“I think he might have left it to her, along with an inheritance,” I admitted. “There’s not much to go off of, but I found an old letter Lane wrote to the mistress speaking of his plans for her.” I left out the fact that he had really been speaking about his plans for her children. Bryant might have played on my temper to get me to admit to my mechanisms, but I wasn’t fool enough to tell him about Bianca and Brando. For my sake, and for theirs. “He said he would set her up for life.”
“And did he?”
“I found her living one step above squalor,” I admitted.
“Bring her to me,” Bryant decided imperviously, the way a king might order his vassal.
Anger spiked hot through my veins, a douse of kerosene to the bundle of history as dry as kindling I harbored at the heart of me. I was a grown man, not a boy, and I deserved more than his dismissive authority. Lucian got Morelli Holdings, Leo got the respect of our family, and all I got were the fucking dregs.
“She’s dead.”
It was the truth, but Bryant tilted his head to lock eyes with me slowly, calculated, the way a bird might swivel its head to pin its eye on prey. He studied me for a long, vibrating moment, before reaching into his desk and retrieving something he dropped into his lap casually.
Every muscle in my body tensed.
Bryant was a man of violence and bluster. When he grew silent, you knew he was coiling like a snake to burst into action.
“I see where you are going with this, Tiernan,” he murmured smoothly, reaching over the table to extend his hand, demanding one of my own. I handed my palm to him, aware that if I didn’t, the consequences would be much worse. “But I hope you know I am at the end of my patience. First Lucian takes up with that trollop, Elaine, and then Leo with Haley Constantine. I will not fuck around any longer. People will think we are weak, soft, if we let that damned family continue to manipulate us. I want this ended once and for all. If you don’t have the means to do it, you do not have the means to stay in this family. Am I understood?”
It didn’t matter. I had my own wealth, my own shadowed prestige. So what if the upper echelons of society thought I was the disfigured, idiot thug son of Bryant and Sarah Morelli? So what if my siblings thought they were better than me?
It shouldn’t matter.
I was a grown-ass, thirty-year-old man.
But I’d been raised on rage.
On the idea that revenge was owed to us if we were wronged.
And I’d been grossly wronged.
By my own father, the same man who’d shoved that adage down my throat my whole life.
“Tiernan?” Bryant demanded, his grip on my hand tightening. “Do you understand that failure will not be tolerated? That secrets, if you are keeping them, will be sniffed out and snuffed out?”
I gave him a bland look.
“Do I need to remind you who is in charge in this family?” he asked me.
This was it.
No one ever visited the Morelli fucking Mansion if they could help it. Bryant was the dragon in this fairy tale and Sarah was the pill-popping, vapid princess in her separate tower. It was a house of horrors and none of the children that grew up between these walls were likely to forget.
Least of all me.
So, I was prepared when he moved suddenly, his free hand snapping up from his lap, the knife he’d pulled from his drawer gripped tightly in his strong fingers. With the hand that gripped mine, he splayed my palm against the marble top of his desk, intending to stab my hand, or more likely, leave a lovely bleeding wound as a reminder that he was more powerful than me and I shouldn’t forget it.
It was a ham-handed power move.
Violence as a question, instead of a response.
I gave him my answer.
The tip of the knife slashed over the back of my hand, just a graze, but the point was razor-sharp. My skin opened up under the metal, a thin ribbon of blood from knuckles to wrist. But I was moving before it could truly scar. I turned my cut hand over in his hold to grip his wrist and tug him toward me, upsetting his balance. He tried to catch himself with the hand holding the knife, flattening his palm so the blade wasn’t entirely secure.
I plucked it from his knuckles in a flash and took a step away from the desk just as he landed awkwardly over top of it.
When he looked up at me, his dark eyes burned hot and deep as coal fire.
I held the knife I’d given him for his sixtieth birthday between two fingers, dangling it in the air. “You shouldn’t use a gift against the giver, Father.”
“You shouldn’t test the alpha unless you want a fight,” he countered, righting himself calmly even though a muscle ticked like a bomb counting down to detonation in his cheek.
It was reckless of me to stand against him. I hadn’t done it so obviously in years and the giddiness of it rushed through me, making me light-headed. I wanted to laugh, at him and myself, for being so animalistic, so fucking uncivilized when the Morellis had tried for years to convince people they were the crème de la fucking crème of society.
I knew what we were and so did Bryant. It was about time I started to take back what always should have been mine.
My life.
“Hurt me again and I’ll leave the family myself,” I told him, the words heavy things clunking to the floor, land mines I was setting up between us. “You don’t need to threaten me anymore. I’ve been doing your bidding since I was twelve years old.”
“You’ve been doing it because it’s all you have to offer this family,” he reminded me. “You have none of the Morelli intelligence or beauty, you’re barely worth the name on your birth certificate. You should be glad I gave you purpose.”
“If I do this, if I disgrace the Constantines and seize control of CEI, I won’t be your henchman anymore, Bryant. I want my own assurances of that,” I demanded, flipping the knife into the air and catching it by the handle without looking to see how it spun.
He glowered at me, and whether or not he was my birth father, it was the same scowl I could catch in the glimmer of my reflection in the windowpane behind him. I knew I was playing with fire, that he was the kind of man who quite literally killed people for insubordination, but it was my one chance to get out from under his thumb without having to kill him myself.
I’d been waiting to do this for years, this Mexican standoff with a man who should have loved me, but didn’t. I’d just lacked juicy enough bait to goad him into it.
And now I had Bianca.
I could see he wanted it.
Even beneath his furrowed brow, his eyes were wide with sincere yearning. He had been almost obsessed with Caroline and the Constantines for decades. He was also the sort of man who relished wielding power over everyone else and it clearly frustrated him that he hadn’t been able to do so resolutely over our rivals.
So I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Fine, you have my word.”
But I did laugh.
“Your word means nothing to me,” I reminded him. “I’ve been at your side for long enough to know that the word of a Morelli means less than his greed. Get papers drawn up. I want out of your businesses and you out of mine.”
“Out of my will, then,” he threatened.
“You and I both know I won’t need your money if I make this happen,” I said, almost happily, because fuck, it felt good to look this man in the eye and know I had him by the metaphorical balls.