Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tiernan

Bryant Morelli could have been on a poster for a Hollywood movie about Wall Street just as much as he could have appeared on one about the mafia. There was no doubt he exuded wealth, power, and virility. It was evident in the expensive power suit he wore from the time he took breakfast in the great dining room to the hour before he went to bed, in the expensive watches and penchant for foreign whiskey, cars, and cigars. But he had never been able to successfully hide his baser origins. He worked out religiously every morning, lifting weights sixty-something-year-old men usually left to younger generations. As a result, he was thick through the neck and shoulders, his hand quilted with muscle and some calluses that seemed at odds with his suave businessman persona. He was born poor to parents with high expectations for their eldest son and they’d raised him to be thirsty. So thirsty, that even decades later, having amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the United States, he was still parched, still driven to seek water from every possible well.

I knew him well enough to know what I believed my brothers did not. He would never “retire” the way he claimed he already had. There was a restless hunger in him that would never be satisfied. He had simply transferred his office from Morelli Holdings Inc to Morelli Manor in Bishop’s Landing, where he conducted business as usual.

He was a secretive man, but I knew his schedule and his habits better than almost anyone else. Certainly better than his wife or his prodigal elder sons. I knew him because while he would never call me his right-hand man, I was something far more intimate.

I was Bryant Morelli’s favorite weapon.

“I don’t like this shit,” he was saying as he adjusted the large, framed family photo on the edge of his desk. It was taken by the same woman who photographed the British royal family. I wasn’t in the picture. Bryant had sent me out of town on an “errand” and forgot to mention the shoot until two weeks later when the frame showed up on his desk and I’d asked about it. “Leo’s shacked up with that filthy Constantine, Haley, and he’s pushing for Ronan to get on his payroll… He has no respect for the Morelli name acting this way.”

I didn’t respond. He was on a tirade and I’d learned a long time ago not to interrupt him in his anger. My fingers itched to touch the scar tightening the skin on my left cheek, but I curled my hand into a fist to resist the temptation.

Bryant liked to see me haunted by it and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“What are you doing to bring down the Constantines?” he asked me point-blank, those Morelli family brown eyes dark as tar. “You keep promising me Caroline’s head on a silver platter, but so far, I don’t see any evidence of your success.”

He grunted as he sat back in his chair and regarded me the way a scientist might a bug under glass. “You never tire of disappointing me, do you, Tiernan?”

I’d spent years hardening myself against his cruelty, but no matter what, there always seemed to be a crack in my armor, a minuscule opening for his poison to inject itself into my blood.

At this point, it hurt my pride more than anything. I’d taken Bryant’s old loan-sharking business and turned it into an entire underworld kingdom of illegal gambling dens, underground fighting, sports rigging, and real estate fraud. I’d made the family twenty-six million dollars last year on one scheme alone.

And still, I disappointed him?

“I found something,” I said, before I could curb the anger that gave birth to the words. “Something about Lane Constantine’s ex-mistress.”

Bryant scoffed. “Hell, we all have mistresses. Well, everyone except for you. Still can’t get it up for anyone, boy? Grace’s been gone for over a decade now.”

“Don’t say her name,” I snapped, the words shooting from the chamber of my lips before I could click the safety.

He laughed, loud and long, slapping one thick hand against his desk as he finally trailed off. “You’re so easy, Tiernan. Even after all this time, you can’t stand the mention of that girl.”

I couldn’t stand the mention of her name in his mouth.

“This is different,” I continued through clenched teeth, my jaw spasming under the pressure. “Lane might have left her something.”

Someone else might not have seen the infinitesimal hitch of breath through Bryant’s barrel chest, but I’d studied him for so long, it seemed obvious to me.

I’d caught his interest like a hook through his suddenly slack mouth.

“What makes you assume that?” he asked, trying to keep the suspicion from his voice.

If I wanted to show all my cards, I could have assured him that Bryant’s own mistress and two bastard children were safe, at least from me. For now. But it seemed like a good idea to let him sweat, wondering if I knew about Madison Bailey and her kids.

“Do you remember Colombe Energy Investments?”

