Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tiernan

Isat in the shadows of my office, even the moonlight obliterated behind thick clouds as an autumn storm raged outside the windows of Lion Court.

I’d just taken Bianca Belcante’s virginity.

The feel of her snug walls hugging my aching cock, the scent of her sweet, young cunt and her sugary perfume in my nose, the…emotion she’d invoked inside me still lingering in my hollow chest like a single rose in a large vase.

After I gave her my hoodie to cover up the wreck I’d made of her clothes, we’d walked back to the house in silence. But our arms brushed, fingers catching on fingers as we moved too close together, drawn back to each other again and again like magnets. We parted ways in the somber, echoing chamber of the front hall, her face all cast in shadow as she stared up at me. I didn’t need to see her features to know what she was asking me with those siren’s eyes.

What does this mean?

Do we still hate each other?

Did you mean what you said? Am I reallyyours?

I didn’t have any answers, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, like a coward and a fool, I’d stalked off to my office and sat in the dark to brood.

She’d scared me tonight.

When Walcott said she wanted to go for a jog, I’d said no unequivocally. Of course, the little brat had taken off already. By the time I logged in to my account to track her phone, finding her on the same street as the Constantine Compound, I thought I’d have a fucking coronary. When I reached the house ten minutes later, she was gone, the grounds behind the gate empty and still.

It would be…annoying if my investment in Bianca didn’t pay off. If I couldn’t use her as a tool of destruction against my enemies.

But that wasn’t why I fucking panicked thinking about her wandering the streets of Bishop’s Landing, as beautiful as it was deadly, like a lamb in a flock of wolves.

I cared.

Some old, atrophied part of me had started to revive itself the moment I locked eyes on that velvet blue gaze, growing and stretching every time Brando laughed, each time Bianca opened her mouth to spar with me. They were…reviving me, bringing me back from the death I’d had at twelve when Bryant forced me to take his belt in my fist and bring it down on innocent flesh and again when Grace took my future with her to the grave when I was just seventeen.

I felt like Lion Court, old and empty but for relics and memories no one else gave a shit about, but suddenly filled with noise and energy, with the vibrant presence of two blond-haired Belcantes.

I scrubbed a hand over my face, my thumb catching on the puckered line of my disfiguring scar. Sarah and Bryant hired private tutors after I’d been cut open ear to mouth by the belt, too ashamed to have a son with such a deformity out for the world to see. No one knew a thing about the third Morelli brother. I wasn’t in the gossip rags or newspapers like Lucian and Leo, like Sophia and Eva.

I was as dead to society as I was emotionally.

But here I was feeling.

Here I was feeling something when I had a plan to re-enter society for the first time in decades to introduce Bianca Belcante as my ward and the bastard child of Lane Constantine. I had the DNA test proof in my top drawer, the original birth certificate Lane had been too much of an idiot to burn.

I still hadn’t found any sign of a hidden will other than that letter he’d written in perfect script to Aida when Brando was born, promising to look after them for the rest of their natural born lives. I’d discovered it in a silver jewelry box on Aida’s nightstand in Texas, hidden beneath expensive gifts from Lane she’d been too avaricious to sell to pay for Brando’s medical issues or Bianca’s college fund. There were tearstains on the page, his or Aida’s, I wasn’t sure and it didn’t matter. The whole letter reeked of love and sincerity.

I needed that damn codicil in order to steal one of the Constantines’ most lucrative companies out from under them, but I found myself wanting it for other reasons.

I wanted it for Bianca and Brando. They deserved to know their father hadn’t intended to leave them destitute and alone, that he’d had a plan for them. That he cherished them.

Every child deserved to know if their parents loved them or not.

It was easier once you did, either way.

More than that, there was some small part of me that wanted to be the one to find that adjusted will, to hand it over to them like some kind of hero. So Brando would look at me like he did today when I gave him Picasso, as if I hung the moon and the fucking stars. As if I was his personal Superman. So Bianca would get that look in her eye she had sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking, the same look she got when she studied the Picasso in the hall down from her room. Admiration and adoration.

Pathetic.

Ridiculous.

I knew what kind of man I was, and it had nothing to do with princesses in locked towers and noble fucking steeds.

I was the shadow king of New York City.

It was dangerous to play at being anything else.

But Bianca made me feel human and what an idiot I was for indulging such weakness.

I pulled up my online bank account on a remote server, the one I hid in Switzerland under a shell company within a shell company. The one I used to harbor the millions of dollars I made for Bryant, because of Bryant over the last twelve years.

I didn’t need his fortune.

I didn’t need his love.

But all these years I stayed by his side, out of fear and duty, but something more. Something Bianca and Brando’s presence had made me aware of.

In a fucked-up way, I was closer to Bryant than my siblings. His enforcer. His knight moving across the board at his behest. He might not have loved me or respected me like the others, but he did trust me.

That had been enough.

Despite his villainy, the many ways he’d stolen from me through my life, first my siblings, then Grace and my future as a different kind of man, I’d stayed with him because he was all I knew.

