“Your crazy bitch! What have you done? WHAT DID YOU DO? I’ll—” She started to cough, collapsing. “I’ll kill you for this.”
“If you don’t die from the water first. I hope you didn’t fill those with the water from your houses…” Ivy said to her, and she froze. All of their eyes looked over at the pitchers of water out for people. The man getting himself a cup dropped it and stepped back.
“We did bring our own food for a reason,” she added.
Everyone who held cups in their hands dropped them.
“What can I do from a prison cell eight hundred miles away? You asked me that, remember? And I told you to watch your front,” Ivy said to Cillian as one man began to cough gently at first but much more violently, grabbing onto the people around to stand up straight. “This. I could do all of this.”
A Belladonna indeed.
“For these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me,” I said, picking up the bag of bagels Shay had dropped out of the grocery bag. “I may not be God, but that does not mean I can’t take lessons from his playbook, now, does it?”
After all, if anyone knew how to seek retribution it was the Lord. “Dawn, Cillian. That is how long I’ll wait for your apology. For you to remember you were nothing but a puppet king who forgot he was on strings.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
~ Charles Bukowski
AN HOUR UNTIL DAWN
IVY
Fury.
Wrath.
Rage.
Death.
Ethan, at this very moment, was all of those things, personified in silence, as we, and everyone else within the neighborhood and beyond, stood outside, watching as the Boston PD and the FBI raided my former childhood home alongside that of Cillian and Elroy. The whole place looked like the ending to a Christopher Nolan action movie. Helicopters hovered in the air as their spotlights beamed down on the street below, camera crews and reporters recording from off to the side, cops putting up yellow tape, dogs sniffing around the houses…and like the movies, no crime scene was complete without a body. There were a few in the street, people who’d supported Cillian who’d chosen to go firing at the police. Some were young, probably teenagers, teenagers who so badly wanted to have a purpose and be rich. Most of them were older, around Cillian’s age…all of them following him…straight to the grave. Who’d killed him, no one was saying, not with the feds all over the place, at least.
“Thank you, Cooper,” a female reporter spoke loudly into the light and camera in front of her just off to the side of us. “Right now, I, along with many other reporters, are standing at the home base of the notorious ringleaders behind the infamous drug known as the Cocktail. Shortly before five forty-six this morning, the DEA, FBI, and the BPD descended on South Boston where a shoot-out between the Boston police and the assailants occurred no less than a few feet from where we are standing. Another one of the attackers drove right into a yard of bystanders in the neighborhood, leaving multiple dead and injured. The whole area is on high alert. There has been no word yet on who has died and if this puts an end to the deadly drug. But we will not be leaving until we find out what exactly happened here.”
He took it all in. His gaze shifted from the reporters to the police, the dogs, the burning car crashed into the house next door, everything…until he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He pressed only two keys before putting it to his ear.
“Enjoy this moment, Takahashi, burn it into your mind, because when I find you, you’ll never show what is left of yourself again. You are the mayor of nothing and no one now,” he said, hanging up and heading into the house quickly.
He walked into the living room and waited till the door closed before he grabbed the fire poker and began to destroy any and everything.
“FUCKING SIMPLETONS!” he roared out, swinging into the television set, shattering the glass. “I BUILT UP EVERYTHING AROUND THEM AND YET NO ONE LISTENS!” He shattered the coffee table. “THEY CALL ME A GENIUS FOR PLANNING. DON’T THEY HAVE BRAINS? CAN THEY NOT FUCKING THINK?”
He hammered into the wall, breaking the wood.
“GET POWER! GET RICH! STAY POWERFUL! HOW? HOW?” He swung at the lamp. The bulb exploded on impact and there was a giant flash before the light went out. “THEY DON’T FUCKING KNOW HOW? THEY ARE GREEDY MOTHERFUCKING COCK SHIT!”
Nothing left to break, he threw the bent, deformed fire porker to the ground. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he rubbed the corners of his eyes.
“How many people died in the street?” he asked, and I wasn’t sure he was talking to me or himself. Dropping his hands, he looked at me. “Thirteen, correct?”
I nodded.
“Plus Cillian. Makes fourteen.”
I nodded again.