I knew what kind of man I was, and it had nothing to do with princesses in locked towers and noble fucking steeds.
I was the shadow king of New York City.
It was dangerous to play at being anything else.
But Bianca made me feel human and what an idiot I was for indulging such weakness.
I pulled up my online bank account on a remote server, the one I hid in Switzerland under a shell company within a shell company. The one I used to harbor the millions of dollars I made for Bryant, because of Bryant over the last twelve years.
I didn’t need his fortune.
I didn’t need his love.
But all these years I stayed by his side, out of fear and duty, but something more. Something Bianca and Brando’s presence had made me aware of.
In a fucked-up way, I was closer to Bryant than my siblings. His enforcer. His knight moving across the board at his behest. He might not have loved me or respected me like the others, but he did trust me.
That had been enough.
Despite his villainy, the many ways he’d stolen from me through my life, first my siblings, then Grace and my future as a different kind of man, I’d stayed with him because he was all I knew.
And after what I did to Carter, what I let happen to Grace, I thought I deserved that.
I was good for one thing, one purpose.
Destruction.
“It’s late.”
I looked up at Henrik in the doorway, coming home from a drag show in the city, the only sign of his participation the sky-high heels dangling from his right hand and a pink duffel filled with his alter ego, Henrietta Leone.
When I didn’t respond, he sighed, dropping his things on a Queen Anne sofa before he took a seat across the desk from me.
“You underestimated this,” he said, wearily, rubbing pink-polished fingers over his bald head.
“What?” I humored him, though I wasn’t in the mood.
“Who,” he corrected. “You. Them.”
I scoffed. “They’re kids.”
“Yeah.” Voice soft, eyes softer. “They’re kids, T.”
A muscle spasmed in my jaw as I clenched it too tightly together, teeth grinding. “Bianca’s seventeen with the personality of a forty-year-old soccer mom.”
This was true. She was responsible, maternal, formidable if anyone dared to fuck with her baby brother. She cared about recycling and the planet, about whether or not Leonardo da Vinci really did paint his initials into the eyes of every portrait and if Picasso and Matisse had more than a platonic friendship. Teenagers were supposed to care about hair and makeup, trends and popularity, boys.
But Bianca had all my money to play with and spent it on a minor rebellion in getting a tattoo just to fuck with me. She didn’t care about fashion or designers if continuing to wear old, oversized Greenpeace tees was any indication, and boys… No. Bianca didn’t care for prepubescent teens with acne scars and damp, fumbling hands.
She wanted a man.
Someone sure enough to use her properly, to take her to the edge and keep her there suspended in their web until she was crying those lovely tears and splitting open at the seams.
She said she hated me, and she probably did, but I knew the truth.
She also wanted me.
“She’s a woman,” I concluded after a brief pause, almost to myself.
Henrik’s eyes bored into me, his perceptiveness as annoying for our personal relationship as it was a boon for my business.
“Maybe now,” he mused. “Maybe you’ve made her a woman. Maybe she’s making you want to be a man.”
“A man, not a monster?” I joked, but the edges of my hard smile made it sound cruel and unamused.
“It’s always been your decision, Tiernan,” my best friend reminded me. “You like to think Bryant’s been in control all these years, that your sins are his, but the truth is, you stopped being his puppet the moment Grace died and you became his partner. You run the dark side of the Morelli fortune. Not Bryant. Not Sarah. Not Lucian or Leo. You.”
“What’re you trying to say?” I demanded, tugging both hands through my hair, remembering the way Bianca had done the same as she clung to me on the sand, taking me like a wanton instead of the innocent she was.
I still had her virgin blood on my cock. When I’d cleaned up in the bathroom on the way to my office, I couldn’t bring myself to wipe it off. I liked it there. The mark of her on me. Knowing she would go to sleep feeling the ache of me deep inside herself.
“I’m saying you came up with this crazy, complicated plan to get revenge for Grace, but I think you did it for yourself.”
“Of course, I did,” I snapped, teeth clanking together over the hard-bitten words. “I’m doing this for me. For my family. For Grace. The Constantines—”
“Bryant,” he shouted back, smacking a big hand on my desk. “Bryant! He is the one that wronged you. What did Winston Constantine or Perry or fucking little Tinsley do to you? Huh? They aren’t responsible for the sins of their parents who started this damned feud with Bryant and Sarah just like Bianca and Brando shouldn’t be held accountable for the sins of their father.”
“It’s too late,” I intoned, suddenly exhausted with myself, with Henrik, with this house. “The ball is this weekend and I’m taking Bianca. I want to see Caroline’s face when she realizes what is about to happen to her sterling reputation.”
I wanted Lion Court back the way it was, haunted and empty, echoing with memories I didn’t deserve to forget. There were too many voices, too many people watching me…worried about me.
It was fucking unnerving.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he repeated, then softly rapped his knuckles on the desk. “You remember what Bianca said that first day in the gym? Sometimes, violence isn’t the answer. Sometimes, grace is the best response.”
“I don’t have any grace to give,” I barked. “This is who I am, Henrik. I’m a Morelli whether I want to be or not. I’m a monster because I was born and bred to be one. Do not ask me to be something I’m not.”
Henrik didn’t bat a fucking eye at my outburst. He just watched my fingers white-knuckle the edge of my desk. My chest worked hard around air that didn’t seem to do anything to oxygenate me. After a long minute, he stood up, went to his bag and retrieved some papers. He tossed them onto the desk.
“This from the man who’s been desperate to figure out his parentage as if Bryant being your birth father or not makes a difference to the man you chose to be. Blood doesn’t mean shit unless you make it. And you know the irony is, you’re the man who taught me that when you took me in. When you made all us outcasts into The Gentlemen. Into a family bound by respect and honor,” he scoffed, turning on his heel as if the sight of me made him sick. “I found it. The connection you wanted. Lane Constantine bought a painting by Pablo Picasso a week before Bianca’s twelfth birthday. A month before he died.”
He stalked out the door, slamming it behind him so the entire bones of the old house creaked and moaned before settling back into itself.
I looked down at the paper under my head and read the words I’d been waiting for.
Child with a Dove. 1901. Pablo Picasso.
Bought by Lane Constantine from an art dealer in Monaco, then donated to The Met three days after the sale was finalized.