“So be it then,” I growled. “You come for mine, I’ll end you, even if it means the end for me. You took everything from me, Bryant. I don’t have anything left to lose, and that is a very dangerous thing.”
For the first time all night, Bryant looked momentarily unsure, his eyes cutting to the left over my shoulder as he tried to calculated the truth of my words. Even if he wouldn’t admit it, he knew of all the people in his life, I was the most capable of destroying him.
That was the problem for people who created monsters, it was only a matter of time before they turned on their creators.
There was something about seeing him across from me like a mirror image that chilled me deeper than his disregard, horrified me more than the violence between us. I felt suddenly sure that I was staring through the looking glass at my future, a villainous man with a black heart and only selfish intentions, corrupted by greed, power, and vengefulness.
How fucking empty it seemed looking a Bryant then, an aging man with a massive family who respected him out of fear instead of love. Who wouldn’t give him a fucking nickel willingly let alone their love and trust.
It reminded me of Bianca’s word about choosing grace over violence.
Done with this, with Bryant and anything associated with him, I threw him away. I dug Eamon McTiernan’s old, silk handkerchief from my pocket to clean my hands as I watched him stumble to regain his footing and then land hard on the floor, breath forced from his lungs on a wet exhale.
To my right, still prone on the ground, Carter began to stir.
I stared at him for a moment, the brother I’d wronged who had just tried to exact retribution on me, and I made the first decision borne of grace that I’d made in a very, very long time.
Thankfully, the bullet wound to my upper chest was artificial, because when I bent to pick Carter up in a fireman’s carry over my healthy shoulder, he was heavy as fuck.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Bryant ordered imperiously as if he reclined on a throne and not the ground over a growing pool of his own blood.
“I never could resist a good dare,” I told him with a smirk that was strained with pain.
Using everything in me, I straightened and carefully strode away from the only father I’d ever known as he growled after me. Once, it might have hurt to know he was more upset about me abducting Carter than about shooting me or losing me forever, but now, the only sadness it brought was the truth.
I’d responded with violence for so long, I’d forgotten the language of love. It took losing Bianca and, potentially Brandon, to realize that maybe I wasn’t too old to learn it again. Maybe I wasn’t too dead inside to want to try.
2
TIERNAN
It was a bitch opening the grand, heavy doors of Lion Court. Carter had woken up during the drive. He’d accepted a cursory explanation of the events that happened while he was passed out. He didn’t seem particularly shocked, which said a lot for the Morelli ethos. Then he went on to take a call from his mysterious employers in London. I had no idea why a scientific researcher needed high-end encryption on his phone… and I didn’t want to know. The Morelli family had enough shit to deal with without Carter’s brand of hyperintelligent trouble.
He was busy, which was fine by me. I wasn’t in the mood to answer questions or ask them in a way that would compel him to answer.
I needed a drink, but I wouldn’t have one. Ever since I lost Grace to a poisonous cocktail of booze and drugs, I’d abstained from both. But fuck me, I could have used them for the insistent, throbbing pain in my shoulder.
Instead, I led my brother up the wet steps through the rain and into my sanctuary, a place he hadn’t seen since it was owned by our maternal grandparents. Of all my siblings, they’d left their estate to me. It surprised some people, but then again, Zelda and Eamon McTiernan had always been collectors of broken relics and banned art. They saw things in the unused and unwanted that other people often missed.
They saw something in me. I didn’t know what the fuck it was, but a tiny part of me wondered if Bianca had seen it too.
The moment the door creaked open, Walcott appeared at the mouth of the hallway leading back to the kitchen. He took one look at me, turned on his heel and disappeared back down the hall calling to Henrik as he did.
Carter went to a fainting couch and dropped into it.
I ignored him as Ezra appeared at the top of the stairs. He noticed the blood saturating my white shirt and immediately pulled out a gun.
“Christ,” Carter muttered.
When Ezra’s dark gaze rose to mine, I wearily lifted my blood-stained hands and signed.
Things didn’t go as planned.
His brows cut lines into his forehead. He carefully holstered his gun long enough to sign, No shit.
“Where is Bianca?” Henrik asked as he entered the foyer behind Walcott carrying a First Aid kit.
It should have irritated me that he asked after her first. He was my employee. My friend. My…family. And maybe, four hours ago, it would have. Now, it only sent a dull echo through my empty chest like a shout in a haunted house.
Before I could answer, Walcott was dragging a chair over to me and pushing me none-to-gently onto it. “Tell me you didn’t go through with your stupid plan.”
“It was a good plan,” I argued mulishly while Henrik bent to peer at my wound. Carter threw himself on an antique fainting couch, looking bored. “Until Bryant shot it all to hell.”
“He has a way of doing that to you,” Walcott agreed, but his mottled face was creased deeply with concern. “What happened, T?”
I sighed so heavily, it hurt my injury like a bitch. “I fucked up.”
“Well, acceptance is half the battle,” Walcott quipped as Henrik started to cut my soaked blazer and button up from my body.
“Not this time,” I rested my head against the antique headrest of the fucking uncomfortable Queen Anne chair and closed my eyes. “Bianca’s gone.”
“Where?” Henrik asked.
“I…” No matter how hard I squeezed my lids shut, the sight of Bianca’s shocked, broken expression was embedded in my mind. “I don’t know.” I signed his name. “Ezra?”
Without opening my eyes, I could tell by the tread of his heavy gait that Ezra was leaving the room to find out where exactly Bianca had run away to. Henrik was the tec wizard, but Ezra would find her.
He had to.
“What did you do?” Walcott demanded, an edge to his voice he’d never used with me before.
He was disappointed in me.
It hurt, but he could join the fucking club. No one was more eviscerated by the nightmare of this night than I was.
“I went to that cursed painting and cut it open,” I explained as I dug the key out of my pants pocket with a wince.
“Stop moving,” Henrik muttered, pouring water down my bare torso over the wound to gage how bad it was.
“We find what this key opens we find Lane’s hidden will.” The words should have been triumphant. I’d been working toward exactly this for so long…Even Bianca finding out I was a Morelli had sounded deplorably delightful in those early days when I’d hated her just for being Lane Constantine’s spawn. That look of heartbreak so clear on her face would have overjoyed me. I would have introduced to her to that crowded ballroom stuffed with plastic figurines of shallow, callous people as Lane’s bastard and watched her humiliation and Caroline’s like some sick fuck.