by J. J. McAvoy
Fine.
I’d be fucking nice.
I hated being fucking nice—it was exhausting.
But apparently, I had no other choice.
13
“Life brings with it strangeness
and surprises and upsets.”
~Patricia Cornwell
CALLIOPE
He was quiet.
When I woke up this morning, he was already sitting by my side, just watching over me and Gigi, who slept next to me. He’d helped me freshen up in bed in silence before getting me breakfast, which was porridge and some crackers…aka bland. But I said nothing and ate, watching him as he watched us. Gigi had stayed asleep through all of that, and I had the feeling someone, most likely Liam had let her stay up early into the morning, so she was now a snoring lump beside me.
Ethan watched her sleep without complaint, though.
I had no idea what he was thinking right now, and it was best to give him time to work out whatever it was he had on his mind. Finally, once I had finished everything he had given me, he looked at me…lost.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Keep you both safe,” he replied and glanced back at Gigi. “The original plan was to have my parents clear the field, then when Fiorello called you to tell you they were losing, we’d bring the family to Italy on vacation to avoid attracting more damage to the city. They’d feel confident of striking us then, with you on the inside. But then we’d counterattack with my parents' help and I, along with your brothers, would deal with the last of them. From there, you’d kill them both.”
“But your parents were better than we expected. And Fiorello came to Chicago instead of calling me to Italy, and I killed him here.” It all happened much faster than we had planned. “The plan needs to be adjusted; instead of them coming to me, I’ll go to them—”
“No.”
I frowned. “No?”
He nodded, still watching Gigi. “I thought of what you want to do. It’s not going to work. You’re injured. You don’t know what they think of you now. There is at least a 50% chance you will die before getting in.”
“And a 50% chance I’ll make it.”
“I do not want a coin flip,” he snapped, looking up to me. His green eyes were worried. “We planned everything thing for years, and you still ended up with a bullet you. I still ended up hovering over you, watching blood pour out of you…no. We need to do better.”
“We always knew there was a risk to one of us—”
“No, Calliope,” he said again, clasping his fist. “Besides, you’re right. They will try to get hold of Gigi. I don’t trust her with anyone else. She can’t hide with anyone else. It’s better that you go into hiding with her. The manor also needs—”
“Hiding?” I tried to laugh at that but couldn’t. It wasn’t funny. “That’s why you don’t know what to do? Because you know there is no way in hell that I’ll agree to hide in your family’s house.”
He inhaled deeply. “Exactly. So, help me. Don’t be stubborn. Just agree—”
“No.”
“Calliope—”
“No!” I snapped, doing my best not to scream in his face and wake Gigi. Maybe it was the meds, no, it had to be the meds, and all the memories of my past spinning in my head every time I closed my eyes, that made my eyes water in anger. “Ethan, twenty-eight years. I have suffered for twenty-eight years, in ways I don’t think you could ever understand. Ever. And I survived because I knew I was going to get to this point one day. I believed it with every fiber of my being that it wouldn’t be angels, or God, or some magical prince who would save me. But me. I would save and free myself. I did not come this far for you to tell me to go home. I refuse. Even if you cut off all my limbs and blind me, it’s not possible. I have to do this. Nothing will stop me.”
“I understand you, Calliope, but at what cost?” he asked, and I wanted to smack him.
“Don’t say that,” I said, shaking my head. “You don’t understand this. You could never understand this. Do you know what it’s like to be asked to use your virginity to seduce a man to kill him at seventeen? I thought he was a regular teacher. No, he liked to groom vulnerable young girls until they fell in love with him and then have them commit suicide for him to prove their love. He was my first. My second was a man Siena brought in to teach me how to be a vixen. That was my life. Every part of me was a tool to kill…an instrument for her revenge. Now I am at the door of mine, and you want me to stay away? No, you do not understand at all.”
Completely unfazed, he looked to me. “Isn’t your final act of revenge surviving? Of all of those horrors, isn’t the final act your victory. If you want, I will bring Siena to your feet when it is over. You already got Fiorello—”
“Get out of my face,” I whispered because if I didn’t, I would scream, and if I screamed, I would throw a punch, and if I threw a punch, I’d pull my stitches, and Gigi would witness me murdering her father. “Thank you for breakfast. Please go and figure out a better plan.”
Without a word, he rose from his chair and left the room. When he left, I leaned back against the pillows. Grinding my teeth, I breathed through my nose. I glanced at Gigi, which calmed me down…but I was—
“Are the two geniuses at odds?”
I was not in the mood. But when I looked back to the door, Melody stood smug, eating the same grapes I had snacked on yesterday. She was dressed in all black, and her hair pulled back into a braid. She stepped into the room and walked to the same seat that Ethan had just vacated. Causally, she kicked her boots onto the side of my bed and popped another grape into her mouth. “I thought you two were of one mind? What happened?”
When people wished to piss me off, my way to fight was to smile and pretend as if nothing at all could touch me. For some reason, I didn’t feel at all, like doing that right now. So I turned dead faced. “You. You fucking happened.”
