I wouldn’t let anyone—not my friends, not Bianca with those wet, blue velvet eyes, not Brando with his funny kid-candor—get in the way of my mission.
Besides, they were offspring of the man who had tried to ruin my family and started the feud between us in the first place. He was the reason I was indentured to my father. The reason I’d been born into a war that would rage until the day Bryant died and beyond.
Using Bianca Belcante to bring down the Constantine family was the only way to bring my family peace.
To bring me peace.
And after years of fighting, that was all I really wanted.
A hug from Carter.
A kiss from Eva, Sophia, Daphne, and Lisbetta.
Respect from Lucian and Leo.
Harmony for my mother who was driven to drink and do drugs by the past and by her husband.
Freedom from Bryant’s sick, hellish games.
I looked down at the broken locket on my desk, cracked open without ceremony by a single hammer strike. Amid the cracked pieces of silver lay a note.
Two words.
La Paloma.
Dove, in Spanish.
I’d expected something more from the Constantine patriarch who was known for being mysterious and coy, for playing games better than anyone else.
Why the fuck would he leave his daughter a locket filled with such a prosaic word?
“Find out everything you can about Lane Constantine’s association with doves,” I ordered my men.
“And the locket?” Walcott had the guts to ask. “Should I look into having it repaired?”
“Absolutely not,” I snapped as the image of Bianca’s beautiful face made pale and tragic with tears filled my mind’s eye and stirred something latent in my chest, something long dead struggling to resurrect itself. “In fact, frame it broken like this, will you? I’ll give it to her as a gift for her eighteenth birthday.”
I ignored the way they looked at me, embarrassed for them. They were supposed to be my crew of mercenaries and there they were sympathizing with a wisp of a girl.
“So, what’s the plan? Beat her into submission like everyone else who crosses you or your father? Get her to find out where Lane hid millions of dollars and then what? Have her sign over the money to you because she’s afraid for her life?” Walcott asked.
“You’re forgetting the part where he introduces her to society at Lane Constantine’s Memorial Ball in April as his bastard child,” Henrik added mildly.
Ezra just stared at me with his dark eyes, condemnation written there in bold.
“I could hear her crying when I came down the stairs,” Walcott added.
“She won’t have to sign over anything. As her guardian, I will be responsible for her assets until she comes of age, which is why there is a countdown on finding this dirt. She turns eighteen in five months and the Lane Memorial Ball is in a month. I want this sorted out as soon as possible, so I can kick them out of this house.”
The hardened criminals I’d spent years corrupting and crafting in my deviant image all stared at me with identical expressions of disappointment that made my heart burn up in my chest. I rubbed absently at the pain, shocked that I cared what they thought because unlike with my blood kin, I’d never been faced with their disappointment before.
“She’s just a girl,” I reminded them harshly, somehow forgetting to include Brandon in my defense.
I liked Brando even though it ached to look at him and know that if life had gone a different way, my way, I might have known someone similar. It was easy to be good to the kid when he was sweet and funny as hell.
Bianca was a different story entirely.
She didn’t remind me of Grace, of everything I’d lost to this war between two families.
She didn’t remind me of anything.
I’d never met someone like her before, so innocent yet so full of fire. She was unafraid of me like only The Gentlemen and my cousin, Tilda, were unafraid of me. She was beautiful, but many women were beautiful. Her uniqueness lay in her artlessness, the way she moved through the world as if she thought she was invisible when every single person she passed looked at her and longed to be her or be with her.
Of course, I wanted neither, but I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t stupid.
There was some kind of magic to Bianca Belcante and if I wasn’t careful, she would infect this household with it too and bring all of our dead souls back to life.
I just had to make sure that didn’t happen.
Cruelty came easily, violence was my friend, and my heart hadn’t worked properly in years, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
But I had the ominous feeling as I stared at the critical faces of my men, as I remembered the tragic beauty of her tearstained face when I stole her locket, that I was about to embark on the hardest mission of my entire life.
Chapter Three
Bianca
I woke up the next morning feeling achy and hollow, despair echoing through the empty caverns of my heart as I stared at the blue velvet canopy over my bed. My hand rested over my breastbone in the empty space where Dad’s locket should have lain.
I couldn’t believe Tiernan had ripped it away from me like that.
It ashamed me to admit that before that monstrous act, I’d been intrigued by the scarred and tattooed billionaire. He was a study in contrasts, and as an art lover and sometimes artist, I couldn’t help but feel compelled to understand the intricacies of his duality.
His voice was cultured, East Coast perfection, but the words he spoke were frayed with anger and bitterness, rough where they should have been smooth. The same wrath was mirrored in those serpentine eyes, their narrowed glower under heavy brows. But he had a full mouth, soft and delicate pink like the inside of a seashell. It was incongruous on his harsh features with that long, slicing scar, yet it fit. He wore expensive, impeccably tailored clothing like a classic New York businessman, but his skin was stamped with black tattoos, carving up his flesh in Latin phrases and detailed outlines of random images like the rose on the back of one palm and the full sleeves going up either arm done all in blacks and greys.
He employed a deaf man, a scarred man, and a female lawyer as if equality and acceptance meant something to him yet he called me “little thing” like I was an object and not a girl.
He took in two orphaned children who otherwise would have been condemned to the messy foster care system and potentially separated from each other, but he seemed to hate me. So why would he become our guardian?
My head throbbed as I fought to understand the cruel man who had saved us even though it seemed he sought to destroy us.
I tossed off the silk sheets and swung my feet over the edge of the bed, wiggling my toes on the soft carpet I’d cried into for hours the night before. Dawn had breached the horizon, spilling light as pale as milk across the frosted landscape outside. Brando would be up soon if he wasn’t already and I wanted to be able to spend our first morning in this gothic hellhole together.
When I tried the door, it was blessedly unlocked, which sparked a remnant of rage in my chest. How dare Tiernan steal from me, then lock me in my room like an errant child.
My steps were heavy with anger as I stalked down the long, dark hall filled with priceless art to the stairs. No one had given us a tour of the main floor, so I wandered from large, cluttered room to large, cluttered room, touching my fingers to the marble busts and stacked paintings just to spite Tiernan’s insane rule that we didn’t touch anything.