And after what I did to Carter, what I let happen to Grace, I thought I deserved that.

I was good for one thing, one purpose.

Destruction.

“It’s late.”

I looked up at Henrik in the doorway, coming home from a drag show in the city, the only sign of his participation the sky-high heels dangling from his right hand and a pink duffel filled with his alter ego, Henrietta Leone.

When I didn’t respond, he sighed, dropping his things on a Queen Anne sofa before he took a seat across the desk from me.

“You underestimated this,” he said, wearily, rubbing pink-polished fingers over his bald head.

“What?” I humored him, though I wasn’t in the mood.

“Who,” he corrected. “You. Them.”

I scoffed. “They’re kids.”

“Yeah.” Voice soft, eyes softer. “They’re kids, T.”

A muscle spasmed in my jaw as I clenched it too tightly together, teeth grinding. “Bianca’s seventeen with the personality of a forty-year-old soccer mom.”

This was true. She was responsible, maternal, formidable if anyone dared to fuck with her baby brother. She cared about recycling and the planet, about whether or not Leonardo da Vinci really did paint his initials into the eyes of every portrait and if Picasso and Matisse had more than a platonic friendship. Teenagers were supposed to care about hair and makeup, trends and popularity, boys.

But Bianca had all my money to play with and spent it on a minor rebellion in getting a tattoo just to fuck with me. She didn’t care about fashion or designers if continuing to wear old, oversized Greenpeace tees was any indication, and boys… No. Bianca didn’t care for prepubescent teens with acne scars and damp, fumbling hands.

She wanted a man.

Someone sure enough to use her properly, to take her to the edge and keep her there suspended in their web until she was crying those lovely tears and splitting open at the seams.

She said she hated me, and she probably did, but I knew the truth.

She also wanted me.

“She’s a woman,” I concluded after a brief pause, almost to myself.

Henrik’s eyes bored into me, his perceptiveness as annoying for our personal relationship as it was a boon for my business.

“Maybe now,” he mused. “Maybe you’ve made her a woman. Maybe she’s making you want to be a man.”

“A man, not a monster?” I joked, but the edges of my hard smile made it sound cruel and unamused.

“It’s always been your decision, Tiernan,” my best friend reminded me. “You like to think Bryant’s been in control all these years, that your sins are his, but the truth is, you stopped being his puppet the moment Grace died and you became his partner. You run the dark side of the Morelli fortune. Not Bryant. Not Sarah. Not Lucian or Leo. You.”

“What’re you trying to say?” I demanded, tugging both hands through my hair, remembering the way Bianca had done the same as she clung to me on the sand, taking me like a wanton instead of the innocent she was.

I still had her virgin blood on my cock. When I’d cleaned up in the bathroom on the way to my office, I couldn’t bring myself to wipe it off. I liked it there. The mark of her on me. Knowing she would go to sleep feeling the ache of me deep inside herself.

“I’m saying you came up with this crazy, complicated plan to get revenge for Grace, but I think you did it for yourself.”

“Of course, I did,” I snapped, teeth clanking together over the hard-bitten words. “I’m doing this for me. For my family. For Grace. The Constantines—”

“Bryant,” he shouted back, smacking a big hand on my desk. “Bryant! He is the one that wronged you. What did Winston Constantine or Perry or fucking little Tinsley do to you? Huh? They aren’t responsible for the sins of their parents who started this damned feud with Bryant and Sarah just like Bianca and Brando shouldn’t be held accountable for the sins of their father.”

“It’s too late,” I intoned, suddenly exhausted with myself, with Henrik, with this house. “The ball is this weekend and I’m taking Bianca. I want to see Caroline’s face when she realizes what is about to happen to her sterling reputation.”

I wanted Lion Court back the way it was, haunted and empty, echoing with memories I didn’t deserve to forget. There were too many voices, too many people watching me…worried about me.

It was fucking unnerving.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he repeated, then softly rapped his knuckles on the desk. “You remember what Bianca said that first day in the gym? Sometimes, violence isn’t the answer. Sometimes, grace is the best response.”

“I don’t have any grace to give,” I barked. “This is who I am, Henrik. I’m a Morelli whether I want to be or not. I’m a monster because I was born and bred to be one. Do not ask me to be something I’m not.”

Henrik didn’t bat a fucking eye at my outburst. He just watched my fingers white-knuckle the edge of my desk. My chest worked hard around air that didn’t seem to do anything to oxygenate me. After a long minute, he stood up, went to his bag and retrieved some papers. He tossed them onto the desk.

“This from the man who’s been desperate to figure out his parentage as if Bryant being your birth father or not makes a difference to the man you chose to be. Blood doesn’t mean shit unless you make it. And you know the irony is, you’re the man who taught me that when you took me in. When you made all us outcasts into The Gentlemen. Into a family bound by respect and honor,” he scoffed, turning on his heel as if the sight of me made him sick. “I found it. The connection you wanted. Lane Constantine bought a painting by Pablo Picasso a week before Bianca’s twelfth birthday. A month before he died.”

