Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Bianca

It didn’t occur to me over the next three months that I didn’t know Tiernan’s last name. Honestly, I didn’t care. He was a dark spot in my life, a shadow I couldn’t dodge no matter how much time I tried to spend in the library, working at the diner, or taking Brando to the arcade.

He had infiltrated our lives.

Even though he lived in New York, he visited almost weekly for a handful of days, spending the night with Aida out on the town before returning to her room where they made enough noise to keep Brando and me from sleeping soundly.

I bought us both earplugs the night after his first sleepover.

I tried not to think about him because I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. He seemed to delight in irritating me, in being as cruel as he could without drawing the attention of my mother or my brother, whom he mostly ignored.

It was just me he hated.

I didn’t know why, and I pretended I didn’t care.

No one in my life had ever hated me before.

At school, I kept to myself because I didn’t have time for parties or extracurricular activities, but I was friendly with the entire grade and never longed for company.

People at the diner liked me and I liked them, they were the closest thing to a community I had.

To everyone in town, Bianca Belcante was a quiet, studious girl with a penchant for daydreaming at the bus stop and chastising people for wasting water or not recycling.

To Tiernan, I seemed to be the freaking antichrist.

But he was right, Aida didn’t care that I hated her boyfriend. She just clucked her tongue and accused me of being overly loyal to my dead father.

“I’m a woman,” she’d say every time. “I have needs. You’ll understand one day when you’re older.”

As if I was a kid and not a seventeen-year-old woman.

I might have been a virgin, but I had needs.

I knew what it was to feel heat pool wetly between my thighs, to feel the tick of arousal beat in my low belly, to want something only rough hands on my body could gift me.

She didn’t know I lay awake at night trying not to let the low growl of Tiernan’s voice issuing demands in the room across the hall from my bedroom affect me. She didn’t know how often I failed and gave in to the impulse to play my fingers between my legs.

The shame of it burned holes through my soul, but I found myself inexplicably attracted to Tiernan’s meanness. There was some intangible chemistry in our barbed words, crackling between us as potent as the hatred we shared for each other. He was callous and cruel beneath the suave veneer he applied in front of Aida. I saw him for the monster he was, so how could I be attracted to him?

It was difficult to admit that I’d never met anyone like him before. He was older, powerful, so attractive even with the slashing scar across his cheek that I had to swallow the drool pooling in my mouth every time he showed up on our doorstep. I simply wasn’t worldly enough to deal with a presence like his. He turned me inside out with rage and upside down with deviant curiosity. It was a dangerous cocktail of temptation and revulsion.

I was in the kitchen late one night getting Lucky Charms cereal because I couldn’t sleep with the noises coming from Aida’s closed bedroom. I refused to succumb to my perverted desire to touch myself imagining someone eliciting those sounds from me.

Music thrummed through my earbuds, Billie Eilish’s smoky voice thumping through the speakers. I swayed my hips to the beat, fingers drumming on the countertop quietly in time with the tempo as I poured the cereal into a bowl with the other hand. Eyes closed, mouth open to wordlessly form the lyrics about bad boys, I was wholly unprepared for the firm grip that manacled my arm.

Startled, I tossed the cereal box into the air, tiny pieces of sugared goodness spilling out from the open top like confetti from a canon. Morsels caught in my hair and in the deep crevice of cleavage exposed by the old black sports bra I wore to sleep. I spun to face the man who grabbed me, panting and wide-eyed with fear.

And there he stood.

The monster that kept me from sleep.

Tiernan stared at me impassively, taking in my disheveled hair and worn sports bra and baggy sweats as if I were some criminally boring obstacle in his way.

“You scared the crap out of me,” I accused breathlessly, one hand pressed to my panting chest while the other ripped out my earbuds. “What are you doing lurking in the night, huh?”

A tiny smile flickered at the edge of his ruddy mouth. I frowned at him as he reached toward me, plucking a piece of candied cereal from where it was slightly tucked into the crease between my breasts. I gasped in surprise and outrage at his audacity, but my nipples furled into hard peaks at the brush of his rough knuckles against the swell of my chest. His eyes were so clear I thought I should have been able to see straight to the bottom of his thoughts, but they were utterly fathomless. Just a color as pale as frost.

I watched with my heart beating in my throat as he took the anchor-shaped piece of cereal to his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He crunched into it, then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his tanned, strong neck.

Heat pooled in my belly and I wondered with a flare of irritation how he managed to make eating children’s cereal sexy.

