And I would have loved it.
Maybe it’s too late for you, a voice in the back of my head that sounded like Bryant’s whispered, you are a monster. And monsters don’t get to have hearts.
But I’d been born a man, a boy. I still had vague recollections of happy days from my childhood before my twelfth birthday when I’d been too young to draw Bryant’s particular notice and Leo had still protected me like he did the rest of our siblings. When my brothers and sisters had loved me and my mother hadn’t yet been driven to drink. They’d lain like half-forgotten relics in the fallow dirt of my soul until Bianca and Brando arrived to unearth them.
And now that I knew I was once capable of love and devotion, I couldn’t help but harbor this stubborn hope that I could have those things again.
Sharp pain burst through my shoulder as Henrik dug the bullet out of my muscle with a pair of medical pliers. When I looked at him in reproach, he only lifted an eyebrow as if I deserved the pain.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“Bianca found out I’m a Morelli,” I said, almost to myself, staring at the innocuous key in my stained hand.
“I figured when you said Bryant showed up. I’ve no doubt he relished telling her the truth,” Walcott muttered bitterly.
“Silly little thing tried to defend me from him at first.” My bitter laughter tasted acrid on my tongue. “Can you imagine? A slip of a girl in a feather dress against Bryant Morelli.”
“Yeah, I can see her doing that,” Henrik murmured softly, as he pulled the bullet from my flesh and dropped it with a plink into a metal dish. This wasn’t the first or last time he’d retrieved a bullet from one of us. “That girl has got the heart of a lion.”
“True,” Carter murmured.
I leveled him with a cool look, trying not to wince as Henrik began to stitch me up right there in the foyer. “Thanks for your feedback.”
He sighed at me, his temple and jaw already beginning to bruise. “I didn’t show up to fight with my fucking father. I showed up to help you. You know, as your brother. Or are you still acting like you don’t have brothers?”
Fuck.
Okay, that hit the mark.
But I didn’t so much as blink at the barb. “Half-brother,” I allowed, because there was protection in being the one to admit it first. “And it’s not as if you’ve ever forgiven me for what happened with the belt.”
“According to who?” he snapped. “You haven’t spoken to me in years.”
I arched a brow. “According to tonight when you put a gun in my face.”
“You always were so dramatic,” he countered, as if we were two boys insulting each other in mom’s garden again. “You have no idea why I was there tonight.”
“It seemed fairly obvious,” I said drily then hissed as Henrik pulled taut on the last stitch.
Carter eyed my wound. “How does it feel?”
“One guess.”
He winced, an odd reaction. “Gunshots are the fucking devil.”
I tried to shrug, but the action was too painful so I only lifted a hand and let it fall into my lap. “And you know about that how? No, don’t bother answering. I already know you’re neck deep in secrets.”
Carter blinked then huffed out a heavy exhale and looked at the ceiling as if beseeching God for patience. “And people wonder why the hell I left all of you for England.”
“I never wondered,” I offered, because I could still remember the bone deep sense of relief I’d felt when he got accepted to Oxford and moved across the pond.
Carter was the brightest of the Morelli men—and the kindest. Despite what I’d done to him, he’d turned into an upstanding citizen, a man all of the Morellis could be proud of because he was that much better than the rest of us.
“That’s your problem, Tiernan.” He leaned forward as much as he could with his hands locked behind his back, the face so much like my own open and honest. “You’ve been Dad’s weapon for years––the big, bad, scary Morelli––but you always fall into line so easily.”
“You think I wanted this?” I scoffed, resentment churning low in my belly.
He had been coddled by the whole family his entire life. Other than the beating I’d been forced to give him so many years ago, what trials and tribulations had this soft handed man known in his twenty-eight years? He was the golden boy, the one set to do great things. At least, that’s how I’d always thought about Carter. I’d always thought he was lucky to get of Bishop’s Landing, but now I wasn’t so sure. He had returned with lines of strain etched around his mouth, tired lanes fanned out beside his dark eyes. He accepted mysterious phone calls and wasn’t afraid to fuck around with a man as dangerous as Bryant Morelli. Who really knew what my little brother had been up to in that last ten years? Most of my trauma was represented by ugly scars across my skin, but I knew how many would never surface and I didn’t doubt Carter had earned his fair share of those since he was the kid I’d known.
“No. But I don’t think you fought very hard to get out from under Dad,” he said, the angle of his chin so familiar from childhood, when he’d dig in his heels until he got his way.
Something inside me ached at the memory and stretched toward him like a flower searching for sunlight.
“You don’t know anything.”
Carter eyed Walcott and Henrik, who’d both finished up and stood flanking me, offering their silent support even though they had to have questions and doubts about what happened that night.
These men were my family. These men who overcame their struggles every fucking day could inspire me to do the same.
“I know more than you think.” Carter rearranged his long limbs on the fainting couch. It didn’t look comfortable. “You took in Bianca and Brandon Belcante to use them to embarrass the Constantines and impress Dad.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from telling him I’d mostly done it to impress him. Carter and the other siblings I’d lost to Bryant’s manipulations. For so long, nothing had mattered as much as their love and acceptance.
Now, it felt ridiculous that I’d ever put so much importance on the opinions of people who didn’t matter. Sharing the same blood might have given us the same hair color, but it didn’t give us the same hearts.
“Now you’ve lost them because of Dad,” Carter continued, a sly kind of look in those dark eyes. “Haven’t you lost enough to him?”
“You think I’m going to go back to work for the man who just shot me in the chest?” I questioned drily.
He shrugged. “You went to work for the man who split your face open with a belt.”
“I was a fucking kid, then,” I snapped, immediately irritated with myself for showing how keenly his words cut.
“Exactly,” he said, triumphant. “You were a fucking kid, Tiernan. So was I. Yeah, I hated you. You were my best friend and then you beat me blue with a belt. It didn’t matter to me that Bryant made you do it, that he scarred you and marked you for life at the very same time. I was a kid.” He shrugged again, but his expression was as somber as a funeral goer. “I couldn’t get my head out of my ass enough to see you had suffered, too. That came later.”