He stalked out the door, slamming it behind him so the entire bones of the old house creaked and moaned before settling back into itself.

I looked down at the paper under my head and read the words I’d been waiting for.

Child with a Dove. 1901. Pablo Picasso.

Bought by Lane Constantine from an art dealer in Monaco, then donated to The Met three days after the sale was finalized.

My heart thudded so hard it threatened to crack my ribs.

This was it.

What I’d been waiting for.

The key to the lock of the Constantines demise.

So why the fuck did I feel like throwing up?

*     *     *

“She’s late.”

I stalked back and forth over the cold floors of the entry hall as I waited for Bianca to finish getting ready for the Lane Constantine Memorial Ball at The Met. The gala started at seven and it was already nine o’clock. I’d always planned to get there fashionably late, to make an entrance, but this was pushing it.

“She’s a girl,” Brando told me sagely from the ground where he rolled around playing tug-of-war with Picasso. “They always take forever.”

Henrik chuckled from where he stood huddled with Walcott and Ezra, all of them pretending to talk business when I fucking knew they were just waiting to see Bianca in all her finery for the event.

The truth was, I was agitated by exactly that and not our lateness.

I’d barely slept the last few days as I prepared for my plan to go off without a hitch. Lawyers were ready to tackle the will if I found it where I assumed the clever Constantine bastard had hidden it, a messenger ready to courier it over to the Lombardi & Ghorbani offices as soon as it was in my possession. I’d gone to Judge Bartley to finalize my custody of the Belcantes so that assuming guardianship of Colombe Energy Investments would be absurdly easy.

I was ready for it.

What I wasn’t ready for was the sight of Bianca coming down the stairs.

I hadn’t seen much of her in the days following our torrid assignation on the beach of Bishop’s Landing. It seemed, if not easier, then infinitely smarter to stay away from her. My skin fucking itched every time I thought about that plush mouth, that sweet, wet pussy clutching at me in the same greedy manner as her hands on my shoulders. The way she’d licked my scar like a cat grooming a sore on her young. As if she could heal me with her touch.

I didn’t need the added temptation of her in my actual presence, all the memories that assaulted my waking and sleeping hours confirmed by the feel of her in the same room as me.

I’d vowed not to take her again. This wasn’t about satisfying some carnal craving.

This was about revenge. Cold-blooded, rage-hot revenge.

Finally delivered.

I was ravenous for it.

Almost as ravenous as I was each time I thought about her marshmallow-flavored kisses.

My teeth ground as I checked my Patek Philippe watch, the same one I’d worn the day I met Bianca for the first time.

“Bianca!” I roared, my voice filling the nooks and crannies of my gothic home. “Get down here now.”

“Jesus, old man, there is no need to yell.”

I froze at the sound of her voice floating down the stairs, but I didn’t look her way without taking a deep, bracing breath.

She’s just a girl, I reminded myself.

A seventeen-year-old too naïve for her own good.

“Wow,” Brando whispered into the sudden quiet, even Picasso still at his side.

“You look stunning, Bianca,” Walcott agreed warmly, almost proudly.

I wanted to scoff at him for being so enchanted, but fuck, I couldn’t blame him when I was almost terrified to look at her myself.

“Tiernan?” she called, a hesitancy in her voice that found its way under the crack of the locked door to my heart and made it pound madly. “Will I do?”

Slowly, my head swiveled, eyes narrowed as if I prepared to look directly at the sun.

And there she was.

Not a seventeen-year-old girl.

No.

She was all woman, all grace and subtle feminine power.

The dress that skimmed the lush curves of her lean body should have been ridiculous. The bottom half floated around her, all white feathers moving as if she glided down the stairs instead of stepped. The bodice was flesh-toned mesh and careful collections of diamonds and silver lace that made her shine in the light from the ancient chandelier glowing over the entryway. The light caught on her hair, spinning it to pure golden curls spilling down her back and shoulders, caught up at one side by a diamond clasp over her left ear.

But it was her eyes, done up in deep browns that made the blue of her irises seem oversaturated, too blue to exist in nature, that did me in. They sought mine across the expanse of the hall and asked a simple question that carved itself into my fucking chest.

What do you think of me?

I thought she was exquisite.

The most beautiful thing to grace the earth.

An angel descending the curved staircase into hell, into the arms of a man she knew to be a monster.

It should have filled me with shame, maybe, but it was desire I felt coiling low in my belly. I was hungry for that contrast, to take that pretty painted mouth and smear her lipstick across her cheeks with the head of my cock, to watch that mascara drip off her lashes as I forced myself into her throat. I wanted to mark her all over as mine, dirty her up with the blackness of my soul and see how far I could drag her into hell with me.

I was walking forward before I noticed what I was doing, my long legs making quick work of the stairs between us. There was no idea in my head of what I would do when I reached her, but suddenly face-to-face with her perfection, my body seemed to find an answer.

My tattooed hand at her throat where diamonds should have nested, my rose ink her only adornment, and then my mouth over hers, parting her lips like a sword through flesh.

