“Fine,” he allowed.
I nodded, turning my back on a man I knew to be mad because I was high on my power trip. Only when my hand was on the door did he break the moment to say, “Oh, Tiernan, you would do well to remember what every single tally mark on your back means and who you did those in service of—me. If you turn on me, boy, I’ll turn on you and hand over evidence to the police.”
“You’d never put one of your own behind bars.” Still, I looked back at him to gauge the level of his warning.
“It’s a good thing you aren’t a true Morelli, then, isn’t it?” he said, smiling pleasantly in a way that was utterly sinister.
“Did you ever stop to think that reminding me of that constantly since I was a boy might lead me to be less loyal to a family who doesn’t seem to want me?” I asked, genuinely curious, but veiling my sincerity in lethal warning. “Did you ever stop to think you trained a man to be your monster, but you never let him in from the cold? Did you ever wonder what he might find out there unsupervised?”
Before he could answer, I threw the knife, turning on my heel before I could see where it would land.
I knew without looking it embedded itself in the framed photo of the Morelli family on the corner of Bryant’s desk.
Chapter Eight
Tiernan
Sarah Morelli didn’t have to beckon me the way my father did. I never visited the Morelli Mansion without stopping by her suite of rooms in the east wing. While I hadn’t called ahead, one of the servants had obviously clued her in to my presence, because when I opened the door to her rooms, she was dressed in a floor-length silk nightgown trimmed in fur and a matching dressing gown with her arms held open for me to step into.
I was a thirty-year-old man, but I did as she silently bade and stepped into her heavily perfumed embrace. Beneath the artificial flower notes, she smelled of expensive vodka and the bitter aftermath of pills she kept too long on her tongue before swallowing them down. She cupped the back of my head and swept her other hand between my shoulders, over the thirteen tally marks Bryant had forced me to get from the time I was seventeen to mark me as his weapon the way military men notched their guns with each kill.
She liked to brush her hand over them through my clothes as if she could erase the permanent ink there.
“My sweet monster,” she crooned to me before pulling away, keeping me close with both hands on my forearms so she could study me. “You look tired.”
“You look beautiful,” I countered, shaking off her hands so I could move farther into the feminine room.
Her little dog, Sheba, yapped at me from her silk cushion, but I ignored her as I took a seat on the white couch, unbuttoning my jacket.
“I can’t stay long,” I mentioned immediately. “I’m working on something.”
“Oh?” Sarah asked, moving to the bar cart to pour herself a drink even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning. “I thought that ugly bitch died?”
“She did. Her children didn’t.”
“Ah, well, that’s interesting.” She walked around the couch opposite me, but didn’t stop until she was beside me, sitting with our thighs pressed together. It was close, too close maybe for a normal mother/son bond. But Sarah wandered her rooms in this house like a caged bird, infrequently visited by her children other than myself and flatly ignored by Bryant unless he had some use of her. She craved affection, attention, and I was her single source for it.
I put up with it even though I disliked being touched especially when it was only to satiate her needs and not my own. I’d been a momma’s boy since the day she shoved that McTiernan ring on my broken finger just like I’d been my father’s weapon since the day he cut me open with his belt.
When I was fourteen, Lucian paid attention to me for the first time in seven months.
I’d been counting.
He found me in Sarah’s solarium, sitting at the edge of the large koi pond hidden among the greenery, an exact replica she’d had made of the one at Lion Court. I liked to sit there listening to the trickle of water while I struggled to read through my textbooks, the words merging together until my head ached.
I was so startled by his appearance, I almost fell into the fucking pond. He didn’t laugh at me the way Carter might have or offer to help me despite his fear like Eva. Instead, he threw something at me.
I caught it reflexively, the book slim in my hands. On the cover, a photo of a marble bust and the words “Oedipus Rex.”
“They wrote a book about you and Mom,” Lucian told me, his tone impossible to read, his expression flat.
He turned on his heel and left.
It was a cruel present when I struggled to read at the best of times with my dyslexia, but I was eager, happy almost that he’d given me a present. I was eager to read it and I spent the next month painstakingly moving through the pages.
Only to realize the extent of cruelty the book represented.
It was a tragic story about a man who unwittingly killed his own father and married his mother. When he realized what had transpired, he gouged out his own eyes.
The next time Lucian sought me out, he seemed surprised to see my eyes remained in my head.
Fucked up didn’t even begin to describe the Morelli family dynamic.
“So, what’re you doing with them?” my mother asked, her diamond-encrusted fingers trembling as she raised the martini to her mouth. “You wouldn’t mention them if you didn’t think they would be useful in taking that cunt Caroline down.”
I didn’t bat an eye at her language even though most people who thought of Sarah Morelli would conjure an image of the beautiful, polite, and much younger wife of Bryant instead of the cursing, pill-popping drunk he’d turned her into behind closed doors.
“There’s something there,” I agreed vaguely.
“You like them,” she ventured, much shrewder than anyone ever gave her credit for. “You don’t want to use them like this?”
“I will,” I said with a shrug.
“Of course. You’ve always done what you were told.” Her voice was as bitter as it was full of pride. She enjoyed my loyalty but hated Bryant’s use of me. “Nothing matters more than taking down the Constantines. You know that better than most.” She swept her hand down my arm, then tapped a finger to the tattoo on my left hand, a cherub crying blood. “They’ve taken so much from you. From this family.”
I didn’t respond, but then, I didn’t have to.
Sarah had been there through all of it, silently waiting in the wings to comfort me after all the bigger players on the board made their moves. It never occurred to her to stand up for her children. It stopped occurring to us a long time ago to ask.
In addition, she had her own vendettas and prejudices against the Constantines. Against Caroline, the woman who broke her husband before she ever got a chance at loving him.
“How old are they?”
“Seventeen and seven.”
I thought of Brando convulsing on the floor of the kitchen, of his smiles when I taught him to fight like Iron Man in the ring, of the sound of his voice endlessly babbling to Ezra or Walcott or Henrik, whoever would listen. He was as bright and green as lime juice squeezed straight from the fruit. It was impossible not to be drawn in by his candor and charm.