A Bloody Kingdom (Ruthless People 4)

“No!” I backed away from her, my whole body trembling. I couldn’t believe this shit. “No, you don’t get the right to speak, dead people do not speak. Seven days Melody, seven fucking days and you come in here and say hear me out? Are you fuckin’ with me? Either I wake up or one of us is really going to die tonight!”

“I’m obsessed with you Melody. No matter what you do, I’ll always forgive you. Even if you were to kill me, I’ll always forgive you.” She repeated my words back to me and I nearly lost it.

“Oh my God.” Those were the only words I could say. My hands were in the air, ready to strike her down, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“I did this for us…for all of us.” She leaned against the wall.

“You dropped a nuclear bomb on our family for us? How so? Please explain, because maybe I’m too goddamn stupid to understand how you faking your death could be a good thing! You bitch!”

She hung her head.

“Come on, you are the master of the universe, Melody. Explain your grand plan for us little folk here on Earth!”

“I almost died…” she whispered, finally looking up at me. “Four years ago when Liling shot me, I honestly thought in that moment I was dead. I said goodbye to you in my head and the moment I did, I realized I didn’t want to. There are a million and one things I want to do with you, things I had never even thought of popped into my head, Liam. I want to eat gnocchi in Italy with you. I want to ride our motorcycles down the Transfagarasan Highway in Romania. I want to stay in a really shitty motel somewhere in the red light district of Amsterdam. It all flashed through my head in that one second and I remember thinking, when? We would never get the chance. We would spend the rest of our lives fighting and fighting and fighting. God knows if Orlando has any other bastard children out to kill me or us or our children. So what if I became the president? If we left this city for eight years and came back, we’d have start fighting all over again…my own people proved that to me when they weren’t all loyal. Why the fuck am I fighting for those people? I don’t want to be the president! I had power and I just wanted gnocchi…” She broke down and started laughing, tears falling from her eyes.

“M… I…” I didn’t even know what to say.

“You can’t believe it? Have I let you down? I know I’m supposed to be Bloody Melody, power before everything else, and a decade ago I would never have believed this would be me. But I was happy Liam, with us and our family. I was happy, but I could never enjoy it because I kept seeing the traps, the dangers. My father told me I would never rest until I was dead. Well, I’m dead…at least to the rest of the world.”

Sitting on the couch in front of our bed, I took a deep breath. “And what about our kids? Huh? Melody, you’ve abandoned them… Maybe you didn’t see the news in whatever hole you were hiding in, but the world saw our daughter break down—”

“I saw…and before that, I saw you with the gun.” She cut me off, slowly falling to the ground. “I almost called back then, but Dona went out and she got you to stop. It was the scariest moment of my life and seeing Dona…it almost broke me.”

“And because you wanted gnocchi you let our children mourn a mother who’s alive?”

“I’m cold Liam, not heartless.” She sneered at me.

“Are you sure? Because it’s hard for me to tell. Melody, you’ve broken them! You’ve done exactly what your mother did to you. For years, I’ve tried to save you from yourself, all for what? To prove you’ve learned nothing—”

“Tell me, Liam, how many mafia bosses do you know that came from happy stable homes?” I couldn’t answer. “Exactly. Your family was the closest I ever saw and you still had a fucked up childhood. Our kids? Every second of every day we showed them how much we loved them. Even when we trained them, we couldn’t bring ourselves to be as cold as our parents were. They are Giovanni-Callahan’s; they can’t be soft. In five years Ethan will be a legal adult. If we were gone, people would kill them just to make a statement. I love my children. I love them to the point that this…me sitting here and knowing they are two rooms over and I can’t touch them…is hell, but I will do that if it means they grow to be the most ruthless and powerful people this city has ever seen. You don’t become ruthless with hugs and kisses. It is pain that makes us. They are going to be great…they will rise above this…and I will smile every time someone doubts them and they prove them wrong.”

She smiled at me and yet all I saw were tears in her eyes.

“Melody, this is too much…it’s…I…” I just kept seeing Dona’s face in my mind as I tried to think of any way to undo this. “How could you even think of this? How could you abandon them?”

“Stop saying that—”

“Newsflash, Melody, you did! You threw them out of a plane without a parachute! What were you going to do, watch them grow up from afar the rest of their lives? How can you—”

“We’ll call this a punishment.” She snickered bitterly. “Karma for everything I’ve—we’ve done. For the rest of my life I’ll feel pain for the blood I spilled by not being able to be near my own children. Tell me how else would this have worked out? I thought of faking all our deaths…us all going together, but no one would believe that, and even if they did, our children would have to hide for the rest of their lives. They’d never be able to come back to Chicago. I thought I’d wait until they were teenagers…but by then they would already be stuck in their ways, used to never having to really fight—”

“Fighting Emilio changed everything. They understood the dangers, they were kidnapped—”

“They weren’t even gone for a half hour. Yes, it was scary, and yes Ethan proved he would do what was necessary when the time came…but with us by his side, in a few years, it would fade into the background. I also thought of telling them I was still alive, but that defeats the purpose. And I’m bac

k at square one. So tell me, Liam, how do we make sure our children are ruthless enough to handle the shit storms that will come when we are gone. How do you make anyone strong without breaking them? Who in this family isn’t broken? Cora killed her cousin and gave me her heart, Mina waited years for revenge, Declan lost both his parents at a young age—both of them, and he was much younger than they were. You were sick, Neal was ignored and overlooked. This is the mafia. The person who’s the most broken is the one who wins at the end of the day.”

I understood the words coming out of her mouth, I just didn’t like them.

“Why…we have always talked through our plans together…why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you love me too much, and you love our children just as much as I do. If I told you…shared this…you would have told me to wait until they were older. Or worse, you would have agreed and not been able to fake the pain. I saw you when Sedric died; you could barely function. I didn’t go through all of this just for there to be doubts. Not just with the city, but with our family. Declan would have caught on within the day, he would have spoken to Cora. Cora would be relaxed and Neal and Mina would understand. I needed you to sell it. Yes, I used you, and I’m sorry. This wasn’t a nuclear bomb, it was a drone strike….I even had to kill Frankie. It’s just me, you, and Evelyn who know.”

I rubbed my face, my brain feeling like it was going to explode. “So what am I supposed to do, fake my death too and we run away together?”

“I said I’m cold, not heartless. You can’t leave our kids now. They are still too young, plus people would suspect something was off.”

Yes, my dead-alive wife was insane; I was now positive. “So you want me to stay with our kids until they are ready? And where will you be, eating gnocchi while I play single dad?”