Under my palm, she trembled.

I ate at her, the beast in me hungry, voracious for every inch of her mouth, the space behind her teeth, at the back of her tongue. She clung to my elbows as I held her still and took what I pleased.

When I finally pulled away, she was panting, her lipstick kissed off to reveal swollen lips made red by the scruff of the beard I hadn’t deigned to shave off.

A low growl of satisfaction rumbled through my chest before I could stop it.

And Bianca?

She caught the noise and offered me a tiny, tremulous smile as a reward for my possessiveness.

“You like it,” she guessed, recovering her sass enough to laugh at me with sparkling eyes.

I didn’t answer her because words would only give me away. Instead, I grabbed her hand and tugged her unceremoniously down the stairs. She giggled behind me, as if my rudeness was somehow charming.

I ground my teeth together.

Walcott, Ezra, Henrik, and Brando all stood together at the bottom of the staircase with matching shit-eating grins.

“You never kissed Mom like that,” Brando noted with all the candid awkwardness of a child.

I dropped Bianca’s hand like a hot coal and shot Brando a withering look, but he had already turned his attention to his sister, murmuring about how she looked like Wonder Woman, like an Amazonian princess.

“Here,” Walcott said quietly, pulling me away a few paces to press something into my hand.

It was a flat velvet box the same dark sapphire as Bianca’s eyes.

“No,” I said immediately, pushing back at him. “Absolutely not.”

“She’s representing you tonight. The McTiernans, not the Morellis or the Constantines. She should look like the belle of the damn ball, T, not a pauper. Give it to her,” Walcott argued quietly but intractably, so the words wouldn’t reach Bianca’s ears.

He was usually the most good-natured of The Gentlemen, but today he was obstinate, jaw tensed around words carved from stone.

Fuck.

“What is it?” I muttered.

“Zelda McTiernan’s diamond locket,” he said, but I’d already known he would.

There was nothing else that would do for Bianca in that dress. Bianca on my arm.

For the ruined locket I’d stolen from her when she first arrived.

I scowled at him as I turned on my heel and went to her, tugging her away from my admiring thugs to pull her toward the door.

“Her coat!” Walcott called as I opened the door, letting the cool wind whip around our legs, stirring her feathers as if she were about to take flight.

I ignored him, pulling her by the wrist through the door, smiling wolfishly at the men inside the house as I slammed the door shut. The lion’s head rattled at me like an agitated animal.

“You seem…angrier than usual tonight,” Bianca ventured, more curious than afraid, the stupid girl.

I grunted, taking her hand again to lead her down the stairs to my Aston Martin Victor, its dark finish gleaming in the lamplight from the garden. It seemed more like Chiron’s morbid boat across the Styx than anything worthy of the fairy tale Walcott and Bianca seemed to think this night was.

“Get in,” I demanded, leaving her at the passenger side door without opening it.

She hesitated, then opened the door and carefully sat down, arranging her feathers so that they spilled through the interior, across the small space between us. Her scent was just as invasive, something sweet that reminded me of the way her mouth tasted after she ate those horrible Lucky Charms.

She didn’t try to make further conversation as I started the car and peeled out of the drive, spitting gravel from the spinning tires. Instead, she fiddled with the music system until her phone was connected, rich music with a resonate bassline like a heartbeat filled the car.

My hands clenched the wheel too hard, sweat slicking my grip. She was everywhere. In my thoughts, in my nose, beside me like an angel sent to earth to tempt me.

I wanted to rip her dress to shreds and fuck her among the feathers.

My gaze kept slipping over to her, the curve of her profile in the spinning lights of Bishop’s Landing’s streetlamps, the elegant line of her throat where I could just faintly detect a hickey I’d left there on the beach hidden beneath layers of makeup.

Something animal in me roared in primal satisfaction.

I was half hard imagining fucking her before the ball so my cum would leak out of her as I introduced her to society as mine.

No, no.

Not mine.

Lane’s bastard.

Lane’s mistake and Caroline’s shame.

Bianca shifted, twisting her hands together. I caught a flash of the tattoo, finally uncovered and healed, on the inside of her wrist.

I grabbed her fingers with one hand and turned them over so I could see it more clearly. She let me.

It was a dove, one stylized like Picasso’s famous white bird mid-flight, meant to represent peace.

When I looked up at her eyes, they were dark, sheened with reflections from the streets we breezed through on the way to New York.

“My father,” she explained quietly. “He called me his dove.”

Of course, he did.

Child with a Dovemade even more sense in that context.

“You speak of him like he was good to you,” I said cruelly, taking a corner too fast so she was flattened against the doorframe. “Yet he left you and your family with nothing.”

She was quiet for a long moment, only the music and a matching tension throbbing between us.

“He had his reasons.”

“And you know this how?” I demanded, suddenly angry with her faith, with her unshakeable belief in her father when he’d ultimately let her down as all parents did.

She shrugged one bare shoulder, the long arms of her dress glittering silver. “He was preoccupied with keeping us safe. We might have been poor, but we were safe in the end.”

