Leo pulled back, a small, private smile on his face. A smile meant for someone else. “Yes.”
Leo and Lucian left then, though Carter lingered, picking up a pair of gloves to spar with Henrik as if he did so every day.
I watched him spar and joke with my men as something broke free of the previous fallow soil in my soul and grew leaves. This was what I’d always wanted. My brothers back and hopefully, one day soon, my sisters, too. I wanted family and peace, an end to the tragedy and violence Bryant had forced on me my entire life.
I wouldn’t ask Lucian and Leo to help me strip Bryant of his lingering power over me. That was something I was prepared to do alone. But it meant the fucking world that they had my back all the same. Now, I wasn’t just putting Dad in his place for me, I was doing it for what he’d done to Leo, what he’d no doubt done to all my siblings. I’d face our tormentor and I’d take him down myself.
7
BIANCA
That night, I had nightmares of Tiernan I didn’t want to wake up from because I knew I wouldn’t see him when I opened my eyes and how fucked up was that?
He was this contradiction only my heart could decipher.
A lovely monster.
A beautiful nightmare.
I was fascinated by his cruelty and savagery as much as I was by his hard-won loyalty and infrequent but brilliant flares of tenderness and humility. Even in the depths of slumber when the mind untangled itself in long ribbons of vibrant dreams, my consciousness couldn’t make sense of my feelings for the man.
And then, as if in answer, that morning when I woke up, there was a gift on the vanity.
The French doors to the balcony were closed, the curtains barely parted, but I knew without question that Tiernan had broken into the Constantine Compound again to leave me the immaculately wrapped present tied with a crimson red bow. A red rose was slotted beneath the satin fabric and, like the one he’d had on the day he showed up on my doorstep in Texas, this too was resplendent with sharp thorns.
I smiled despite myself as I carefully brought the bloom to my nose and inhaled the rich floral perfume. The small white envelope wasn’t addressed, but the cramped hand-written words written within the blank card were undoubtedly for me.
I’ve made you bleed since the moment I met you, but now I’m bleeding out without you.
It wasn’t signed with a name. Instead, a neatly pressed bloody thumbprint marred the bottom of the cardstock.
Maybe to another girl, or a Bianca from an earlier time, the words would have been too dark or too cliché, but in that moment, I was certain I’d never read, seen, or conceived of anything more romantic than that proclamation. That beautiful whorl of a blood-stamped finger print.
This was how a violent man proclaimed his affection.
With blood.
This was how a man without the proper vocabulary to express his love made his intentions clear.
I’d doubted his sincerity when he’d spoken about buying me back on the floor of my borrowed room. How could he be believed after everything he’d done? When I knew he’d sought out Aida then taken Brando and I solely to suit his own needs for revenge against our Lane.
I still didn’t know why he felt the need for revenge or when he had decided not to go through with his original plan. Why he hadn’t gone through with it.
But staring at that thumbprint, feeling the shifting of my something fundamental in my soul like shifting tectonic plates, I knew something with absolute and terrifying certainty.
My fingers were numb as I pulled out my cell phone and swiped through my contacts to Tiernan’s number.
It only rang once.
“Little thing,” he practically purred. “Did you have sweet dreams about the monster under your bed?”
Normally, I might have laughed and rolled my eyes, but my entire focus was on the card pinched in my trembling hands.
“I hate you,” I declared with surprising conviction even though my heart was turning over in my chest like a key in the lock of a heavy door that pushed open suddenly at the pressure and sent me falling.
Falling for him.
The enormity of the revelation threatened to consume and the only thing keeping me anchored was that card, that print, the hushed murmur of Tiernan’s breath through the phone line.
“I think you understand me too well too hate me,” he countered calmly.
In the background, I could hear the low murmur of one or more of The Gentleman and the high octave of Brando’s trilling laugh.
“Is that Brando?” I whispered through the cataclysm rocking through my chest cavity.
“He bullied me into making getting two trees,” Tiernan admitted ruefully. “Ezra’s just set one up in the entry hall and the other in the living room. We’re making…” he paused and I could picture the look of self-mockery on his face, “popcorn to string from the boughs.”
A startled laugh burst from me like machine gunfire. “You aren’t.”
“This is not something I’d brag about,” he drawled.
In the wake of my laughter, I felt hollow and alone, a tumble weed blowing across a barren landscape. “I wish I was there.”
“Come home,” he said and I could hear the effort it took him to play casual, to form the words without ordering me. “Stop the bleeding, Bianca, and come the fuck home.”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“A single rose and a thumb print aren’t going to erase all the lies you’ve told,” I countered, relieved to feel a surge of anger. Anger I could understand more than this bone deep ache for a man it wasn’t permissible for me to love. “I don’t even know why you did it. Why you took us in to get revenge on a man who has been dead for five years.”
There was a long pause punctuation with Brando screaming in delight in the background.
Missing my brother deepened my aching and yearning so acutely tears bloom along my lower lids.
“I won’t forgive a man I know nothing about,” I warned him, but what I really meant was ‘I won’t love a man I know nothing about.’
His sigh crackled over the phone. “I’ve kept secrets for some many years I’ve become a vault. It’s not in my nature to share things, but to hide them.”
I could relate to that in a strange way.
I was Bianca Belcante because I had to hide who my father was. I spent the last ten years in Texas then lied to Tiernan about my history for the same reason. Even with Aida, I’d been a false sense of self. Someone harder, more somber and bitter than the woman I wanted to be.
Ironically, it was only heated by the flame of my hatred for Tiernan I’d begun to discover what it was like to truly be me. To fight for who and what I wanted and deserved.
“I can’t say I don’t understand, but I still need answers if who want anything more to do with me.”
“I want everything to do with you,” he replied instantly, easily, and it was so shocking to hear such sweet words in such a habitually cruel and filthy mouth that they hit me like hammer strikes. “I’ll answer your questions, Bianca, but I won’t do it on the phone. When I see you on Friday, I’ll tell you what you need to know.”