Her eyebrow raised. “Me?”
“I’ve been hurt hundreds of times before. Bullets, knives, poison—”
“Good for you. So, have I. Get to the point.”
“—and Ethan never saw the extent of it.” I went on as if she hadn’t interrupted me. “He’s never seen me weak before because I haven’t let him. For a good reason. His family keeps fucking up, and he keeps fixing it. It’s exhausting for him. I never wanted to be another problem he needed to fix.”
“You mean your family? After all, you worked so hard for that Mrs. Callahan title—”
“I don’t give a damn about them,” I replied coldly. “Wyatt, Dona, Helen, Sedric, Neal, Declan, Nari, Evelyn—”
“Coraline,” she said with anger.
“Ah, Coraline,” I pretended to think, then nodded. “I didn’t care. I was grateful, so fucking grateful her cancer came back because it would have taken so much effort trying to figure out how to fake someone’s death and prove it to Fiorello. So, I was grateful her body was weak because it was less work for me. The day she died, I thanked her. It was the best wedding gift.”
She moved to grab my morphine drip, but I gripped her wrist. “No. No. You came to me. Let’s talk since you want to talk.”
“You’re the one picking a fight,” she sneered, pulling her wrist back.
“No, I’m telling the truth. I do not care about your murderous Brady brunch clan. If pushed, if need be, I’d slit all of their throats. They are not family to me. I’ve never had a family before. It has always been me, the people I’m going to kill, and the people I haven’t killed yet. Then…then there was Ethan and now Gigi. They consider you family. They care if you all live or die. And so, I smile, I bake, and I protect them even as they insult me, belittle and try to kill me. I don’t care if they like me. The only reason they are alive is because of Ethan and Gigi. That is it. That’s all. I don’t regret it. So long as my husband and daughter want them alive, I’ll protect them even if they spit in my face. But that is not my point. M
y point is because of you, Ethan is now looking at me as another person behind his back he needs to protect.”
“My son is strong—”
“Is that why you doubted him?” I questioned. “Is that why you all thought my pretty face and tight body made him lose his mind? No. You all knew he was strong. You just also know strong is not invincible, and a man still has his weakness. Ethan’s weakness is you all. He likes to pretend that he could do it. Let you all go to die. But he can’t. Now I’m in that group. He can’t let me risk my life, as if I haven’t been doing that all of my life. It was traumatizing to see me poisoned and then shot. He doesn’t think my luck will hold out a third time.”
“And what makes you think it will?” She pressed. “The fact that you’ve made it this far could be seen as—”
“Hard work,” I snapped. “Arduous work. I didn’t start with a boss daddy, who had a whole clan of people behind me. It was just hard, fucking work. We are not the same, but we are both strong. So, you are going to help me get out of the category you’ve pushed me into.”
“I’m doing what?” She laughed.
But I was not laughing as I ripped off the covers. I pushed her legs out of the way so I could move mine out of bed, and then reaching over to her with my good arm, I pulled myself forward.
“What the hell are you doing—”
“Standing the fuck up,” I hissed, ignoring the pain and the weakness in my legs. I pushed myself with all my might to stand. I felt sick, but I stood up for only a second before my knees buckled.
She got up quickly, tossing her grapes to the floor, catching me. Holding her shirt, I pulled myself back up, breathing through my nose, until I stood eye level with her. “Give me two days, and I won’t need you to stand. Three and I’ll start walking. A week…everything will change.”
“Your shoulder will not heal properly.”
“I’ll fix it later. If not, I don’t care,” I sneered as Melody held me up, moving me back to the bed. “I’m fighting…and you’re going to help me get ready for that fight, oh great, Melody Nicci Giovanni Callahan.”
“No, thank you.” She tried to toss me off her, but I held on tighter. “Are you bloody serious right now? Let go?”
“Either you agree, or you cut off my arms.”
“Mommy?”
I heard Gigi’s voice call from behind, and I smiled. I loved my daughter; she had such perfect timing. Melody couldn’t cut off my arms now.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
“Trying to get Grandma to help me,” I said and looked up to Melody, who glared at me.
“Grandma doesn’t like us,” she grumbled, making a face.
“Is that true, Grandma?” I asked her.
She cracked her jaw to the side and moved me over to sit on the bed. But I didn’t let go. “Even if she doesn’t like us, Gigi, we are her family, so she will help. After all, family is very important to her.”
MELODY
I ignored her all day and even into the next day.
She had banned Ethan from going into her room.
Which made Ethan, for once, come to me. He had a tray of food out for me. And I was speechless.
“You want me to serve her?”
“No,” he replied. “But she demands you do it, so…it’s you.”
“Or you can ignore what she wants and not give in to her whims.”
He nodded. “True. But she won’t give me the map of her family’s estate in Italy. I can’t move without it. If you can get it without her, we’ll leave her and Gigi and go tonight.”
“You didn’t think to get that before you pissed her off?”
“It’s in her head—the map in and out of the estate. And I have a feeling she never told me, just in case we did disagree in the end. So…” He lifted the tray back to me.
