in her eyes. She grabbed the soap and moved to throw it at my head. “You are so damn annoying!”
I laughed, ducking out of the way. “All you had to do was admit it.”
“Go fuck yourself!” she snapped, moving to leave the bathroom and nearly slipped but caught herself.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed harder at her, and for that, she came back in for vengeance, even though it was the wet floor she should have been mad at.
ETHAN—PRESENT
Reaching over, I took her hand into mine, when suddenly, the door opened, Vinnie looked to me.
“The silent alarms were tripped!”
“It could be my—”
BOOM!
The explosion to the right of him was so hard, the whole room shook and threw his body to the side, flames erupting outside.
This was not my parents.
The real war had started.
FUCK!
“Go!” I hollered to Dino, pulling out the machine gun from under Calliope’s bed as Gigi rose up confused. “Gigi, come here. Now!”
Jumping off the couch, she ran to me. I opened the paneling beside her mother’s bed. Pressing the keypads for her to go inside.
“Papa!”
“Sweetheart, I’ll be right back!”
“No, Papa!
“Listen to me,” I yelled. “Stay here!”
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
The hail of bullets could only come from a machine gun. It pinned us down; however, it was enough time. Walking to the other side of Calliope’s bed, opening the panels, I grabbed a mask putting it over my face.
Thank God, someone came. I really needed to kill a motherfucker today.
And any motherfucker was better than no motherfucker.
10
“An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure.”
~Benjamin Franklin
MELODY
BOOM!
The ceiling above us shook so hard that dust fell on top of us. I glanced over at Liam, and he exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose with his good hand.
“Can we ever have a dull year? Just one?” he asked.
Ignoring him, I got up, quickly grabbing my gun. “Melody, I’m sure he’s got it under control.”
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
“That is definitely a military-grade machine gun,” I said, moving to check out on the rest of the floor. Seeing no one, I moved on, quickly surveying the area, but I couldn’t see much damage from this angle
“It could be his machine gun,” Liam said behind me. “If we go and ruin anything else, he might just shoot you.”
“My son won’t shoot me,” I said, moving back to the door.
“How about me, then?” He asked.
I frowned, turning to him, wishing he’d get off his fucking ass already. “Are you coming with me or not?”
“Exactly what am I supposed to do with one good arm?”
“Fine, I’ll go myself,” I said, opening the door, lifting my gun, stepping out into the dark and empty hallway.
Tip-toeing past the nurse’s station, I made my way to the stairs. There was no way the elevator would be working now, and even if it were, the hospital staff would be trying to figure out what had happened. The explosion was intense but not strong enough to shatter the glass, which meant it hadn’t come from one of the rooms. It had come from the hallway, and it wasn’t strong enough for the place to begin collapsing, either.
It was a diversion, most likely to start the firefight.
Opening the stairwell first, I checked down the tower of staircases.
BANG.
Slowly, I shifted my gaze from down to up, only to see a large man with blond hair fall from the top steps onto the platform right before me. He was dressed in dark clothing with a military-style bulletproof vest on over his chest. He coughed, desperately trying to breathe, bullets in both of his legs, causing him to crawl. That was the only sound, him wheezing and another man's shoes as he came down the stairs.
“Where do you think you are running to?” the other man asked, taking off his mask as he reached the platform where I stood. He was dressed in black.
I saw my son’s face, the darkness in it, the ruthlessness in his expression, as he put his foot on the man’s head. “I asked you a question; when I ask questions, I want answers.”
The man reached to grab his knife, moving to stab Ethan in the leg. Immediately, I grabbed my gun only for Ethan to shoot the man’s wrist.
“That’s not how you answer questions.”
The man bit down on his teeth…assassins.
“If you try to capture them and question them, they bite down on a fake tooth. It has poison in it,” I said to him.
It seemed as if he had only just noticed me. Ethan, with his green eyes clear yet bloodthirsty, stared at me for a long time, then he looked back down at the man under his foot. Without a second thought, he lifted his foot and crushed it back down onto the man’s face.
“I have questions,” Ethan said as if he did not hear me. “And yes, you are going to answer them. Because that poison isn’t going to work, that smoke bomb had an antidote in it. The moment you breathed it in, you ended your chance at a quick death.”
Removing his foot, he put his gun right into the man’s thigh and fired once again.
“Ahh!” The man hissed, spitting out a mixture of his blood and poison out onto the staircase.