“Safe from whom?” I pressed, prying for her secrets like a crowbar wedged in the wall of a safe. I was done with subtle, I wanted her mysteries spilled across my lap like diamonds.

She bit her lip, still reddened from my earlier kiss. I hoped it was sore, bruised from me. “He was a…powerful man. When I was little, back when we lived in Upstate New York, one of his business rivals found us. Found me. He cornered me at school, told me my dad needed to see me, but I’d never met him before and there was this look in his eye.” She paused, searching for the word as if it were written in her palm. “This wild desperation. When I didn’t go willingly, he forced me into his car and took me to some house a town over from us. I remember him talking on the phone, telling someone he had me.”

I realized I was holding my breath as blind fury raced through me like a lit fuse. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never did find out. He kept me there for two days in a room with a bed and a saucepan to pee in. In the end, my dad came for me. I knew he would.” She looked out the window, her hand going to the base of her throat where her locket had once lain. “He was my hero.”

If I hadn’t been furious at the thought of Bianca stalked and kidnapped by an unknown assailant, I would have snorted at the idea of Lane Constantine being anyone’s hero. He was as savage as the rest of us under that thin gold coating of good manners. Instead, I gripped the steering wheel so tightly, the leather-wrapped plastic creaked ominously.

I’d have Henrik find the motherfucker the same way I’d ordered him to find Aida’s ex-boyfriend who had back-handed her. And then, I’d end them both myself.

“He moved us after that, to be safe. Stopped spending so much money on us.” A hesitation like a hiccough. “Stopped spending so much time with us.”

“Sounds like an asshole to me,” I grated out as we whizzed over the bridge and finally broached the outer ring of Manhattan. “You’ve romanticized a ghost, turned him into something he never was.”

“What would you know about it?” she asked, suspicion laced through her tone. “You speak as if you knew him.”

“No,” I muttered darkly. “I didn’t know him.”

The truth was, I’d heard rumors that Lane Constantine was a good father. It fucking rankled me to know that he’d loved his kids while Bryant had not. No matter what I did, what he took from me to force me to live in his shadows, I’d never be good enough for my father because I wasn’t really his.

I didn’t want to be good enough for him anymore.

I wanted to be good enough for my brothers and sisters, even Leo, who’d abandoned his protection of us for long enough for me to be forced to take a belt to Carter on my nightmarish twelfth birthday.

That was why I was doing this, driving Bianca toward her humiliation and the Constantines’ public shaming.

For my siblings and for the name of my real father.

If I could just know him, maybe I could finally shake the yoke of Bryant from my shoulders and become a different kind of man.

We were quiet after that, each of us mired in our own thoughts. It was only when we approached The Met that she murmured, “I think it was a Morelli who took me, or one of their henchmen. I have nightmares sometimes about the face of the man who took me.”

Ice water poured down my spine. “What makes you think that?”

“When he talked on the phone, he mentioned he was doing it for the sake of the family. Capital ‘T,’ capital ‘F.’ He mentioned the name Bryant.”

My head rang as if I’d been hit at the temple with a baseball bat.

Had someone in the family tried to abduct Bianca as a girl? To what fucking end? To humiliate Lane and Caroline? To blackmail them for money?

Was that person still out there, waiting and watching for Bianca to reappear?

If it was Bryant, who the hell would he have trusted with the task if not me?

“I think you just passed it,” she said softly and I noticed we were half a block beyond the turnoff for the museum.

I sucked in a controlled breath, hoping it would calm the tornado ripping through me.

Was I putting Bianca in danger by outing her to society?

I had refused to think about what would happen after.

After she found out I was Tiernan Morelli.

I hadn’t known she had this history with my family, this full-bodied fear. She wouldn’t trust me after this, wouldn’t stay in my house a moment later. She couldn’t take Brando from me, not really, but she was almost eighteen, she could file for emancipation or run away.

My chest filled with acid, burning and tight. She’d be alone and vulnerable to my enemies, to the Constantines’ enemies, to the Constantines themselves.

What would they do with Lane’s bastard daughter? A daughter who stood to inherit a substantial amount of Lane’s holdings.

“Tiernan,” she called a moment before a soft hand traced the length of my puckered scar beneath the flimsy cover of my beard. I shivered at the intimacy, pulled from my paralysis. “Thank you for bringing me here tonight. It means more than I can tell you.”

“It’s nothing.” My voice was shredded.

Her hand dropped to her side, but she smiled at me, a little shy but feeling bold. “You know, I’m almost certain you aren’t as much of a monster as you make yourself out to be.”

I snarled at her. Why the fuck did people keep implying that?

She didn’t flinch at my gesture or when I reached out to crumple her silken curls in my fist. When I brought her close, leaned over the console between us, her lips fell open like my aggression was the key to the lock of her arousal.

I didn’t kiss her though. I breathed against her parted lips, panting with the exertion of holding still while conflicting emotions raged war inside me.

