Inked Destiny

Epilogue

Niall Dunne felt only a coldness of purpose as the man who’d tried to have his son killed sat down across from him. What was done was done. Rage had no purpose here.

Frederico Perera waved away the menu and ignored the glass of water set in front of him, though he had the look of a man whose fear had left his mouth dry and his bowels loose. And why not? Pressure had been brought to bear and he understood power, and how little of it he held, that he could be forced back to San Francisco before the earth had settled over his son’s grave.

Let him fear.

“There are men who would threaten to have done to your daughters what was done to my niece and her friend,” Niall said. “I am not that type of man. Nor is my brother. We abhor rapists. This ends now, in a truce. Or your wife becomes a widow and your children fatherless.”

Bile rose in Frederico’s throat, a festering rage with nowhere to go. No safe target except one. “And the boy who still lives?”

“Would it make your loss more bearable to imagine him in prison? Are you asking that he be spared the death awaiting him behind bars?”

“No.”

“Then there is nothing more to discuss. Are we in agreement about a truce?”

“Yes.”

Frederico pulled the phone from his pocket. He dialed the number he had been given by the American who’d driven him here, and was not truly surprised to have it answered by Eduardo Faioli.

“You wish something of me?”

“That matter we spoke of earlier. It is no longer something I wish to pursue.”

“It has brought trouble into both of our lives.”

His bowels became watery. “My apologies. It was not my intent.”

He did not dare remind the man he spoke to that he himself had dismissed the Irish as no threat. He did not voice his suspicion, that Eduardo Faioli had already called a halt to further attempts on Cathal Dunne’s life.

The silence stretched, a menacing threat that had sweat gathering under his arms. Eduardo Faioli wouldn’t hesitate to target wives and daughters and parents should he desire to send a message of his displeasure.

Finally, Eduardo said, “I will stop my efforts on your behalf though they have not led to success. But I have expended political capital. Because of it, your debt to me remains.”

“I understand.”

He hung up, hand shaking as he returned the phone to his pocket. “It is done,” he said, standing, leaving Aesirs, a place he couldn’t have otherwise entered.

His bitterness grew in the presence of the dark-suited American who drove him back to the embassy. It was made sharper as he went to his small office to wait until he would leave for the airport and a long commercial flight home rather than the military jet that had brought him here.

He remembered the touch of his lips to his dead son’s cold skin, the promise of vengeance he must forsake unless he was willing to get his own hands dirty. Looking down at them, he considered how easy it would become to kill at least one of the Dunnes if they believed the threat was over. He wondered if the sacrifice of his life might be better for Margarita and their daughters, might free them of the threat from Eduardo Faioli.

Or perhaps he could arrange for an assassin, someone who could make it look like an accident or suicide. His pulse quickened, fantasy born in grief but cut short with the sudden awareness that he was not alone.

He turned to find a stranger where it should be impossible for one to be unannounced and unescorted, a dark-skinned man with long braids, his appearance too similar to those who’d been serving at Aesirs to be a coincidence.

If he courted death, it was here in this stranger’s eyes. In a voice that calmly said, “The man who holds my oath has some interest in the Dunnes. Remain a threat and there is no place you can go I cannot find you, nor will I wait for you to act first.”