“See,
still alive, still able to feel pain,” Ethan replied.
“I’m not scared of pain.” The man who spoke did so with a Russian accent, and for some reason, that made Ethan snicker.
“Give it a second,” he said. “The bomb wasn’t just an antidote; it was another poison. My wife is good at those. Apparently, this… yep…there it is.”
He lifted the barrel of his gun to the man’s face where blood was pouring from his nose and eyes. The man’s whole face turned red as he shook.
“Like I said, I have questions,” Ethan bent down at eye level to him. “Here they are. One, how long have you been working for i Libitinarii? You seem new. Two, who told you to attack now? Three, where is that person? I’ll let you think about my questions carefully. This won’t kill you for a few days, if not a week. So, you should have a very good answer for me. If you don’t, you die, like the other one upstairs.” He slapped the man’s cheeks with his gun. “Enjoy.”
Standing taller, Ethan took a step back and turned to me, bored, he just shook his head. “If you can’t listen to me when I say do not interfere, at least have the good sense not to play with guns when you are drunk.”
“Are you lecturing me? About guns?” I asked, shocked. Again? Was he lecturing me again? In what fucking alternate reality was I now living in? It was like having an out of body experience. “I’m the one who taught you how to fucking shoot one.”
“And?” he asked, staring at me.
I stared back, not sure what to say. So, he rolled his eyes.
“Don’t just stand there. You caused this problem, now come up and fix it,” Ethan said, walking back up the stairs.
I wasn’t sure who he was talking to until I felt the presence beside me. I looked at Liam standing next to me, gun in one hand, while the other was still bandaged and held up to his chest.
“That sounds like you are asking for help, son?” Liam grinned. “What happened to fucking it and leaving it for us to deal with?”
Ethan didn’t say a word since he was already back up the stairs. Leaving the two of us…well the three of us, if you counted the Russian man bleeding from his eyes on the staircase.
“Good news, he’s not abandoning the family,” Liam smirked, his shoulders relaxing. “Bad news, I have a feeling he’s setting us up again with one of his heavenly plans.”
“I thought you weren’t going to follow me?”
He dropped his head to the side, looking at me lazily. “When have I not followed after you, even too my doom sometimes. Oh, what a curse this love is.”
I rolled my eyes, walking up the stairs, wanting to see more of this son I had brought into this world—a child who had turned into a ruthless, cold-blooded killer. Our children were the greatest extensions of ourselves. They existed because we existed. Our morals often shaped their morals. He was what I had made him to be…and yet, seeing him like this was still odd. I had seen him from afar a thousand times. He had done things that had me so proud of him, hearing how the Italians respected and feared him…made me feel…good. Yet, for some reason, with him here now, addressing me, lecturing me, it didn’t feel the same. Now that the worlds had finally and fully collided, I didn’t feel like the proud mother watching over her son. I felt like an intruder getting in his way, and I didn’t like that shit one fucking bit.
“This attack was a distraction,” Ethan spoke commandingly to the three men standing outside the door of his wife’s hospital room.
When they heard us enter, they turned back, guns already up, but they paused seeing us.
“They are also a distraction, ignore them for now.”
Liam chuckled. “That son of a bitch.”
“Glad to see you are amused. Is the bitch you are referring to, me?” I ignored his answer, focusing on Ethan, who did not pay us any mind.
“Siena, or whoever is pulling strings on her behalf, wants us to believe they are attacking now.”
“When your enemy is far, make them think you are near,” one of the men replied.
Ethan nodded. “Exactly. What happened yesterday and today have sped up everyone’s plans. The game has shifted. Siena’s goal isn’t to just destroy my whole family. She also wants to take everything we have built. That means if they still believe Calliope is on their side, they needed to take her, and if not her, then Gigi.”
“Why didn’t they send more people?” another one of them asked.
“Because they don’t have that many left. So, the distraction here is to make us leave. Make us want to go somewhere we have control. Normally the rules of my family state that if there is impending danger, we lockdown in the Callahan house.”
“That’s where they will send all the rest of their people for a final attack,” the third man spoke, and Ethan nodded.
“Yes,” he replied, glancing back over his shoulder. “I brought Gigi out here with me. Once the manor is on lockdown, it is nearly impossible to enter. We could go back and defend it. But my family is not in the frame of mind to defend our home or my daughter at the moment. So, I need you all to go with them and protect them. Italo go back to watch over Killian—”
“With all due respect, boss,” Italo said spat bitterly, “we joined hands with Calliope to get revenge on the Orsini family, not sit around and protect yours. If they are weak now, I am going for the kill. I’ve waited a decade for it.”
