Page 135 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
“The green tech company? Sure.”
“It was a subsidiary of Halycon,” I said, mentioning the Constantines’ primary enterprise run by Winston, the eldest son. “But since Lane died, it’s gone into trust.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bryant mused, absently rubbing at his right knee beneath the desk. It was still cold in New York in late October and his old wound was acting up. “Doesn’t CEI hold the patent on that carbon capture technology the Canadian government wants to use for their energy initiative?”
I smiled grimly at his recall. Bryant was getting older, but he hadn’t lost a single iota of his edge. He could remember what he read in the Financial Times last Tuesday if I was so inclined to ask him.
“Yes. I reached out to a contact in Ottawa, but they were closemouthed on the project.”
“It’s interesting, but I don’t know what the hell you think it has to do with Lane Constantine’s ex-mistress.”
“I think he might have left it to her, along with an inheritance,” I admitted. “There’s not much to go off of, but I found an old letter Lane wrote to the mistress speaking of his plans for her.” I left out the fact that he had really been speaking about his plans for her children. Bryant might have played on my temper to get me to admit to my mechanisms, but I wasn’t fool enough to tell him about Bianca and Brando. For my sake, and for theirs. “He said he would set her up for life.”
“And did he?”
“I found her living one step above squalor,” I admitted.
“Bring her to me,” Bryant decided imperviously, the way a king might order his vassal.
Anger spiked hot through my veins, a douse of kerosene to the bundle of history as dry as kindling I harbored at the heart of me. I was a grown man, not a boy, and I deserved more than his dismissive authority. Lucian got Morelli Holdings, Leo got the respect of our family, and all I got were the fucking dregs.
“She’s dead.”
It was the truth, but Bryant tilted his head to lock eyes with me slowly, calculated, the way a bird might swivel its head to pin its eye on prey. He studied me for a long, vibrating moment, before reaching into his desk and retrieving something he dropped into his lap casually.
Every muscle in my body tensed.
Bryant was a man of violence and bluster. When he grew silent, you knew he was coiling like a snake to burst into action.
“I see where you are going with this, Tiernan,” he murmured smoothly, reaching over the table to extend his hand, demanding one of my own. I handed my palm to him, aware that if I didn’t, the consequences would be much worse. “But I hope you know I am at the end of my patience. First Lucian takes up with that trollop, Elaine, and then Leo with Haley Constantine. I will not fuck around any longer. People will think we are weak, soft, if we let that damned family continue to manipulate us. I want this ended once and for all. If you don’t have the means to do it, you do not have the means to stay in this family. Am I understood?”
It didn’t matter. I had my own wealth, my own shadowed prestige. So what if the upper echelons of society thought I was the disfigured, idiot thug son of Bryant and Sarah Morelli? So what if my siblings thought they were better than me?
It shouldn’t matter.
I was a grown-ass, thirty-year-old man.
But I’d been raised on rage.
On the idea that revenge was owed to us if we were wronged.
And I’d been grossly wronged.
By my own father, the same man who’d shoved that adage down my throat my whole life.
“Tiernan?” Bryant demanded, his grip on my hand tightening. “Do you understand that failure will not be tolerated? That secrets, if you are keeping them, will be sniffed out and snuffed out?”
I gave him a bland look.
“Do I need to remind you who is in charge in this family?” he asked me.
This was it.
No one ever visited the Morelli fucking Mansion if they could help it. Bryant was the dragon in this fairy tale and Sarah was the pill-popping, vapid princess in her separate tower. It was a house of horrors and none of the children that grew up between these walls were likely to forget.
Least of all me.
So, I was prepared when he moved suddenly, his free hand snapping up from his lap, the knife he’d pulled from his drawer gripped tightly in his strong fingers. With the hand that gripped mine, he splayed my palm against the marble top of his desk, intending to stab my hand, or more likely, leave a lovely bleeding wound as a reminder that he was more powerful than me and I shouldn’t forget it.
