“Well, it’s common knowledge in the family, so I don’t suppose I have to keep it secret from you now that you are family,” she mused.
“I won’t tell a soul,” I promised as I shimmied into the slithering material and felt it slide like rainwater down my curves.
I stepped out of the room to do a lame little twirl for Tilda who gasped, covering her mouth with her hand, eyes wide as she took me in.
“Exquisite,” she breathed. “How old did you say you were?”
“I didn’t. I’m seventeen.”
“Ah, you’d better be careful, Tiernan or his dad will have you married for political gain in a nanosecond looking the way you do. Especially in that dress.”
“I’m not even eighteen yet,” I repeated horrified by the idea of being married off like some fifteenth-century bride with zero autonomy.
Tilda shrugged. “The age of consent in New York State is seventeen. Besides, it’s the way of the wealthy, darling. With great money comes great manipulations. If they can use you, they will.” Her eyes narrowed, a shrewd intelligence flashing in their depths. “How did you say Tiernan discovered you?”
“I didn’t.” I took a page from Tiernan’s book and didn’t offer anything further. “You were mentioning something about why he doesn’t go to social gatherings.”
“Oh, he isn’t invited to many,” she assured me. “He’s the black sheep of the family, which is saying something. His older brothers are basically psychopaths and, in my humble opinion, Tiernan is the only one with any heart left after their father tried to beat it out of them.”
“He beat them?” I echoed, frankly shocked by the idea that anyone could hurt Tiernan.
I’d seen him fight in the ring, the powerful grace of his trained body like a weapon arching through the air. Then again, even Tiernan had been a child once just like Brando, young and tender, in need of protection.
“That’s the story,” she murmured as she handed me a blouse and skirt combination, obviously preoccupied with my wardrobe. “That scar on his face? His father gave him that.”
My fingers flew up to my cheek, tracing the path of Tiernan’s angry scar on my own flesh.
Lane Constantine hadn’t been perfect. He was a married man with a family and an entire life separated from Aida, Brando, and me, but he had only ever protected us. Only ever loved us. Even at his most terse, in the weeks leading up to his death, Dad had catered to our needs before his own. An image of him at the dinner table, his cheek pressed to my open chemistry textbook as he slept soundly, having fallen asleep after checking over my homework, flashed into my mind.
If I brought him peace, he brought me safety. I knew no one would ever hurt me or at least, never get away with it so long as my dad was alive.
It seemed Tiernan had grown up with the opposite sentiment in his home.
“A belt,” she continued as she pushed me into the changing room again. “The buckle pierced his cheek and cut it open from ear to mouth. I wasn’t there, but his sister, Sophia, told me you could see his teeth through the gap in his flesh.”
A shiver tore down my vertebrae like a sticky zipper.
“Obviously, he doesn’t see him anymore,” I surmised, needing Tilda to validate it for some unknown reason.
She stared at me for a moment, her lips pursed as if around a sour secret. “He works for him, actually.” When shock broke open my face, dropping my mouth into a wide “O,” she sighed. “When you’ve been abused all your life, it’s the only thing you know. You come to expect it, to believe that you deserve it.”
“But…Tiernan is one of the most arrogant, self-assured people I’ve ever met,” I argued, unable to come to grips with this new knowledge.
“Mmm,” his cousin said, disappointment clear in her pale gaze. “How well do you know him?”
I only stared at her as she gently pushed me a little farther into the dressing room and closed the door in my face. I pressed my forehead to the wood door and closed my eyes against the wave of sickness that overtook me. Tiernan, younger, no silver among the dark hair, no creases beside his pale green eyes, fuller in the face and skinnier through the limbs, cut open by a beating from his own father. I wondered what he had been like before that moment. If, once, he’d been kinder, softer, someone willing to open their heart to new people.
It was almost impossible to imagine him as anything less than what he was now. Cruel, cold, almost almighty with his own arrogance, heartlessness, and wealth.
But knowing this little fact about him, this tiny key in the lock of his many secrets, softened me toward Tiernan dangerously.
I already found him fascinating despite myself.
Attractive beyond what I could bear.
I didn’t need to see any traces of humanity in him. In fact, it almost horrified me that the simple story had impacted me so profoundly.
“He’s still a monster,” I murmured to myself as I tried on yet another outfit for Tilda, but a tiny voice in the back of my mind whispered back, “Monsters aren’t so monstrous when you understand where they came from.”
Chapter Four
Bianca
I refused to let myself be intimidated by Lion Court’s eerie majesty or its master. So, Monday morning, hours before I had to leave for my first day at a new school, I started my day. Walcott informed me that Tiernan was out, so I followed the stairs down to the basement to see if Ezra was there to give me my first lesson in defending myself. It was Henrik who offered though, his bald head beaded with sweat from his own workout, the eyeliner he wore smudged by the moisture. We started easy, learning how to make a proper fist and torque my hips to eke the most out of my small stature and strength.
After, I found Walcott and talked to him about picking up Brando’s epilepsy meds and his ketogenic meals. Apparently, the house employed a chef named Patsy, a large redheaded woman with jowls and a laugh like an opera singer. She agreed to Meatless Mondays and sustainably sourcing her ingredients, excited about the prospect of it, in fact. Walcott wasn’t as enthused when I asked if it would be possible to add solar panels to the roof or southern lawn. When he reluctantly agreed to look into it, I beamed, pressing a kiss to his marred cheek at the same time I pressed a folded list of further environmental recommendations into his limp hand.
When I left Walcott’s office, it was with a sense of accomplishment.
If this mausoleum of a house was going to be mine for the foreseeable future, I was going to make it a home.
When I swung through the kitchen on the way to the main hall to go up to wake Brando, I was startled by the sight that awaited me.
Brando sat on the island with his legs crossed, Iron Man beside him, a huge bowl in his lap that he stirred with a wooden spoon.
“Anca!” he cried on the tail end of his laughter. His arm arched wide, still clutching the wooden spoon so that some kind of batter flung from the end and splattered over the cabinets. “We’re making pancakes.”
I smiled at him automatically, but couldn’t pry my eyes from Tiernan at a messy stovetop with a flipper in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. It was clear he’d been roped into breakfast on his way to or from some business meeting because he wore one of those expensive black suits that perfectly skimmed every powerful inch of his frame. As a concession to the task at hand, he’d lost the suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves on his white dress shirt to reveal thickly corded forearms dusted in black hair and blacker tattoos.