“I had a hankering for a midnight snack,” he said finally, as he snatched another piece from me, a four-leaf clover marshmallow tangled in the hair over my right ear. “But you shouldn’t eat this poison. Sugar will kill you.”

“You could use some sweetening up,” I offered pleasantly as I reached up to shake my hands through my hair and dislodge the remains of the Lucky Charms. “Why don’t I make you a bowl?”

He made a quiet noise in his throat that could have been something like laughter or a derisive snort. I watched from the corner of my eye as he leaned against the counter while I cleaned up the mess on the floor and put it in the garbage. The long, v-shaped expanse of his torso was bare, black ink forming words and outlined images here and there across his torso, thick from hands to shoulders on each arm. A pair of black sweatpants in some luxe material sat low on his hips, revealing a light smattering of hair leading from his belly to his groin, a tattoo barely visible above the waistband in the low light pouring in from the streetlamps outside. I swallowed thickly as he crossed his corded arms over his chest, abs tensing into perfectly stacked boxes.

Suddenly, I wasn’t as hungry for cereal as I was for something darker.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” he asked me. “Little girls need their sleep.”

“I could say the same about old men,” I countered with a sniff as I topped up the bowl with more cereal and then went to the fridge to get the oat milk. “I’m seventeen, by the way, and I haven’t had a curfew since I was seven. The minute Brando was born, I was on feeding duty throughout the night more often than Aida.”

“Such a good girl,” he said in a voice that made it seem like a bad thing. “Wholesome and responsible. I wonder where you got that from…your father perhaps?”

I angled a glare at him, but he was just staring at me with that cold gaze. “My father was a good man.”

It was only because I was studying him that I caught the flash of tension contracting his harsh features. Only half a second, but it was enough to express his hatred for my father.

I frowned. It was a little early in his relationship with Aida to be jealous of her dead lover and baby daddy.

“Good is boring,” he offered, and suddenly he was too close, crowding me into the corner of the countertops.

He braced his arms against the laminate, caging me in. I froze at his nearness, as the masculine scent of him surrounded me. He dropped his gaze to my chest, but when he moved his hand, it wasn’t to touch me inappropriately. Instead, he plucked the heavy locket I wore around my neck into his fingers and lifted it to his gaze.

“What’s this?”

I swallowed thickly, wrapping my hand around the chain to try to tug it from his hold. It felt wrong for Aida’s lover to touch the most precious possession I owned.

“None of your business.”

His eyes tipped up to meet mine, something working behind the icy shields. “I think you’ll find, little girl, that you very much are my business.”

“What does that mean?” I demanded, but he was already stepping away to get a glass from a cabinet to fill with water at the sink. “Tiernan, I asked what the hell you meant.”

He took a long drink of water, throat working, abdomen clenching. I averted my gaze, jaw clenched.

“Why don’t you ask your mother?” he suggested slyly after draining the glass and placing it in the sink. “She’s awake and I’m leaving.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

An arrogant smirk tipped his mouth, his scar bleaching to a brilliant white against his tan. It should have been frightful, ugly, but it only made his beauty somewhat otherworldly.

“The perks of having a private plane.”

“Fossil fuel emissions from private planes has gone up thirty-one percent in Europe alone over the last five years. Did you know a four-hour flight can emit as much as an average person does in one whole year?” When he only blinked blandly at me, I glowered. “You’re disgusting,” I said even though it was childish.

I couldn’t help it.

Being near him felt like one thousand bees buzzing under my skin. I was hot and irritated, annoyed with both of us for inexplicable reasons.

He cocked a thick, dark brow at me, but otherwise, didn’t say anything.

I was learning he was a man of few words. Cruelly, which was against my nature, I wondered if he had a high enough IQ to manage his billion-dollar businesses.

“Why are you with my mother?” I asked, then winced slightly because it seemed as if I didn’t think she was good enough for him when in reality, it was the other way around.

He raised one hand to rub a thumb over his lower lip. Back and forth, back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum.

“Have you ever heard the saying, ‘curiosity killed the cat’?”

I blinked owlishly. “Are you…threatening me?”

He blinked right back.

Fear knocked my heart hard against my chest, but beneath it, sunk beneath my skin and bones, deep in the synapses of my brain, intrigue tangled with a strange kind of lust that made my blood heat.

I stepped closer to him, cereal gone soggy in the bowl and forgotten. “What do you want with her?”

The scarred side of his mouth lifted in a little smile. “What does any man want with any woman?”

