Page 155 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
Tiernan
Isat inthe shadows of my office, even the moonlight obliterated behind thick clouds as an autumn storm raged outside the windows of Lion Court.
I’d just taken Bianca Belcante’s virginity.
The feel of her snug walls hugging my aching cock, the scent of her sweet, young cunt and her sugary perfume in my nose, the…emotion she’d invoked inside me still lingering in my hollow chest like a single rose in a large vase.
After I gave her my hoodie to cover up the wreck I’d made of her clothes, we’d walked back to the house in silence. But our arms brushed, fingers catching on fingers as we moved too close together, drawn back to each other again and again like magnets. We parted ways in the somber, echoing chamber of the front hall, her face all cast in shadow as she stared up at me. I didn’t need to see her features to know what she was asking me with those siren’s eyes.
What does this mean?
Do we still hate each other?
Did you mean what you said? Am I reallyyours?
I didn’t have any answers, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, like a coward and a fool, I’d stalked off to my office and sat in the dark to brood.
She’d scared me tonight.
When Walcott said she wanted to go for a jog, I’d said no unequivocally. Of course, the little brat had taken off already. By the time I logged in to my account to track her phone, finding her on the same street as the Constantine Compound, I thought I’d have a fucking coronary. When I reached the house ten minutes later, she was gone, the grounds behind the gate empty and still.
It would be…annoying if my investment in Bianca didn’t pay off. If I couldn’t use her as a tool of destruction against my enemies.
But that wasn’t why I fucking panicked thinking about her wandering the streets of Bishop’s Landing, as beautiful as it was deadly, like a lamb in a flock of wolves.
Icared.
Some old, atrophied part of me had started to revive itself the moment I locked eyes on that velvet blue gaze, growing and stretching every time Brando laughed, each time Bianca opened her mouth to spar with me. They were…reviving me, bringing me back from the death I’d had at twelve when Bryant forced me to take his belt in my fist and bring it down on innocent flesh and again when Grace took my future with her to the grave when I was just seventeen.
I felt like Lion Court, old and empty but for relics and memories no one else gave a shit about, but suddenly filled with noise and energy, with the vibrant presence of two blond-haired Belcantes.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, my thumb catching on the puckered line of my disfiguring scar. Sarah and Bryant hired private tutors after I’d been cut open ear to mouth by the belt, too ashamed to have a son with such a deformity out for the world to see. No one knew a thing about the third Morelli brother. I wasn’t in the gossip rags or newspapers like Lucian and Leo, like Sophia and Eva.
I was as dead to society as I was emotionally.
But here I wasfeeling.
Here I was feeling something when I had a plan to re-enter society for the first time in decades to introduce Bianca Belcante as my ward and the bastard child of Lane Constantine. I had the DNA test proof in my top drawer, the original birth certificate Lane had been too much of an idiot to burn.
I still hadn’t found any sign of a hidden will other than that letter he’d written in perfect script to Aida when Brando was born, promising to look after them for the rest of their natural born lives. I’d discovered it in a silver jewelry box on Aida’s nightstand in Texas, hidden beneath expensive gifts from Lane she’d been too avaricious to sell to pay for Brando’s medical issues or Bianca’s college fund. There were tearstains on the page, his or Aida’s, I wasn’t sure and it didn’t matter. The whole letter reeked of love and sincerity.
I needed that damn codicil in order to steal one of the Constantines’ most lucrative companies out from under them, but I found myself wanting it for other reasons.
I wanted it for Bianca and Brando. They deserved to know their father hadn’t intended to leave them destitute and alone, that he’d had a plan for them. That he cherished them.
Every child deserved to know if their parents loved them or not.
It was easier once you did, either way.
More than that, there was some small part of me that wanted to be the one to find that adjusted will, to hand it over to them like some kind of hero. So Brando would look at me like he did today when I gave him Picasso, as if I hung the moon and the fucking stars. As if I was his personal Superman. So Bianca would get that look in her eye she had sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking, the same look she got when she studied the Picasso in the hall down from her room. Admiration and adoration.
Pathetic.
Ridiculous.
I knew what kind of man I was, and it had nothing to do with princesses in locked towers and noble fucking steeds.
I was the shadow king of New York City.
