Page 96 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
“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 formyhelp 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 beento 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.
Instead, she was being put in the ground of this godforsaken town we had moved to eight years ago out of necessity.
Still, there was a larger group of mourners around the wounded earth and gleaming casket than I would have assumed. A few past lovers, all with sad eyes and damp faces because Aida was the kind of woman you continued to love even if you realized she was wrong for you. Our neighbors, the Dabrowski family with their four little kids who lived across the street, old Mrs. Rhodes with her milky cataracts, the handsome biker, Brick, who Aida had tried to seduce for years without success. My friends, Zoey and Hitchcock, from school were both there with their parents along with an assortment of Brando’s friends and their families. A few people Aida had worked with at the beauty counter at the mall and some of my friends from the diner.
