Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Tiernan

“What is this I hear about you being unreachable?”

Bryant Morelli’s voice boomed through the phone speaker on my desk, filling my office with the sound of his low, perfectly enunciated speech.

“I have a project I’m working on at the house,” I answered smoothly, affecting boredom because I knew he could sniff out a lie from across the phone, across continents. “I’ve left the McTiernan Estate in disarray for too long.”

“You should burn that dump to the ground,” Bryant declared. “Sarah’s parents never should have left it to you in the first place. You should be here so that I don’t have to waste time calling you when something needs to be done.”

Something always needed to be done.

Even though Lucian had wrested control of Morelli Holdings from him last year, Bryant hadn’t conceded defeat, not really. Instead, he’d slunk deeper into the shadows. It had been my domain for so long, I bristled at having to suddenly share with my father. I’d never spent as much time with him as I had the last twelve months, and while I’d yearned for exactly that most of my youth, the reality of “quality time” with Bryant Morelli was much different.

“I’m always available,” I told him, which was true.

A couple months ago when he’d ordered me to jump on a plane to Ireland to track down Caroline Constantine’s bulldog, Ronan, I’d done it without question even though I was in the middle of securing a rigged construction contract for the new Price Tower in New York.

Bryant grunted through the phone. “I find out you’re up to something unsanctioned, Tiernan, I’ll be very unhappy.”

Unsanctioned.

The only unsanctioned thing I’d ever done was fall in love with someone he didn’t approve of when I was seventeen. Grace didn’t deserve what happened to her simply by associating with me and perhaps, Bianca didn’t deserve what I had planned simply because she was the bastard offspring of Lane Constantine.

But life wasn’t fair.

It amused me to think of how young and foolish I’d been then.

Now, I was the one in control.

Not Bianca.

Not Bryant.

“You’re welcome to come by and help me sort Grandma Zelda’s Matisse collection,” I offered drily. “Though, I distinctly remember you saying once that art was the pastime of sloths and fools.”

He snorted. “Don’t forget the mentally unhinged. Whatever it is you’re doing, Tiernan, I expect to be kept informed. Be in my office tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

Without waiting for my reply, he hung up.

In the echoing silence that followed, the men I’d collected into my employ over the years, my inner circle the underworld of NYC called “The Gentlemen,” shifted restlessly in their seats around the room.

“It’s not going to work, you know,” Walcott informed me as he poured chilled Kona Nigari water into a crystal tumbler and set it by my elbow on the desk. “You’re going about this all wrong.”

I ignored my old friend’s remark and lifted the glass to my lips. The absurdly expensive water was smooth and cool rolling down my throat when I yearned for the harsher burn of whiskey or scotch. I’d been sober for thirteen years even though I’d never been an alcoholic to begin with, but the desire never seemed to wane. That was fine with me, the daily struggle reminded me what I had lost to alcohol and drugs when I was still just a teen.

“Bryant’s going to find out,” Henrik added. “He has a way of sniffing out everything.”

“Yes, the way is through me,” I pointed out. “So this time, I won’t tell him. He trusts me, his loyal servant, enough not to scrutinize me the way he makes me scrutinize the rest of his world.”

“Tell him you took in two innocent kids to use them against him and Caroline Constantine?” Henrik murmured, as if the decibel of his voice would soften the blow of his traitorous words. “You’re really willing to ruin two young lives to get revenge?”

“Et vindictam retribuet in alis nigro,” I quoted the Morelli family motto in Latin.

Vengeance on black wings.

We’d built our entire family history on climbing to the highest echelons of success on the backs of lucky risk-taking, so of course, we were bound to be burned on occasion, just as the Constantines had burned us decades ago. The difference between a Morelli and everyone else was that we never let betrayal go unavenged.

And I wasn’t about to start deviating from the norm now.

“They took two lives from you,” Walcott whispered, leaning forward earnestly, his scarred face creased in odd places. “I know you want Bryant’s in retribution, but you’re taking two more by involving Brandon and Bianca.”

“You just met them, what the fuck do you care?” I demanded, but my fingers tightened on the glass of useless water I raised to my mouth.

“They’re cute,” Walcott admitted with a little shrug. “Cute, but tragic.”

Like you, Ezra signed to me, following the conversation by reading our lips.

Cute?I signed back.

A little bit tragic, he corrected.

“I have nothing in common with those brats.” I was being mean, but then again, I was always mean. Cruelty felt right in my mouth, ice in my veins. But there was something shifting restlessly beneath my breastbone that made me reluctant to discuss the matter further.

I didn’t care about the cost of revenge.

I didn’t need my own men reminding me about Bianca and Brandon’s stake in the situation because it didn’t matter.

Or, it shouldn’t.

