“Let this be a lesson to you, little thing. If you will not give me what I want, I will take it from you.”
Abruptly, he released me and turned on his heel to storm out the door. I flew after him, but the door slammed in my face.
“Tiernan!” I called through the heavy wood, banging my fists against the door. “Please. Please, don’t take that from me. I-it was a gift from my father. It’s all I have left from him.”
I stopped pounding on the door to wait for his response. My entire body felt poised on a precipice, quaking in a threatening wind. If he didn’t give me the locket back, I knew I would plummet over the edge and crash into thousands of tiny pieces.
I held my breath as I strained to listen through the thick, old wood.
Finally, there was a sound like rolling metal and then a harsh click.
It took me only a second to realize what he’d done.
Tiernan had locked me in my room.
And without another word, I heard his expensive shoes strike hard against the wood floors, down the hall, and away from me.
My knees gave out from under me and I fell to the ground with an awkward clamor, knocking my elbow into the door, my hip to the floor. My head fell onto the carpet, forehead pressed into the plush material and there I lay.
I lay there and I cried away all my tears.
Tears for my dad and my mom.
Tears for Brando who barely got to know his own parents.
Tears for lost hopes and dreams.
And tears for me, great, body-quaking sobs of self-pity.
Usually, I was stronger than that. Usually, I could remember that there were starving kids in Africa and veterans with PTSD living on the street with their demons. Usually, I could think of Brando’s smile and walking through the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston holding my dad’s hand when I discovered the beauty of art for the very first time.
Usually, I could find the hope and will to carry on.
But just this once, fresh off the death of my mom, burdened with the responsibility of a seven-year-old with epilepsy who deserved every single happiness in the world, deprived of my anchor, the locket my dad had given me before he died, I lay on the ground of Tiernan’s nightmarish house and let myself drown in despair.
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.