“We’ve all waited,” Ethan snapped. “You waited a decade? She has waited her whole life. Do you want to be there at the very fucking end? Fine. I do not give a fuck. But we are not at the goddamn end right now; we are in the final act. There are still pages to go. So, you will do as I fucking told you so we can all get what we’ve waited for. Unless you all know where to go and how to do it without either Calliope or me? If so, get out of my fucking face and go do it. Please, that would be no skin off my back.”
They were silent and did not move.
“As I thought,” he snapped. “So, as I was saying, Italo, you will return to Killian’s side before he gets any smart ideas. Dino, my house, let Uncle Neal know, the rest of them are useless. But they should listen to him. Make sure they stay vigilant.”
He wasn’t leaving this to Wyatt again…that trust was broken worse than before.
“Vinnie.”
“Back to wining and dining? No problem.” The man smirked.
Ethan shook his head. “I’ve worked too damn hard to make my family the subject of speculation in this city again. We have an image. I need that image and not one of my wife being gunned down outside of a museum.”
“And how do I fix that?”
There was only one distraction from blood.
“By becoming this city's sniper problem,” Ethan said, giving him a phone. “There is only one distraction from blood, and that is more blood. It can’t just be my wife. It needs to be her and a list of rich, influential men and women in the city. You do not have to take them all out…”
“But just enough that it looks like Mrs. Callahan was just the first in a string of terror attacks.”
“If we are doing all of this, who’s going to be protecting you, Gigi, and Calliope?”
“Two old dogs who don’t know how to quit.” Ethan looked straight at us. “You two can call me boss.”
That little son of a bitch.
LIAM
If he weren’t my son, I’d smack the shit out of him for that disrespect. However, because he was my son, I was fucking impressed.
Annoyed.
Pissed.
But impressed.
He couldn’t walk away from the family, even if he considered our actions betrayal. But he knew we couldn’t walk away, either. We were still targets of the Orsinis, aside from the fact that they were trying to bring down our family.
“You are using us as shields,” I said when we entered the hospital room.
His wife was asleep on the bed as if she were a princess in a movie.
“Isn’t this want you wanted?” he asked, looking at me bored. It was strange looking into
eyes so similar to my own and only seeing coldness. “You wanted to save me so badly, didn’t you? But if it makes you feel better, let me ask which plan do you prefer? We hide away and wait, letting the whole family die in the process then rebuild? Or, do I use you two? I’m fine either way, are you?”
Was he using the family to blackmail us?
“No need for threats. We are here, aren’t we?” Melody said, stepping up beside me and looking around the room, which should have been riddled with holes, but inside, not a single bullet made it in. “You bulletproofed the hospital?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he walked over to the wooden paneling at the door, touching the side of it. It scanned his finger, and he pressed in a code. When it unlocked, he bent down, dropping his gun onto the floor and opening the door. When he did, there was another door inside.
He knocked once before speaking.
“Lupus est homo homini.”
I had no idea what he meant. However, there was rattling before there was a click. The door opened, and out popped a little girl with a frown on her face. “Auribus teneo lupum.”
Ethan frowned, helping her come out. “Aren’t you supposed to wait until I say something else?”
His daughter, my granddaughter, made a face. “But Papa, I know your voice.”
“What if someone records my voice?” he asked, poking her stomach.
She giggled, backing away. “My mommy has a camera in there. When you open it, I can see your face, Papa.”
Ethan frowned, poking her again, making her giggle. “Did you see those people behind me. They are dangerous. There could be a trap. Don’t ever think you are the smartest.”
Upon pointing at us, she immediately moved to stand behind his body which I assumed was because she didn’t recognize us. He smirked. “See, what if it was a trap?”
“Why would you trap me, Papa—wait?” She poked her head out from the side to stare at us with her mismatched eyes. Slowly she moved away from Ethan and grinned.
“Papa, I know them,” Gigi said and then looked back up to Ethan, who only looked back at her, confused.
“How? You’ve met them?”
She shook her head. “Mommy said if her grandma and grandpapa start to be mean to me and I could not find you or her, then I had to call my grandma and grandpapa. She showed me pictures.”