Ezra knocked his heavy fist on the front of my desk to get my attention, then signed to me when I looked over at him.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

“What are you? A fucking wise woman, now?” I snarled at him.

He blinked at me, completely unfazed by my horrible temper.

And I was. In a horrible temper.

Why, I couldn’t quite understand.

I’d laid out the rules for Bianca and taken her locket the way I’d intended. I wasn’t the kind of man to be moved by female wiles or woes. The sight of tears tumbling from those blue eyes, sticking to her long lashes, staining her pink cheeks…none of it should have perturbed me.

I’d spent most of my life being Bryant Morelli’s enforcer, the man sent to do the dirty work none of my brothers or sisters had the stomach for. Once, a long time ago, I’d balked at the violence my father had thrust upon me, but I’d paid the price for that and learned my lesson. Whenever I thought about telling him to go to hell, I just had to look in the mirror at the scar slashing across the left half of my face to remember what happened to people who dared to defy the great and terrifying Morelli patriarch.

My blood set to a low simmer as I thought about the way he’d insidiously turned my own family against me over the years. Unwittingly, my gaze snagged on the framed photo of my younger brother, Carter, and me on the bookshelf to my right. We were just kids, eleven and nine, our arms wrapped around each other, faces broken open with laughter as we recovered from wrestling in the mud after a rainstorm turned Mother’s rose garden into a swamp. A thorny stem had cut Carter under one eye and it was bleeding slightly in the photo. Years later, he still had a pale scar.

It was the last time my brother had embraced me.

The last time any of my siblings had played with me.

Because two weeks later on my twelfth birthday, Bryant had turned me into a monster.

“Tiernan.” Henrik’s rough voice cut into my disturbed thoughts. “We’ve done a lot of fucked-up things in our lives, but toying with children…? It’s not worth it.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, at all three of my friends and employees. “Do not mistake me, men. I am your boss first and your friend second. You may disagree with me, but you will not sway me. My mind is my own.”

Is it?Ezra countered, hands flying. Or is it your father’s? Your mother’s?

“Everything I do, I do for my family,” I ground out.

“Why?” Walcott asked seriously, sitting beside Henrik in the two leather chairs set before my desk. “They don’t deserve you, T.”

A dark laugh scraped up the sides of my throat like talons on its way out of my mouth.

They didn’t understand and I couldn’t exactly blame them.

Henrik was cast out of his family home at thirteen for being a gay man. Walcott had lost every single one of his friends and admirers after his accident had left him severely scarred across eighty-five percent of his body. Ezra had grown up on the streets until Bryant found him and recruited him to do our dirty work alongside me when we were just seventeen, the same age as sweet and tender Bianca crying alone upstairs.

These men didn’t have any family, let alone family like mine.

We weren’t just blood kin, just a unifying last name.

We were a goddamn institution.

Morelli against the whole damn world.

They didn’t know what it was like to be feared and hated by siblings who had otherwise banded together against the cruel forces of our parents and were thick as fucking thieves.

“Don’t say we don’t get it,” Henrik said flatly. “We know what it’s like to be shunned. You let us into your life because we get it. But you gotta get over this need to prove yourself. You made your first million eight years ago, for fuck’s sake. You don’t need their money.”

“You don’t need their love,” Walcott went on. “You got a family in us now.”

“It’s not enough,” I said simply, the words lashing out like a lightning strike, electrifying the air in the room. “Do you know what Bryant took from me? First, my family, the brothers and sisters I loved suddenly looked at me like I was the enemy. And then, as if that wasn’t fucking enough, he took Grace from me just because she’s a distant Constantine cousin…” I sucked in a deep breath of air that scorched down my throat like the phantom burn of whiskey I craved. “He took the family I could have had with her away forever.”

Henrik hesitated then squared his shoulders and said, “He wasn’t the one that killed her, T.”

“He might as well have been the one to do it!” The words ripped from my chest, the tang of blood on the back of my tongue I didn’t realize was from biting through my cheek. “He hid her from me. Depressed and alone…she couldn’t have felt she had any other fucking option.”

Only, she wasn’t alone.

Not totally.

No one but Ezra, Grace, and I knew about the pregnancy until they did the autopsy report, but I’d always wondered if somehow, Bryant found out.

I didn’t realize I’d stood up and thrown my glass of expensive-ass water across the room until the glass smashed against the door and fell tinkling to the ground. My chest was heaving, anger sparking through my limbs like an untamed current.

Violence.

This was me.

My reason for existence.

To brutalize. To curb others into submission under the dominance of my father.

He’d taken away everything I’d ever loved so I forgot the mechanics of it. So I could be his monstrous tool, his enforcer and his heartless servant.

And for years, I’d done it, because that was all I had.

I hadn’t known a soft touch from my siblings since Carter had that arm slung around my shoulders. I hadn’t known love since Bryant ripped it away from me before I was even really a man.