“The green tech company? Sure.”

“It was a subsidiary of Halycon,” I said, mentioning the Constantines’ primary enterprise run by Winston, the eldest son. “But since Lane died, it’s gone into trust.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bryant mused, absently rubbing at his right knee beneath the desk. It was still cold in New York in late October and his old wound was acting up. “Doesn’t CEI hold the patent on that carbon capture technology the Canadian government wants to use for their energy initiative?”

I smiled grimly at his recall. Bryant was getting older, but he hadn’t lost a single iota of his edge. He could remember what he read in the Financial Times last Tuesday if I was so inclined to ask him.

“Yes. I reached out to a contact in Ottawa, but they were closemouthed on the project.”

“It’s interesting, but I don’t know what the hell you think it has to do with Lane Constantine’s ex-mistress.”

“I think he might have left it to her, along with an inheritance,” I admitted. “There’s not much to go off of, but I found an old letter Lane wrote to the mistress speaking of his plans for her.” I left out the fact that he had really been speaking about his plans for her children. Bryant might have played on my temper to get me to admit to my mechanisms, but I wasn’t fool enough to tell him about Bianca and Brando. For my sake, and for theirs. “He said he would set her up for life.”

“And did he?”

“I found her living one step above squalor,” I admitted.

“Bring her to me,” Bryant decided imperviously, the way a king might order his vassal.

Anger spiked hot through my veins, a douse of kerosene to the bundle of history as dry as kindling I harbored at the heart of me. I was a grown man, not a boy, and I deserved more than his dismissive authority. Lucian got Morelli Holdings, Leo got the respect of our family, and all I got were the fucking dregs.

“She’s dead.”

It was the truth, but Bryant tilted his head to lock eyes with me slowly, calculated, the way a bird might swivel its head to pin its eye on prey. He studied me for a long, vibrating moment, before reaching into his desk and retrieving something he dropped into his lap casually.

Every muscle in my body tensed.

Bryant was a man of violence and bluster. When he grew silent, you knew he was coiling like a snake to burst into action.

“I see where you are going with this, Tiernan,” he murmured smoothly, reaching over the table to extend his hand, demanding one of my own. I handed my palm to him, aware that if I didn’t, the consequences would be much worse. “But I hope you know I am at the end of my patience. First Lucian takes up with that trollop, Elaine, and then Leo with Haley Constantine. I will not fuck around any longer. People will think we are weak, soft, if we let that damned family continue to manipulate us. I want this ended once and for all. If you don’t have the means to do it, you do not have the means to stay in this family. Am I understood?”

It didn’t matter. I had my own wealth, my own shadowed prestige. So what if the upper echelons of society thought I was the disfigured, idiot thug son of Bryant and Sarah Morelli? So what if my siblings thought they were better than me?

It shouldn’t matter.

I was a grown-ass, thirty-year-old man.

But I’d been raised on rage.

On the idea that revenge was owed to us if we were wronged.

And I’d been grossly wronged.

By my own father, the same man who’d shoved that adage down my throat my whole life.

“Tiernan?” Bryant demanded, his grip on my hand tightening. “Do you understand that failure will not be tolerated? That secrets, if you are keeping them, will be sniffed out and snuffed out?”

I gave him a bland look.

“Do I need to remind you who is in charge in this family?” he asked me.

This was it.

No one ever visited the Morelli fucking Mansion if they could help it. Bryant was the dragon in this fairy tale and Sarah was the pill-popping, vapid princess in her separate tower. It was a house of horrors and none of the children that grew up between these walls were likely to forget.

Least of all me.

So, I was prepared when he moved suddenly, his free hand snapping up from his lap, the knife he’d pulled from his drawer gripped tightly in his strong fingers. With the hand that gripped mine, he splayed my palm against the marble top of his desk, intending to stab my hand, or more likely, leave a lovely bleeding wound as a reminder that he was more powerful than me and I shouldn’t forget it.

It was a ham-handed power move.

Violence as a question, instead of a response.

I gave him my answer.

