Cute? I signed back.
A little bit tragic, he corrected.
“I have nothing in common with those brats.” I was being mean, but then again, I was always mean. Cruelty felt right in my mouth, ice in my veins. But there was something shifting restlessly beneath my breastbone that made me reluctant to discuss the matter further.
I didn’t care about the cost of revenge.
I didn’t need my own men reminding me about Bianca and Brandon’s stake in the situation because it didn’t matter.
Or, it shouldn’t.
Ezra knocked his heavy fist on the front of my desk to get my attention, then signed to me when I looked over at him.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
“What are you? A fucking wise woman, now?” I snarled at him.
He blinked at me, completely unfazed by my horrible temper.
And I was. In a horrible temper.
Why, I couldn’t quite understand.
I’d laid out the rules for Bianca and taken her locket the way I’d intended. I wasn’t the kind of man to be moved by female wiles or woes. The sight of tears tumbling from those blue eyes, sticking to her long lashes, staining her pink cheeks…none of it should have perturbed me.
I’d spent most of my life being Bryant Morelli’s enforcer, the man sent to do the dirty work none of my brothers or sisters had the stomach for. Once, a long time ago, I’d balked at the violence my father had thrust upon me, but I’d paid the price for that and learned my lesson. Whenever I thought about telling him to go to hell, I just had to look in the mirror at the scar slashing across the left half of my face to remember what happened to people who dared to defy the great and terrifying Morelli patriarch.
My blood set to a low simmer as I thought about the way he’d insidiously turned my own family against me over the years. Unwittingly, my gaze snagged on the framed photo of my younger brother, Carter, and me on the bookshelf to my right. We were just kids, eleven and nine, our arms wrapped around each other, faces broken open with laughter as we recovered from wrestling in the mud after a rainstorm turned Mother’s rose garden into a swamp. A thorny stem had cut Carter under one eye and it was bleeding slightly in the photo. Years later, he still had a pale scar.
It was the last time my brother had embraced me.
The last time any of my siblings had played with me.
Because two weeks later on my twelfth birthday, Bryant had turned me into a monster.
“Tiernan.” Henrik’s rough voice cut into my disturbed thoughts. “We’ve done a lot of fucked-up things in our lives, but toying with children…? It’s not worth it.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, at all three of my friends and employees. “Do not mistake me, men. I am your boss first and your friend second. You may disagree with me, but you will not sway me. My mind is my own.”
Is it? Ezra countered, hands flying. Or is it your father’s? Your mother’s?
“Everything I do, I do for my family,” I ground out.
“Why?” Walcott asked seriously, sitting beside Henrik in the two leather chairs set before my desk. “They don’t deserve you, T.”
A dark laugh scraped up the sides of my throat like talons on its way out of my mouth.
They didn’t understand and I couldn’t exactly blame them.
Henrik was cast out of his family home at thirteen for being a gay man. Walcott had lost every single one of his friends and admirers after his accident had left him severely scarred across eighty-five percent of his body. Ezra had grown up on the streets until Bryant found him and recruited him to do our dirty work alongside me when we were just seventeen, the same age as sweet and tender Bianca crying alone upstairs.
These men didn’t have any family, let alone family like mine.
We weren’t just blood kin, just a unifying last name.
We were a goddamn institution.
Morelli against the whole damn world.
They didn’t know what it was like to be feared and hated by siblings who had otherwise banded together against the cruel forces of our parents and were thick as fucking thieves.
“Don’t say we don’t get it,” Henrik said flatly. “We know what it’s like to be shunned. You let us into your life because we get it. But you gotta get over this need to prove yourself. You made your first million eight years ago, for fuck’s sake. You don’t need their money.”
“You don’t need their love,” Walcott went on. “You got a family in us now.”
“It’s not enough,” I said simply, the words lashing out like a lightning strike, electrifying the air in the room. “Do you know what Bryant took from me? First, my family, the brothers and sisters I loved suddenly looked at me like I was the enemy. And then, as if that wasn’t fucking enough, he took Grace from me just because she’s a distant Constantine cousin…” I sucked in a deep breath of air that scorched down my throat like the phantom burn of whiskey I craved. “He took the family I could have had with her away forever.”
Henrik hesitated then squared his shoulders and said, “He wasn’t the one that killed her, T.”
“He might as well have been the one to do it!” The words ripped from my chest, the tang of blood on the back of my tongue I didn’t realize was from biting through my cheek. “He hid her from me. Depressed and alone…she couldn’t have felt she had any other fucking option.”
Only, she wasn’t alone.
Not totally.
No one but Ezra, Grace, and I knew about the pregnancy until they did the autopsy report, but I’d always wondered if somehow, Bryant found out.
I didn’t realize I’d stood up and thrown my glass of expensive-ass water across the room until the glass smashed against the door and fell tinkling to the ground. My chest was heaving, anger sparking through my limbs like an untamed current.
Violence.
This was me.
My reason for existence.
To brutalize. To curb others into submission under the dominance of my father.
He’d taken away everything I’d ever loved so I forgot the mechanics of it. So I could be his monstrous tool, his enforcer and his heartless servant.
And for years, I’d done it, because that was all I had.
I hadn’t known a soft touch from my siblings since Carter had that arm slung around my shoulders. I hadn’t known love since Bryant ripped it away from me before I was even really a man.
And despite years of hardening my heart, of sharpening my mind, I still couldn’t rid myself of the stupid human compulsion to make my siblings love me again.
So, these two seemingly contrary needs existed in tandem within me.
End Bryant and win back the respect of my sisters and brothers.
Bianca was the key to that.
Taking down the Constantines and Bryant, both of whom had terrorized us for years, would prove to them that I was on my siblings’ side while also securing my personal vendetta against them for ruining my life.
I didn’t care that she was young.
By the time I was seventeen, I’d killed two men and taken countless beatings.
Age was a number tied to the passing of time, not the maturation of the human heart.
And Bianca had taken enough knocks to be considered an old soul.
She was fair game.
Even if she wasn’t, she was my game. My golden fucking ticket to respect and autonomy.