“You’re a silly little thing if you believe I’m anything short of evil,” I warned her, because it was true but also because I was suddenly desperate for her to understand. I needed her to know she’d laid herself prone on my altar and all I intended to do was sacrifice her with a knife to the belly.

Her eyes were black in the shadowed car as she reared forward and caught my lower lip between her teeth. She pulled it taut, scraping her teeth along the sensitive flesh, then flicking her tongue along the parted seam of my mouth.

“Evil tastes good,” she concluded.

The simple gesture, intensely sexual from such an innocent girl, made my blood turn to magma, scorching me from the inside out. I got out of the car without ceremony, almost scrambling in my haste to get away from the sudden siren.

I needed my head on straight.

This wasn’t about her.

This was about Bryant.

About learning the truth about my birth.

About getting peace for Grace.

About my family seeing I was a vital part of their Morelli institution.

“Tiernan,” Bianca called as I rounded the car, having opened her own door.

I tugged her out without ceremony. We were late enough that the red carpet was empty, the paparazzi dispersed, the partygoers inside deep into the champagne. After closing the door, I dragged her behind me up the shallow steps to The Met’s glittering entry where a man waited to collect our tickets.

“Wait,” she demanded, tugging back at my hand so we paused halfway up the stairs. “Tiernan, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” I growled, slowly losing my mind as I stepped down to loom over her. “What’s going on, Bianca, is that you’re driving me mad.”

She licked her lips unconsciously, aroused by the threat of me bearing down on her. “Why?”

“Because you aren’t like them,” I ground out, hating that she was nothing like her father or Caroline or any of their horde. “You aren’t like anyone.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It’s hell,” I snapped. “I had plans, goddammit.”

Something shifted in her eyes, that clever brain finally cluing in. “Plans for what?”

I breathed hard through my nose as my eyes scraped over her face, noting her loveliness, the tenderness in her eyes. I was being rude, terrifying, bullying her just because I was surly and unbalanced, but she didn’t care.

I’d only ever been my worst self with Bianca, yet she still seemed to search for something in me, see something in me that gave her hope.

No, not hope.

My chaos and aggression, it brought her peace.

Without realizing it, my hand grabbed her wrist, thumb tracing the raised skin of her dove tattoo.

“I had plans,” I repeated, clutching her chin with my free hand, angling her head so the lights from the museum spilled onto her face, honey over porcelain. “But you damned them all to hell.”

“I’ve found hell’s not such a bad place to be,” she whispered, her gaze locked on my mouth as she raised on her tiptoes in her tall heels, bringing her inches from my lips. “Not with you.”

She kissed me then, for the first time.

Taking my mouth in a deep embrace, coaxing my tongue out to tangle with hers, hands locked around my neck to bring me deeper into her. She tasted like sugar, sweet and warm melting in my mouth.

I wanted her, I couldn’t deny it.

I wanted to keep her for myself, hoard her in my cave-like home for my pleasure alone like a dragon hiding treasure.

But I didn’t deserve that.

Her goodness, her beauty, her warmth.

Even if I did, I had a plan with so many roots it was impossible to imagine digging it out of myself now.

I wrenched myself away from her, staring over her shoulder so I wouldn’t get lost in those dilated eyes, those open, swollen lips.

“Come.”

She came, following after me as I led her the rest of the way up the stairs, through the main lobby and up more stairs, following the din of the party. I accepted a glass of champagne an insistent server thrust upon me, but I didn’t follow him into the crowded hall. Bianca hesitated when I pulled her to the right instead of left down the hall toward the event, but she didn’t say a word.

Her trust burned in me.

When we entered the room where the Picasso hung, she tensed beside me and I knew she’d seen it before. I headed straight to the painting, the glean of Lane Constantine’s name glowing in the light from above the frame. She numbly accepted my untouched flute of champagne and set it alongside hers on the ground beside us.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I took my knife from my pocket and flipped it open. If I took the frame off the wall, it would trigger an alarm, so I held the frame in one hand and stabbed through the canvas at its edge with the other.

“Tiernan!” she cried, trying to pull on my arm. “What the fuck are you doing? That’s my—” She hesitated, catching herself before the reveal.

“Your father’s painting?” I asked quietly as I worked the top right edge away, then carefully followed the seam to the bottom right corner. When I peeled it back, I saw it.

Not a will.

That would have been too easy.

But a small key, taped to the lining fabric between the painted canvas and the frame support.

“What the hell?” Bianca whispered, her lax hands falling from my arm.

I plucked the key from the tape and pocketed it before turning to face her. My heart was racing, adrenaline like a drug overdose in my veins.

“Your dad left you something, Bianca,” I explained, reaching out to grab her shoulders when she took a step away. “Lane Constantine left you and Brandon a lot of money.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, more breath than sound. “How do you know my father?”

“He knows that son of a bitch because he once tried to destroy our entire family.”

That voice.

It sounded like a crater opening in the ground about to swallow me whole.

It signaled the end of this charade with Bianca, the end of the game I played against my own father.

Bryant had arrived.