“Her body,” I guessed, deflated by his simplicity.

“Her secrets,” he amended in that rough rasp that was somehow also cultured.

Automatically, I crossed my arms over my chest, one hand reaching to clutch at the locket he’d grabbed, the silver still warm from his touch. His gaze flitted there, brows tightening, casting shadows over his eyes that made him look almost skeletal.

Demonic.

“Don’t worry, little girl,” he said, his words icicles stabbing deeply into my flesh. “You’re too young to be interesting enough to warrant my curiosity.”

I gaped at him for a moment as he turned and strolled fluidly out of the room, the skin between his strong shoulders marked with a long line of black tally marks.

“And you’re too old to make any sense of my secrets even if you could find them,” I called belatedly, color rising in my cheeks because he continued to get the best of me.

His soft chuckle wound like a ribbon of smoke back toward me from down the hall.

Angry, I grabbed my milk-logged cereal and a spoon before taking the snack back to my room. I ate it without tasting the sugary mush, waiting until the sounds of Tiernan leaving echoed down the hall.

I put the empty bowl on my nightstand, slid out of my twin bed and stalked down the hall to the linen closet to grab a few things before I knocked at Aida’s door.

“Tiernanny?” she called sweetly.

I gagged at the nickname, unable to imagine Tiernan letting anyone call him such an atrocious endearment.

I vowed to call him by that name the next time I saw him.

“It’s me, Mom,” I called before pushing open the door.

The windows were open, a sweet breeze carrying through the room so that nothing of Tiernan’s masculine scent remained. It was all sweet, floral Aida, who lay in the middle of the unkempt bed on her side, one leg hiked up to showcase the roundness of her bottom, one hand playing with the edge of her lace nightgown. When she saw me, she blew an errant lock of hair out of her face with a loud huff and collapsed back against her worn pink silk pillows.

“Thank God,” she cried dramatically, throwing an arm over her forehead. “I don’t think I could have handled any more of that man.”

“Ew, Mom, please don’t talk about your sex life with that…” I trailed off, unable to think of anything nice to call him.

“That tall, dark, and handsome, drink of cool water?” she suggested, peeking at me from under her forearm.

I shot her an unamused look.

Simultaneously, we dissolved into giggles.

“Come here, sweet dove,” she beckoned through her dreamy smile, the same smile that had made countless men fall in love with her.

I was no different.

No matter her flaws, her self-centeredness, and her habitual neglect, I couldn’t do anything but love my mother when she shot me that movie-star smile. It didn’t help that she used the endearment my father had given me as a girl.

I hefted the sheets in my arms higher. “I’m not getting anywhere near the bed before we change the sheets.”

Aida’s delighted laugh rang through the room, as high and clear as music from a silver flute. I grinned at her and tossed the linens into her face. She sputtered dramatically as she pushed them off her face, then erupted out of the pale pink sheets to lunge at me. I yelped as she landed against me, stumbling backward. She righted me with both arms around my torso, clutching me so tightly for a moment that I couldn’t breathe. I held still as she pressed her nose into my hair, her sigh soft and dreamy after she breathed me in.

“My dove,” she murmured, squeezing me tight. “My sweet, sensible girl. What would I do without you?”

Truthfully, sometimes I wondered the same thing. I would graduate at the end of the year, and hopefully, I’d get accepted to the school I’d been dreaming about for years.

New York University.

It has a renowned Art History program and a seriously cool Sustainable Business program at the Stern Business School.

It had been my dream since I was six years old, and my dad brought me a purple NYU hoodie on one of his visits. I’d wanted to be an art conservationist at eight, when he took me to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston on a rare vacation together. He was an important man, so when I’d expressed curiosity over an empty frame with a placard that declared it was being treated by a conservator, he’d immediately secured us access to that department.

I could still remember the sharp scent of varnish and turpentine in my nose, the careful, steady hands of the man bent over a Gustav Klimt painting. I’d watched raptly as the man carefully peeled back the layers of dirt and the patina of time from the old canvas. One side was dull and grey-brown, the other slowly coming to life in vivid color the way it had looked at its inception.

It was magic.

The purest form I’d ever seen.

Something about it resonated with me then as it did now. The idea that with careful dedication, you could unearth your truest self even after years of brutal wear and tear.

It gave me hope.