The tip of the knife slashed over the back of my hand, just a graze, but the point was razor-sharp. My skin opened up under the metal, a thin ribbon of blood from knuckles to wrist. But I was moving before it could truly scar. I turned my cut hand over in his hold to grip his wrist and tug him toward me, upsetting his balance. He tried to catch himself with the hand holding the knife, flattening his palm so the blade wasn’t entirely secure.

I plucked it from his knuckles in a flash and took a step away from the desk just as he landed awkwardly over top of it.

When he looked up at me, his dark eyes burned hot and deep as coal fire.

I held the knife I’d given him for his sixtieth birthday between two fingers, dangling it in the air. “You shouldn’t use a gift against the giver, Father.”

“You shouldn’t test the alpha unless you want a fight,” he countered, righting himself calmly even though a muscle ticked like a bomb counting down to detonation in his cheek.

It was reckless of me to stand against him. I hadn’t done it so obviously in years and the giddiness of it rushed through me, making me light-headed. I wanted to laugh, at him and myself, for being so animalistic, so fucking uncivilized when the Morellis had tried for years to convince people they were the crème de la fucking crème of society.

I knew what we were and so did Bryant. It was about time I started to take back what always should have been mine.

My life.

“Hurt me again and I’ll leave the family myself,” I told him, the words heavy things clunking to the floor, land mines I was setting up between us. “You don’t need to threaten me anymore. I’ve been doing your bidding since I was twelve years old.”

“You’ve been doing it because it’s all you have to offer this family,” he reminded me. “You have none of the Morelli intelligence or beauty, you’re barely worth the name on your birth certificate. You should be glad I gave you purpose.”

“If I do this, if I disgrace the Constantines and seize control of CEI, I won’t be your henchman anymore, Bryant. I want my own assurances of that,” I demanded, flipping the knife into the air and catching it by the handle without looking to see how it spun.

He glowered at me, and whether or not he was my birth father, it was the same scowl I could catch in the glimmer of my reflection in the windowpane behind him. I knew I was playing with fire, that he was the kind of man who quite literally killed people for insubordination, but it was my one chance to get out from under his thumb without having to kill him myself.

I’d been waiting to do this for years, this Mexican standoff with a man who should have loved me, but didn’t. I’d just lacked juicy enough bait to goad him into it.

And now I had Bianca.

I could see he wanted it.

Even beneath his furrowed brow, his eyes were wide with sincere yearning. He had been almost obsessed with Caroline and the Constantines for decades. He was also the sort of man who relished wielding power over everyone else and it clearly frustrated him that he hadn’t been able to do so resolutely over our rivals.

So I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Fine, you have my word.”

But I did laugh.

“Your word means nothing to me,” I reminded him. “I’ve been at your side for long enough to know that the word of a Morelli means less than his greed. Get papers drawn up. I want out of your businesses and you out of mine.”

“Out of my will, then,” he threatened.

“You and I both know I won’t need your money if I make this happen,” I said, almost happily, because fuck, it felt good to look this man in the eye and know I had him by the metaphorical balls.

“Fine,” he allowed.

I nodded, turning my back on a man I knew to be mad because I was high on my power trip. Only when my hand was on the door did he break the moment to say, “Oh, Tiernan, you would do well to remember what every single tally mark on your back means and who you did those in service of—me. If you turn on me, boy, I’ll turn on you and hand over evidence to the police.”

“You’d never put one of your own behind bars.” Still, I looked back at him to gauge the level of his warning.

“It’s a good thing you aren’t a true Morelli, then, isn’t it?” he said, smiling pleasantly in a way that was utterly sinister.

“Did you ever stop to think that reminding me of that constantly since I was a boy might lead me to be less loyal to a family who doesn’t seem to want me?” I asked, genuinely curious, but veiling my sincerity in lethal warning. “Did you ever stop to think you trained a man to be your monster, but you never let him in from the cold? Did you ever wonder what he might find out there unsupervised?”

Before he could answer, I threw the knife, turning on my heel before I could see where it would land.

I knew without looking it embedded itself in the framed photo of the Morelli family on the corner of Bryant’s desk.