Fuck.
“What is it?” I muttered.
“Zelda McTiernan’s diamond locket,” he said, but I’d already known he would.
There was nothing else that would do for Bianca in that dress. Bianca on my arm.
For the ruined locket I’d stolen from her when she first arrived.
I scowled at him as I turned on my heel and went to her, tugging her away from my admiring thugs to pull her toward the door.
“Her coat!” Walcott called as I opened the door, letting the cool wind whip around our legs, stirring her feathers as if she were about to take flight.
I ignored him, pulling her by the wrist through the door, smiling wolfishly at the men inside the house as I slammed the door shut. The lion’s head rattled at me like an agitated animal.
“You seem…angrier than usual tonight,” Bianca ventured, more curious than afraid, the stupid girl.
I grunted, taking her hand again to lead her down the stairs to my Aston Martin Victor, its dark finish gleaming in the lamplight from the garden. It seemed more like Chiron’s morbid boat across the Styx than anything worthy of the fairy tale Walcott and Bianca seemed to think this night was.
“Get in,” I demanded, leaving her at the passenger side door without opening it.
She hesitated, then opened the door and carefully sat down, arranging her feathers so that they spilled through the interior, across the small space between us. Her scent was just as invasive, something sweet that reminded me of the way her mouth tasted after she ate those horrible Lucky Charms.
She didn’t try to make further conversation as I started the car and peeled out of the drive, spitting gravel from the spinning tires. Instead, she fiddled with the music system until her phone was connected, rich music with a resonate bassline like a heartbeat filled the car.
My hands clenched the wheel too hard, sweat slicking my grip. She was everywhere. In my thoughts, in my nose, beside me like an angel sent to earth to tempt me.
I wanted to rip her dress to shreds and fuck her among the feathers.
My gaze kept slipping over to her, the curve of her profile in the spinning lights of Bishop’s Landing’s streetlamps, the elegant line of her throat where I could just faintly detect a hickey I’d left there on the beach hidden beneath layers of makeup.
Something animal in me roared in primal satisfaction.
I was half hard imagining fucking her before the ball so my cum would leak out of her as I introduced her to society as mine.
No, no.
Not mine.
Lane’s bastard.
Lane’s mistake and Caroline’s shame.
Bianca shifted, twisting her hands together. I caught a flash of the tattoo, finally uncovered and healed, on the inside of her wrist.
I grabbed her fingers with one hand and turned them over so I could see it more clearly. She let me.
It was a dove, one stylized like Picasso’s famous white bird mid-flight, meant to represent peace.
When I looked up at her eyes, they were dark, sheened with reflections from the streets we breezed through on the way to New York.
“My father,” she explained quietly. “He called me his dove.”
Of course, he did.
Child with a Dove made even more sense in that context.
“You speak of him like he was good to you,” I said cruelly, taking a corner too fast so she was flattened against the doorframe. “Yet he left you and your family with nothing.”
She was quiet for a long moment, only the music and a matching tension throbbing between us.
“He had his reasons.”
“And you know this how?” I demanded, suddenly angry with her faith, with her unshakeable belief in her father when he’d ultimately let her down as all parents did.
She shrugged one bare shoulder, the long arms of her dress glittering silver. “He was preoccupied with keeping us safe. We might have been poor, but we were safe in the end.”
“Safe from whom?” I pressed, prying for her secrets like a crowbar wedged in the wall of a safe. I was done with subtle, I wanted her mysteries spilled across my lap like diamonds.
She bit her lip, still reddened from my earlier kiss. I hoped it was sore, bruised from me. “He was a…powerful man. When I was little, back when we lived in Upstate New York, one of his business rivals found us. Found me. He cornered me at school, told me my dad needed to see me, but I’d never met him before and there was this look in his eye.” She paused, searching for the word as if it were written in her palm. “This wild desperation. When I didn’t go willingly, he forced me into his car and took me to some house a town over from us. I remember him talking on the phone, telling someone he had me.”
I realized I was holding my breath as blind fury raced through me like a lit fuse. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never did find out. He kept me there for two days in a room with a bed and a saucepan to pee in. In the end, my dad came for me. I knew he would.” She looked out the window, her hand going to the base of her throat where her locket had once lain. “He was my hero.”
If I hadn’t been furious at the thought of Bianca stalked and kidnapped by an unknown assailant, I would have snorted at the idea of Lane Constantine being anyone’s hero. He was as savage as the rest of us under that thin gold coating of good manners. Instead, I gripped the steering wheel so tightly, the leather-wrapped plastic creaked ominously.
I’d have Henrik find the motherfucker the same way I’d ordered him to find Aida’s ex-boyfriend who had back-handed her. And then, I’d end them both myself.
“He moved us after that, to be safe. Stopped spending so much money on us.” A hesitation like a hiccough. “Stopped spending so much time with us.”
“Sounds like an asshole to me,” I grated out as we whizzed over the bridge and finally broached the outer ring of Manhattan. “You’ve romanticized a ghost, turned him into something he never was.”
“What would you know about it?” she asked, suspicion laced through her tone. “You speak as if you knew him.”
“No,” I muttered darkly. “I didn’t know him.”
The truth was, I’d heard rumors that Lane Constantine was a good father. It fucking rankled me to know that he’d loved his kids while Bryant had not. No matter what I did, what he took from me to force me to live in his shadows, I’d never be good enough for my father because I wasn’t really his.
I didn’t want to be good enough for him anymore.
I wanted to be good enough for my brothers and sisters, even Leo, who’d abandoned his protection of us for long enough for me to be forced to take a belt to Carter on my nightmarish twelfth birthday.
That was why I was doing this, driving Bianca toward her humiliation and the Constantines’ public shaming.
For my siblings and for the name of my real father.
If I could just know him, maybe I could finally shake the yoke of Bryant from my shoulders and become a different kind of man.
We were quiet after that, each of us mired in our own thoughts. It was only when we approached The Met that she murmured, “I think it was a Morelli who took me, or one of their henchmen. I have nightmares sometimes about the face of the man who took me.”
Ice water poured down my spine. “What makes you think that?”