Then there was the wider appeal, the more pragmatic pull of studying business with a concentration in sustainability and environmental science. I’d spent hours touring the Texas countryside with Dad, learning all about the family history as an oil and gas conglomerate, but also about his burgeoning desire to make a change. It was impossible to ignore the disastrous impact of global warming over the course of my life, even in the oil state that tried to disregard it. The Crosby chemical plant fire, the uncharacteristic winter freeze of 2020 that left thousands without food and water, the burst pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico that caused a massive ocean fire the press appropriately named “Eye of Fire” because it looked as hellacious as Sauron’s eye from Lord of the Rings.

These things made an impact on me because they made an impact on my dad and I idolized him from the first moment I could cogitate.

I organized recycling initiatives at my high school, protested the pipeline at the Two Rivers Camp and many others, while also winning a state-wide science fair for my research project on carbon emissions from cattle farms.

Making the world a green place became Dad’s mission at the end of his life.

And so it became my own.

Together, I had two wildly different dreams and I didn’t care much where I might land between them, because I knew I’d never be without passion for either. All I knew for sure was that I was unwilling to give up the opportunity to pursue either at New York University if I was lucky enough to get in and secure a full ride.

Not for Aida.

Maybe not even for Brando.

For once in my life, I wanted something for myself.

So yes, I wondered what Aida would do without me, because that time was coming whether she suspected it or not.

“You’d be fine,” I assured her, stroking through her cloud of soft, pale hair. “You were fine before I was born.”

“I had your father.”

I winced slightly, because that was true. Aida was not a woman who was good or happy taking care of herself.

“That’s why I’m so grateful I found Tiernan,” she said in that wistful way of hers. “He wants to move us to New York.”

“New York!” I pulled back from my mother in shock, my mouth as round as a bullet hole straight through my skull. “Mom, you can’t be serious. You don’t even love the guy.”

She frowned at me, then smoothed the crease between her brows with a finger because she was worried about wrinkles. “Don’t ‘Mom’ me, dovey. Of course, I’m serious. He has money. Loads of money. And he’s nice to me. I know you don’t like him because you think he is some threat to your father’s memory.” She paused to issue a long-suffering sigh. “But he wants us to be a family.”

“He wants you in his bed and Brando and me locked up out of sight in some attic,” I argued, shivering at the idea.

“You’ve always had a silly imagination.”

“If I’m silly, I got it from you,” I snapped, then watched as Aida’s wide, blue eyes filled with tears.

I sighed as she shifted away from me, stripping the sheets from her bed in jerky movements punctuated by sniffling.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I was. I’d learned a long time ago that I was more of the adult in our relationship. It was part of her charm; she was childlike with wonder and sweetness, excited to please and eager for affection and attention. She didn’t mean ill ever and so it felt churlish for me to get angry with her.

She couldn’t change her nature.

My father hadn’t been able to change his even though he tried.

It was safe to say, people were incapable of change and I could live with that even if it wasn’t always ideal.

I shuffled up behind my mom as she bent to tuck one end of the fresh sheet under the mattress and wrapped my arms around her.

“I love you,” I murmured against her silk-covered back. “I wish you knew how lovely and capable you were. You don’t need a man to help take care of you, of us.” I paused, chewing my lower lip. “Don’t I do a good enough job of that?”

She straightened, tugging my arms even tighter around her belly so she could hug them. “You are a wonderful daughter. But, well, you can’t keep us safe the way a man can. You can’t make us rich and secure the way a man can, dovey. It’s just that simple.”

“It’s not the 1950s anymore,” I grumbled even though I knew there was no persuading her. “I could make us rich.”

“By studying art conservatism?” she asked, patting my arm. “No, honey. You chase your dreams and I’ll chase men, okay? Everything I do, I do so that you can be happy. Tiernan could get you into the best schools in the country.”

“I could study sustainable business and I don’t need his help getting in.” I bristled at the very idea.

“He could afford the tuition at NYU,” she coaxed, shifting in my hold to face me so that she could take my face in her hands. “You could stop working and focus on your studies…maybe it would even give you time to date. Your face is too beautiful to be hidden behind a textbook all the time.”

“There is financial aid.” There was no way in hell I’d willingly take money from Tiernan. I had a feeling every single dollar came with strings attached.

Aida let out a beleaguered sigh. “Really, Bianca, are you so determined to hate him that you can’t see how he could change our lives? Do you like living like this? Paycheck to paycheck. Wondering if we can afford the next time Brando ends up in the hospital?” She hesitated in her tirade, her eyes narrowing at my inadvertent reaction.

She’d hit on the only thing that mattered to me.

Brando and his well-being.

