When I came to moments later, Tiernan was gently cleaning me up with a silk handkerchief, his touch light between my ravaged folds. He hushed me and murmured little words of praise as he tucked his softening cock away and gently collected me off the table into his arm. I settled in his hold easily, utterly boneless and spent.
When he pressed a kiss to my forehead and then another to each cheek, I was too tired to tease him for his sudden loveliness.
“Am I forgiven?” he whispered against my lips, and that wasn’t a tease, but an aching vulnerability.
I forced my eyes open so I could look up into his equally shattered expression. “Carve my name into your chest and we’ll see, but you’re getting there.”
He chuckled, kissed the top of my head and started walking us through the casino. “Rest, my sweet thing. I’ll keep you safe while you sleep.”
“We still have to talk,” I warned, but the words were slurred with exhaustion.
“We will,” he promised. “For now, you’ve earned some sweet dreams.”
And even though there were still countless questions that needed answering, pasts that needed decoding and futures to plan, I believed him and fell swiftly in my first deep, dreamless sleep in weeks.
12
TIERNAN
Four levels below street level, there was a room I liked to use for situations like these. Concrete floors and walls, the former stained with faint rust-like splotches around the center drain from years of spilling enemy blood.
I had Santo hanging there now, suspended over that middle drain by chains manacled to his wrists. His arms were wrenched nearly out of their sockets, blood streaming down his torso from the split in his right cheekbone where my knuckles had cut through flesh.
I studied my false friend as he hung like a side of meat from the ceiling. I’d known Santo for years. He was often called in to do the work too dirty and dangerous for Bryant to pass off on even his least favorite son. In recent years, he’d joined the Belcante crime family under capo Monte Belcante, but before that, he’d been a thug-for-hire the Morelli family put to good use.
In the past, we’d strung up men exactly as Santo was now, and the irony wasn’t lost on me.
Hank had gagged him before I entered the room, and I took my time laying into him. His entire torso would be one large bruise tomorrow, but he deserved that and more for threatening and terrifying Bianca. I didn’t care if he was her uncle or fucking God himself. Anyone who raised a hand to my little thing deserved to nothing but pain and misery.
Santo took it like the man and mafioso he was, barely groaning as each of my brutal hits landed, but now he hung, swaying slightly, as if in a coma. My own body was aching from the beating, my fight against Lucian the day before, and the bullet wound still healing at the top of my shoulder so I decided he’d had enough and ripped the gag from Santo’s bleeding mouth.
I rolled my shoulders back, ridding myself of the last of the tenderness I’d felt when I was with Bianca so I could face Santo as the cold motherfucker I usually was. It was hard, after the last thirty minutes I’d spent with Bianca, with the taste of her still on my tongue even though I’d washed my hands and cock in my office bathroom like a whore after setting her sleeping form on the couch.
My old friend lifted his head slightly and glared at me from under the tangle of sweat drenched hair falling into his face.
“There was no need for this,” he told me blandly. “If you wanted to fight, I’d have been happy to have a go in the ring.”
“You put a gun to the temple of my ward, my need is for more than just a fight.” My voice was mild as I stalked over to Hank and took a bludgeon from his grip. “Do I need to extract my pound of flesh now or will you tell me what the hell you were doing first?”
Santo’s chuckle was hollow and bitter. “Your ward? Fuck.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I look away for a few years and this happens.”
“Look away from what?” I demanded, even though I had Bianca’s voice in my head saying ‘my uncle.’
“From my sister.” He shifted in the restraints even though it hurt so he could fix me with a level glare. “From her children.”
“Bianca mentioned she thought you were her long-lost uncle. Funny, in all the years I’ve known you, you never one mentioned family. The orphan taken in by the Belcante family, that’s how the world knows you.”
“You never wondered about her last name?” he countered.
“Belcante is a common enough Italian surname. It would have been a pathetic stretch to assume a widowed mistress and her two kids living in Bumfuck, Texas had any association with the New York crime family.”
“Maybe so, but it’s true.” Santo spat out a wad of blood saliva. “I’m not an orphan old man Monte took in out of the good of his heart. Aida and I were his bastard children. I think you know a little about being born out of wedlock?”
I snarled at him in response, but he only smiled thinly.
“Our mother got the hell out of town when he rose in the ranks and he couldn’t find us for years. When he did…” he shrugged. “He intended to marry off Aida for connections and make me his successor because he didn’t have a legitimate heir. Instead, Lane Constantine met my sister one day when he was negotiating with Monte and within a month, he’d taken her away.”
My brain was slower because of the recent orgasm, but I found myself connecting the pieces of the story in quick succession.
“Monte didn’t like that,” I speculated, because the recently deceased Italian-born mafioso was notoriously jealous and possessive.
For the last five years since Lane Constantine had died under a cloud of suspicion, most people had assumed Bryant (and me by extension) had had something to do with his death. But this offered a second, even more intriguing option. If Lane had taken Monte’s daughter out from under his nose, he would have painted an enormous target on his back.
Italians didn’t often forgive and forget.
Hence the Morelli family motto: et vindictam retribute in alis nigro.
Vengeance on black wings.
“He sent someone after them a few times,” Santo confirmed. “I was able to intercept them the first couple, but someone finally found them Upstate. They abducted Bianca from school.”
“She said it was you.”
“She was a kid and it was a fucking traumatizing experience. It’s not surprising she doesn’t remember the details.” He had the audacity to roll his eyes at me. “A guy named Bruno Puglisi kept her in an abandoned house for two days even though he was ordered to bring her back to Monte.” Santo’s jaw went white with strain as fury transformed his face. “He was thinking about taking her away for himself.”
His fury echoed through me like a gunshot in an empty room. “Tell me you killed him.”
“I carved him up like a Christmas ham using his own knife,” Santo promised with a gleaming smile, white against the blood on his chin. “When I found her, she was locked up in a room using a fucking pan as a toilet. When Lane showed up, he had his own go at Bruno.”
It stirred something in me to know the perfect Lane Constantine was as vengeful, corrupt, and deceitful as any Morelli. The man had done dealings with the mafia, stolen one of their women as his mistress, had two children out of wedlock and hidden a fortune from his wife in their name. In a way, I admired his ability to keep his dirty deceptions as far removed from his public persona as he had.