Bianca swirled to face him, then instinctively took a step back, away from him and into me as if I would protect her.

Bitter humor clogged my throat.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him flatly.

Dressed in one of his perfectly tailored tuxedos, Bryant looked every inch the business magnate, the exemplary gentleman. It was his mouth that gave him away, hooked through one side in a grin as crooked as his morals.

He was going to enjoy this.

Get at the Constantines while at the same time taking me down a peg.

Taking away the only woman I’d had in my life in any meaningful way since he stripped Grace Constantine from my side.

“Bryant Morelli,” Bianca breathed, reaching back to grab for my hand, tangling our fingers together like we were some united front. “I think you should leave. We want nothing to do with you.”

His laugh was bright and brittle, the crackling of a high flame. Beyond him, outside the door, a shadowy figure waited in the hall. My father never went anywhere without protection. Normally, my presence would have been enough, but this time, I was a possible enemy.

“Speak for yourself, little bastard.” His eyes fucking danced as he gestured toward me. “The scarred man behind you is my son.”

Bianca stilled like some time lapse of a pond freezing over through the winter season, a complete hardening of each atom in her short form. She was making herself impregnable, a human shield.

It wouldn’t work.

I knew from experience.

This was going to fucking hurt.

“Bianca,” I said softly, tugging her to face me by her frozen fingers, still intertwined with mine like an afterthought. When she refused to look me in the eye, I clasped her delicate chin and forced her to tip her head up to mine. Still, her gaze was pinned just over my right ear. “Look at me.”

“A Morelli,” she whispered, her mouth barely moving, an incantation like a witch’s curse spilling out between us. “You’ve been a Morelli this whole time?”

Panic sluiced through me, but I forced it down, desperate to keep my calm, to get out of this shit show with as little damage possible done. “I’m a McTiernan too, on my mother’s side.”

“But you’re Bryant Morelli’s son.” A shiver rattled her slight body so fiercely I thought she might break bones.

“Not just my son,” my asshole father called, tucking his hands in his pockets as if he had all the time in the world for a leisurely conversation. “My right-hand man.”

I was close enough to see the pain lance through her dark blue eyes, a shooting star streaking across a midnight sky.

“I see the Morelli reputation has preceded me,” Bryant noted, sounding delighted. “Even all the way to Nowhere, Texas. Have you heard about me, little girl? I promise you, all those wicked rumors were founded on truth. What you might not know is that the man currently holding your hand executed most of those atrocities.”

“Shut your mouth,” I snapped at him, dragging Bianca behind me before I stepped forward menacingly. “You want an atrocity, Father? I’m happy to show you just how vicious I can be.”

Bryant clucked his tongue. “A cornered animal, Tiernan, is never very smart. Did you think I would come unprepared?”

From the shadows, a tall man emerged. He was leaner than me, only an inch or two shorter, but otherwise, we shared a nearly identical build, the same dark hair and rich bronzed skin.

I blinked at Carter as he stepped into the light holding a gun trained my way.

“Carter,” I breathed, struck through the heart by the sight of him after so many years, bleeding out inside my chest as old sorrows broke open and wept. “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck is right,” he mocked, adjusting his grip on the gun. “Whatever happened to loyalty to the family?”

A harsh, broken laugh carved up my throat. “You want to talk about loyalty while you’ve got a goddamn gun in my face?”

“You deserve it,” he said simply, eyes a dark and dangerous Morelli brown.

But he adjusted his gun again, hands sweaty against the slick metal. He didn’t seem entirely comfortable standing there trying to prove to Bryant and me both that he was a killer.

He wasn’t.

The fourth-born son, the one Leo had worked so hard to save from Bryant’s fists and fury. The one Lucian had policed through his youth, making sure he stayed on the straight and narrow. Carter was the one we expected to do great things, to make an actual difference in the world.

Yet here he was holding a fucking gun because Bryant knew I’d never be able to hurt him.

Not again.

“Carter,” I tried, stepping forward even though my brother shook the gun at me in warning. “Brother, don’t do this. I know I deserve your hatred, but you could hurt Bianca if you aren’t careful.”

“She’s Lane Constantine’s bastard,” Bryant scoffed. “She’s worthless except for what she can give us. Did you get the will?”

Good, the bastard hadn’t seen me take anything from behind the painting.

“It wasn’t there.”

“Bullshit,” he seethed, stepping forward himself.

We were close now, four paces between us. If I lunged, I’d be in his face, close enough to do damage. I didn’t need a weapon to incapacitate a sixty-five-year-old man, even if he was in excellent health. My body was a blade, my mind a tactical missile.

I’d put both to good use before I let them touch a hair on Bianca’s head.

I shrugged a shoulder and casually put my hands in my pockets, fingers curling around the edge of my knife. “It’s the truth.”

“It is,” Bianca interjected, holding her chin high in that natural haughty tilt she must have inherited from Lane. “My dad was far too clever for the likes of you Morellis.”

“Careful,” Carter warned. “I suggest you shut up before you make my father any angrier.”