A slow smile spread slick as smeared butter across her cheeks. “You know, he could pay for the best doctors, the best treatments for Brando. And he has connections. I bet he knows someone who knows someone who could get him cutting-edge treatments.” She paused, her face thoughtful as she struggled to remember some of the research I’d shared with her over the years. “Maybe even laser therapy.”

“Laser interstitial thermal therapy,” I corrected automatically, but the fight had gone out of me.

Brandon had been diagnosed with epilepsy when he was a toddler. He was on a cocktail of drugs and a ketogenic diet to reduce the frequency of his grand mal seizures, but they still happened about twice a month. The teachers at his school knew how to handle the situation, but he was so drowsy and weak after an episode that either Aida or I had to leave work or school to pick him up and take him home. Every single time I got a call about him, I worried that would be the one where he hurt himself irrevocably. Once, he’d hit his brow on a coffee table. Another time, he’d fallen down a flight of stairs on the way to the kitchen. It was the main reason we lived in a single-story home.

With the diet and drugs, we could manage his epilepsy.

With surgery—expensive and dangerous enough we would only feel comfortable going forward with a top doctor—Brando stood a chance at eradicating the illness entirely.

My baby brother could have a life free of fear and worry.

My heart burned in my chest, ablaze with reluctant hope.

If Tiernan could buy Brando’s peace, I’d give him anything he wanted.

As if summoned by our thoughts, my little brother appeared in the doorway, shuffling in from the hall with his eyes so squinted against the low lamplight, you couldn’t see his brilliant blue irises. His blond curls were tangled and overlong, flopping across his forehead, sticking up at odd angles.

Tears smarted the backs of my eyes as I looked at him, love a hard knot in my throat.

Yeah.

I’d do anything for that kid.

“Whasgoingon?” he slurred, rubbing a fist against one eye, the other carrying his beloved Iron Man action figure.

“Sorry, bud.” I moved over to him and lifted him into my arms. He was small for his age, still easy to cart around even though he was old enough now he didn’t allow it unless he was sleepy or post-seizure. I pushed my nose into the curls over his ear and breathed in his sweet scent. “We thought we’d have a sleepover.”

“Really?” he whispered hoarsely, eyes popping wide. “I love sleepovers.”

I laughed. “I know. Mom and I just made the bed so you can crawl right in.”

Without hesitation, he squirmed out of my arms and jumped into the clean sheets with a sleepy, little giggle. Aida watched him with a mix of regret and tenderness. She had never gotten over her embarrassment that she’d given my father a son with a brain condition.

Brando had been diagnosed three months after Dad died, so I didn’t get why she focused on that so much. Dad would have loved the little man he was growing into, curious and smart, eager to learn and explore.

Just like Dad.

Aida visibly shook off her melancholy and crawled into bed with him, snuggled him tight into the curve of her body, blowing a raspberry on one of his plump cheeks. He squealed, writhing in her hold.

My heart ached as I watched them and my shoulders felt so heavy, I couldn’t move.

I wanted to give them both the world. It didn’t matter that Aida was our mother and twenty-eight years older than me. It didn’t matter Brando was my brother and not my son.

They were my family and my responsibility.

So, even though it rankled, I knew I had to give Tiernan a real chance because he could make both of them happy and safe in a way that, right now, I couldn’t.

It was a risk, but one I would always be ready to make because I’d sell my soul if it meant Aida and Brando could know a life free of stress and worry, scarcity and sickness.

“Come join us, dovey,” Aida beckoned with a soft, little smile, this one slightly crooked. It was a smile she only used for her kids. “What a treat I get to sleep with both my babies.”

A tremulous smile claimed my mouth, but I paused for just one second more. Something about this night and this moment, the knowledge of our possible move to New York with Tiernan felt final, like the closing of a chapter.

Our life had changed irrevocably and horribly after Dad died and I had the sense now, as I did then, that it was going to shift again. I could only hope it would be for the best.

I joined my little family in the pink sheets, curling around Aida’s back, wrapping my arms around her so that I could tangle them with Brando’s, both of us bookends against her body. Despite her shortcomings, both of us loved our mother.

We didn’t have much choice.

She was all we had left.

Even though she didn’t know what she would do without me, I felt the very same about her. In the roller coaster of ups and downs that was my life, Aida Belcante was my one constant.

And I vowed right there, holding the two most precious people in my entire universe close as they fell into a swift and deep sleep, that I would be their constant no matter what.

Even if it meant giving up my dreams.

Even if it meant inviting Tiernan into our home for good.