And despite years of hardening my heart, of sharpening my mind, I still couldn’t rid myself of the stupid human compulsion to make my siblings love me again.

So, these two seemingly contrary needs existed in tandem within me.

End Bryant and win back the respect of my sisters and brothers.

Bianca was the key to that.

Taking down the Constantines and Bryant, both of whom had terrorized us for years, would prove to them that I was on my siblings’ side while also securing my personal vendetta against them for ruining my life.

I didn’t care that she was young.

By the time I was seventeen, I’d killed two men and taken countless beatings.

Age was a number tied to the passing of time, not the maturation of the human heart.

And Bianca had taken enough knocks to be considered an old soul.

She was fair game.

Even if she wasn’t, she was my game. My golden fucking ticket to respect and autonomy.

I wouldn’t let anyone—not my friends, not Bianca with those wet, blue velvet eyes, not Brando with his funny kid-candor—get in the way of my mission.

Besides, they were offspring of the man who had tried to ruin my family and started the feud between us in the first place. He was the reason I was indentured to my father. The reason I’d been born into a war that would rage until the day Bryant died and beyond.

Using Bianca Belcante to bring down the Constantine family was the only way to bring my family peace.

To bring me peace.

And after years of fighting, that was all I really wanted.

A hug from Carter.

A kiss from Eva, Sophia, Daphne, and Lisbetta.

Respect from Lucian and Leo.

Harmony for my mother who was driven to drink and do drugs by the past and by her husband.

Freedom from Bryant’s sick, hellish games.

I looked down at the broken locket on my desk, cracked open without ceremony by a single hammer strike. Amid the cracked pieces of silver lay a note.

Two words.

La Paloma.

Dove, in Spanish.

I’d expected something more from the Constantine patriarch who was known for being mysterious and coy, for playing games better than anyone else.

Why the fuck would he leave his daughter a locket filled with such a prosaic word?

“Find out everything you can about Lane Constantine’s association with doves,” I ordered my men.

“And the locket?” Walcott had the guts to ask. “Should I look into having it repaired?”

“Absolutely not,” I snapped as the image of Bianca’s beautiful face made pale and tragic with tears filled my mind’s eye and stirred something latent in my chest, something long dead struggling to resurrect itself. “In fact, frame it broken like this, will you? I’ll give it to her as a gift for her eighteenth birthday.”

I ignored the way they looked at me, embarrassed for them. They were supposed to be my crew of mercenaries and there they were sympathizing with a wisp of a girl.

“So, what’s the plan? Beat her into submission like everyone else who crosses you or your father? Get her to find out where Lane hid millions of dollars and then what? Have her sign over the money to you because she’s afraid for her life?” Walcott asked.

“You’re forgetting the part where he introduces her to society at Lane Constantine’s Memorial Ball in April as his bastard child,” Henrik added mildly.

Ezra just stared at me with his dark eyes, condemnation written there in bold.

“I could hear her crying when I came down the stairs,” Walcott added.

“She won’t have to sign over anything. As her guardian, I will be responsible for her assets until she comes of age, which is why there is a countdown on finding this dirt. She turns eighteen in five months and the Lane Memorial Ball is in a month. I want this sorted out as soon as possible, so I can kick them out of this house.”

The hardened criminals I’d spent years corrupting and crafting in my deviant image all stared at me with identical expressions of disappointment that made my heart burn up in my chest. I rubbed absently at the pain, shocked that I cared what they thought because unlike with my blood kin, I’d never been faced with their disappointment before.

“She’s just a girl,” I reminded them harshly, somehow forgetting to include Brandon in my defense.

I liked Brando even though it ached to look at him and know that if life had gone a different way, my way, I might have known someone similar. It was easy to be good to the kid when he was sweet and funny as hell.

Bianca was a different story entirely.

She didn’t remind me of Grace, of everything I’d lost to this war between two families.

She didn’t remind me of anything.

I’d never met someone like her before, so innocent yet so full of fire. She was unafraid of me like only The Gentlemen and my cousin, Tilda, were unafraid of me. She was beautiful, but many women were beautiful. Her uniqueness lay in her artlessness, the way she moved through the world as if she thought she was invisible when every single person she passed looked at her and longed to be her or be with her.

Of course, I wanted neither, but I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t stupid.

There was some kind of magic to Bianca Belcante and if I wasn’t careful, she would infect this household with it too and bring all of our dead souls back to life.

I just had to make sure that didn’t happen.

Cruelty came easily, violence was my friend, and my heart hadn’t worked properly in years, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

But I had the ominous feeling as I stared at the critical faces of my men, as I remembered the tragic beauty of her tearstained face when I stole her locket, that I was about to embark on the hardest mission of my entire life.