Snatching the tray, I marched to her room, kicking open the door. She sat on the edge of her bed, stretching and rolling her arm out slowly.
“Stop being stubborn,” I snapped at her, placing the tray beside her bed. “It is December. It could take weeks for you to heal. There was no time for that. Wyatt and Killian have already been attacked. I’d heard that Sedric and his sister were attacked yesterday. The longer we wait, is more time for your little suicide squad to build up more people.”
“Siena trained us for years, decades. Even if they hired a bunch of people to man the grounds, they wouldn’t be assassins, just hired muscle off the street,” she said, lifting the bread to eat.
“Hired muscle can still shoot a damn gun.”
“Not well.”
“Well enough to cause problems. We need to end this. The longer we wait, the more the family—”
“Then help me get better.”
“I am not a physical therapist! I am not here to coach you—”
“Then learn. What else do you have to do? You’re technically dead.”
I gripped the end of the bed. “Give us the map. Ethan will bring you your crazy stepmother!”
“No.” She pushed herself off the bed, and when she tried to stand, she fell onto the floor…this time, I didn’t catch her.
“See? Your body is not in shape right now—”
She ignored me, army-crawling on the floor with her arms. She moved all the way to the door and took a deep breath before rolling over the best she could.
“This is ignorant, and I’m disappointed Calliope. I thought you were smart.”
“I don’t care if you are disappointed,” she said, laying on her back, breathing slowly. “I don’t care if you all think I am crazy or selfish or wrong. I don’t care who is attacked. I don’t care. I will keep saying I don’t care until you all believe it. So, don’t help me if you like. But it will only make this longer. The people I care about are not in danger.”
Walking over to her, I lifted my foot, ready to stomp on her shoulder, and she looked at me coldly, her gray eyes unrelenting. Slowly I put my foot down and bent beside her.
“What exactly is it that you need to do?” I asked her. “…So, I know how much you need to be fixed?”
“Fire a gun. Throw punch. And get close enough to my grandmother to give her poison.”
“After everything, you plan on taking her out with poison?” I asked. “A gun is much fast and easier.”
“It’s a symbolic thing between us; you wouldn’t get it.”
I shook my head. “This plan you have, it won’t undo anything that happened to you.”
“I’m not looking for it to be undone,” she replied. “I’m looking to win.”
“The old woman is sick, right? She won’t even be the same—”
“I don’t care!”
Why the fuck did she have to be so stubborn?
“What do you care about?”
“Ethan. Gigi. Myself.”
So, fucking stubborn, bloody hard-headed…and childish! But also sincere. She really didn’t care beyond that. Part of me wanted to believe she was lying. That this was a trick. But I had seen it yesterday…I saw it again now. That look of desperation. Like a marathon runner who was exhausted but still had to cross the damn finish line no matter what. No wonder Ethan didn’t even bother speaking to her again. He knew she wouldn’t change her mind no matter what anyone said.
I frowned. “I’m not going to go easy on you.”
“Said the world to little Calliope when she was born,” she replied, grinning, obviously reminding me that she’d never had anything easy.
“If this takes you longer than—”
“Two weeks. All I need is two weeks. Then we can attack on Christmas.”
I sighed, moving to pick her off the floor again.
How did this become my life?
14
“Life is like a book. There are good chapters, and there are bad chapters. But when you get to a bad chapter, you don’t stop reading the book.”
~Brian Falkner
ETHAN
Stubborn.
Pigheaded.
Insane.
Infuriating.
Tyrant.
Yes, tyrant, that was a good word. She was a bloody tyrant—a person who ruled with absolute power. Calliope smiled, she laughed, and she pretended I was the boss, but she held everyone with this invisible power.
“She has grit,” my father said, coming and placing his arm on my shoulder. “It’s hard to deny a person that much determination. She must be in horrible pain, and yet still, she’s asking for more.”
That grit and determination were what made a tyrant…especially over herself and her body. And what was worse was if I called her that she’d say in Greek the origin of the word, tyrant, had no negative meaning, that it just meant ruler or king—then tell me to be a tyrant with her.
“You sure know how to pick the crazy ones.” He snickered, biting into his apple. Looking at him, I glanced at his arm on me for a moment before smacking it off. It only made him grin more. “You’re very worried about her. I can see it on your face.”
“Funny how you both know how to read between the lines when it is not important.”
He bit into his apple again. “Let it go already. If she can forgive the woman who shot her, then you can forgive us for an oversight.”
“Calliope did not forgive her.” I hated how they all thought they knew my wife or me, for that matter. “She is using her.”
“Then, use us.”
“I am, keeping you here, busy, under my eye, away from my work and the family, letting you heal as well so you will be strong enough to finish this war. That is how I am using you. None of that requires that I be friendly as I do it.”
“How have you not grown up since you were a teenager—”
“I guess that’s the part I got from you.”
“Let me at least finish my insults, you little brat—”
“Why? They never change, old man.”
He breathed through his nose in annoyance, and I stared right back at him with that same annoyance.