Clueless and naïve.
She would be even easier to manipulate than Aida.
Despite her youth and naiveté though, there was no doubt Bianca was strong-willed and smart. Aida bragged constantly about her daughter’s good grades, but it went beyond that. Bianca had gumption, something most women lacked when they were faced with my scarred face and cold demeanor.
She wouldn’t be as easy to manipulate as her mother, but something dark and hungry in my gut was excited about that. I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see Bianca’s stubborn chin wobble with tears and her eyes flash as I took her under my wing. Under my control.
Poor little thing thought I was her salvation when all I intended to offer her was ruination.
“I-I don’t have any money,” she pointed out. “Brandon and I…we don’t have anything… Anyone.”
No, but they would.
I’d give them my world on a silver platter and watch raptly as it gobbled them up.
“Hush,” I purred, a dark seed of joy blooming in my gut. “I’ll take care of everything. Did you call the police?”
“They’re on their way. I haven’t told Brando yet. He’s still asleep. I’m worried they’ll try to take him from me.”
“Don’t worry about that. Someone will be there shortly to get you two and take you to a hotel.” I had already texted my associate, Ezra Feck, to pick them up and get them settled. While his official title was my bodyguard, the truth was, he was more of an enforcer. He was also one of the only people I trusted with the enormity of my secrets. Elena Lombardi, my lawyer and the only woman I entrusted with the seedier side of the Morelli buisness, would be there in the next few hours. “I’ll be there when I can.”
“When you can?” she repeatedly dumbly. “My mother—your girlfriend—just died and that’s all you have to say?”
I sighed wearily. “Now is not the time to be childish, Bianca. You need to be strong for your brother.”
“I am strong,” she barked back, a Chihuahua snapping at a Great fucking Dane. “But my mom just died, Tiernan. Are you so cold that doesn’t mean anything to you?”
I stared at the ring on my right hand, the heavy, ornate silver carved around a fat, square sapphire the same color as Bianca’s wide-eyed gaze. It was the McTiernan ring, given to the eldest male child through the generations.
My mother, Sarah, had pushed it onto my broken finger when I was nine after Bryant had taken his fists to me for some forgotten crime. I hadn’t screamed as the metal caught on the protruding bone even though it hurt like hellfire. The look in her eyes held me transfixed, the grey gone to stone with somber intensity.
“You belong to no one but me.” She stroked her hand over my wavy dark hair, then clamped her fingers over the back of my neck to give me a little shake. “Bryant can have the lot of them, but you’re my Tiernan, lord of my house.”
And then later, the ring on my finger, stuck at the base by the swollen mass of flesh around my broken bone above it, my father had cornered me in the hall, his eyes fixed on the silver.
He’d reminded me, as he was prone to, that even if he didn’t want me, didn’t love me, would never be proud of me, I was still his to do with as he pleased.
He’d broken every other finger on my right hand.
If either of my parents died, I wouldn’t go to their funeral.
So…
“No.” My voice was flat, cold. “It doesn’t. Death is a part of life. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll grow up and get smart.”
“You’re a monster,” she whispered, but her voice was stronger than it had been at the start of our call. Hating me gave her resolve, an anchor in her storming torment.
“Undoubtedly,” I agreed as my computer pinged and the guardianship agreement appeared in my inbox. Elena worked quickly. “Yet you asked for my help and you’ll reap what you sow.”
In the background, sirens wailed.
“I didn’t have anyone else to call,” she admitted softly, and I could picture her sitting in some dark corner, the dawn light breaking open across the classically beautiful planes of her face, her eyes dark as wet blue velvet with unshed tears.
Prettier in her sorrow than she’d ever been with her smiles.
Tragedy, I could understand.
“You called the devil you know,” I surmised, standing up from my desk as my man, Henrik Basso stepped through the door and jerked his chin at me. “I have to get back to work, Bianca, but I’ll come for you. And when I do, remember that you asked for this.”
A little pause. A hiccough of hesitation.
Then, voice thrumming with conviction, she said, “Do your worst. Nothing is as bad as this.”
I hung up on my dark chuckle, taking a moment to let it move through me. I didn’t have reason to laugh often and I enjoyed the sensation.
“Sir?” Henrik asked, shock in his eyes even though he knew well enough to keep it out of his face.
I grinned at him, the expression sharp like knife points. “Make it known through the proper channels that I’ll be unreachable for the next few weeks.”
It wouldn’t do to have the rest of my family discover my plan for the Belcante siblings before I could put it into action. Lucian, the cocky asshole, would sweep in and claim victory for himself while Leo, newly in love and soft with it, might try to caution me not to spar with Caroline.
Bryant would try to use the situation to wrestle control of Morelli Holdings back from Lucian, playing Bianca like a trump card against the Constantines and his own family.
Too fucking bad for them.
This was my triumph, not theirs.
I’d show them after years of their derision, their lack of respect, that I deserved the success and power of the Morelli name just as much as they did.
Maybe even more.
“Work?” Henrik asked.
“A pet project. One that requires my avid attention,” I corrected.
There was practically a goddamn skip in my step as I moved out the door onto the floor of the gambling den I operated in midtown for all the wealthy suckers who loved to throw their money at my feet.
After years of searching, employing investigators across the country, planting seeds in the ears of the right people, my patience was finally paying dividends.
The fall of the Constantine family had dropped into my lap in the guise of a pretty, innocent blonde who had no idea the deplorable ways I would use her to bring down my enemies.
Chapter Five
Bianca
I’d never been to a funeral before. I hadn’t been invited to my father’s for obvious reasons…namely, that my mother was his mistress. The Belcante family consisted of Aida, Brandon, myself, and an uncle we hadn’t seen since Brando was first born. Our little community couldn’t afford to lose a member. Yet that cold Tuesday afternoon, we were burying our mother.
Brandon sniffed beside me, his sweaty hand clamped around one of my own as we stood beside the yawning wound in the earth that would be Aida’s final resting place.
It hurt to know she would have hated to be buried here, in this random cemetery on the outskirts of some Texas town and not back in Upstate New York where she was born and raised, where she met Dad and gave birth to me. There had been a quaint little cemetery behind a white, peaked-roof church in her hometown where Dad and Aida had planned to be buried together one day. It was a pipe dream. Of course, Dad was buried in Bishop’s Landing beneath a massive marble obelisk where generations of his family were buried with him. But Aida would have liked to be buried in that quaint cemetery in the birthplace of their love story even if Dad couldn’t be beside her. She was the kind of romantic who would have wanted to be laid to rest amid her happiest memories.