“Make me,” Bianca countered.

“If Tiernan doesn’t have the will by now,” Bryant mused, nodding at his new thug. “We’ll take the girl.”

Carter stepped forward and I lost my goddamn mind.

He was my brother. The same one I’d wronged so terribly as a child. I could still feel the weight of Bryant’s belt in my hand, the buckle dripping with my own blood after he’d taken it to my face. Warmth fell from the blinding agony in my cheek and salt from my burning eyes, stinging as the tears settled into the ragged flesh.

Do it, Bryant said, hand squeezing at the back of my neck so hard I thought he might crack my spine. Punish him.

But hitting Carter with the belt wasn’t punishment for him. It was meant for me.

You’re nothing. You’re lucky I let you live under my roof, Bryant liked to remind me. If you want to be a Morelli, you’ll have to earn it.

Earning it meant beating Carter for talking back to our father.

When I refused, Bryant took the belt to me himself, then stood over me until I’d done what he ordered.

The past flashed through my mind’s eye, Carter begging, curled up in a corner weeping. The thickness of the leather in my palm, the way it snapped as I broke it down on Carter’s exposed back. I hadn’t hit as hard as I could have. Even at twelve, I was big for my age. But I’d done it. I’d hit him once, twice, three times, sobbing and breaking apart inside with each impact.

Bryant had let me stop, a cruel smile on his face, one of mad satisfaction.

He’d done it.

Turned my family against me and started me on my path to becoming a monster.

There was no going back after, he wouldn’t let me. Every time I tried to connect with my siblings, he intervened.

Then, I met Grace and he took her from me too.

And now, he was taking Bianca.

I let everything he’d taught me and taken from me course through my veins, all that cultivated rage and violence zigging through me.

Carter took another step, the black eye of his gun on Bianca.

I acted without thinking.

One step took me between Carter and Bianca, the gun inches from my face. Surprise flickered through my brother’s eyes, followed by the slightest darkening of dread, but I was already moving. My right hand came up and under his hands on the gun while my left grabbed the barrel. Leaning my torso out of the direct line of fire in case he pulled the trigger, I wrenched the weapon to the right, dislodging it from his grip.

Before he could get his bearings, I brought the stolen gun down over Carter’s temple in a quick, hard hit.

He crumpled to the ground, out like a light.

“Bianca,” I called out as I stalked toward Bryant who was quickly pulling his own weapon from the holster under his suit jacket. “Get the fuck out of here.”

There was a brief hesitation and then the rapid click of heels against the floor.

It crossed my mind like the shadow of an incoming storm that I might never see her again. My secret had been exposed cruelly with no time to explain. My deception plain to see. Every moment we’d had, any hope she’d harbored that I could be a good man, evaporated in an instant. Agony tore my heart into bloody, throbbing pieces.

I focused.

My gun was up and at Bryant’s chest the next moment.

But so was his, pressed into the left side of my torso, just over my heart.

A stalemate.

We stared at each other, his Morelli dark eyes sticky black, threatening to suck me into the dark.

“What now, son?” he taunted.

“You promise to leave Bianca Belcante alone,” I ground out, my heart beating slow and steady.

I’d been at the end of a barrel too many times to count. This was nothing.

Bryant cocked his head to the side. “I don’t think so. She has something I want. She has the key to tearing down the Constantine empire. Lane’s sterling reputation will be dragged through the mud, and with it, Caroline and her brood.”

“At what cost?” I demanded, digging the cold metal hard into his barrel chest. “You dragged Carter into this. What did you have to do to get him to agree to this? Is revenge really more important than your own fucking family?”

A slow, liquid smile poured across his face. “Yes.”

My own question echoed through my skull.

Was revenge more important than my family?

At first, I’d believed I was doing it for them. For the Morellis.

But why did I consider them my family when they’d done nothing but ostracize me and use me?

Technically, I didn’t even have Morelli blood running through my veins.

Neither did Ezra or Walcott or Henrik.

Neither did the Belcantes.

But they…they cared about me.

It was obvious when I let myself think about it.

They cared about me enough to take me as I was.

Man or monster.

And there I was jeopardizing it all because this fucking asshole had programmed me to believe I was worth nothing if I didn’t earn his praise.

“What are you going to do, boy? Let some Constantine trollop brainwash you into believing you belong with her? It’s all lies. You’re a Morelli. You belong with me,” Bryant taunted smoothly. “Are you so far gone that you’d shoot your own father?”

Brando’s face came to mind, the mess of blond curls and the missing-tooth smile cracked wide whenever I was near because I’d earned his admiration and adoration.

Bianca.

Her face in the dark night on the beach ravaged with pleasure I gave her.

The color of those eyes as she fought with me, as she showed me again and again what it was like to face adversity unafraid.

How tenderly she’d licked my scar, as if she wanted to heal every wound I’d ever survived.

Yes, I thought wildly, changing the course of my life in one mad moment.

“Yes,” I said to Bryant, the word a declaration of war against the family I’d been sworn to protect.

And then I pulled the trigger.