Page 156 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
It was dangerous to play at being anything else.
But Bianca made me feel human and what an idiot I was for indulging such weakness.
I pulled up my online bank account on a remote server, the one I hid in Switzerland under a shell company within a shell company. The one I used to harbor the millions of dollars I made for Bryant, because of Bryant over the last twelve years.
I didn’t need his fortune.
I didn’t need his love.
But all these years I stayed by his side, out of fear and duty, but something more. Something Bianca and Brando’s presence had made me aware of.
In a fucked-up way, I was closer to Bryant than my siblings. His enforcer. His knight moving across the board at his behest. He might not have loved me or respected me like the others, but he did trust me.
That had been enough.
Despite his villainy, the many ways he’d stolen from me through my life, first my siblings, then Grace and my future as a different kind of man, I’d stayed with him because he was all I knew.
And after what I did to Carter, what I let happen to Grace, I thought I deserved that.
I was good for one thing, one purpose.
Destruction.
“It’s late.”
I looked up at Henrik in the doorway, coming home from a drag show in the city, the only sign of his participation the sky-high heels dangling from his right hand and a pink duffel filled with his alter ego, Henrietta Leone.
When I didn’t respond, he sighed, dropping his things on a Queen Anne sofa before he took a seat across the desk from me.
“You underestimated this,” he said, wearily, rubbing pink-polished fingers over his bald head.
“What?” I humored him, though I wasn’t in the mood.
“Who,” he corrected. “You. Them.”
I scoffed. “They’re kids.”
“Yeah.” Voice soft, eyes softer. “They’rekids, T.”
A muscle spasmed in my jaw as I clenched it too tightly together, teeth grinding. “Bianca’s seventeen with the personality of a forty-year-old soccer mom.”
This was true. She was responsible, maternal, formidable if anyone dared to fuck with her baby brother. She cared about recycling and the planet, about whether or not Leonardo da Vinci really did paint his initials into the eyes of every portrait and if Picasso and Matisse had more than a platonic friendship. Teenagers were supposed to care about hair and makeup, trends and popularity,boys.
But Bianca had all my money to play with and spent it on a minor rebellion in getting a tattoo just to fuck with me. She didn’t care about fashion or designers if continuing to wear old, oversized Greenpeace tees was any indication, and boys… No. Bianca didn’t care for prepubescent teens with acne scars and damp, fumbling hands.
She wanted a man.
Someone sure enough to use her properly, to take her to the edge and keep her there suspended in their web until she was crying those lovely tears and splitting open at the seams.
She said she hated me, and she probably did, but I knew the truth.
She also wanted me.
“She’s a woman,” I concluded after a brief pause, almost to myself.
Henrik’s eyes bored into me, his perceptiveness as annoying for our personal relationship as it was a boon for my business.
“Maybe now,” he mused. “Maybe you’ve made her a woman. Maybe she’s making you want to be a man.”
