“Elaine? Are you in here? Your clutch was on the floor outside; have you lost your fucking mind?”
Lucian was silent, and so was I. Faces just an inch apart, breaths ragged.
“Elaine?! You in here? Seriously, what the fuck are you thinking? Your mom is going to lose her shit. At least take your damn coke with you when you take a piss.”
Oh no.
No.
It was Silas. My cousin, and one of the few I considered almost an ally.
My cousin burst straight into the water closet without a second’s pause, catching me right in the grip of our family’s arch nemesis. Even being pinned by the guy wouldn’t have hidden the fact that I was desperate for him. It was obvious.
Shame piled on top of the rest of my frazzled emotions as Silas lurched backwards, mouth open wide.
Lucian dropped me back to my feet and stared at him, still not even flustered.
“You’ll be dead,” Silas snarled and jabbed a finger at him. “You’ll be fucking dead, Morelli. You’ll never get out of here alive.”
Lucian was smirking as he bent down to the floor to get his mask.
“If I die here tonight, Roosevelt, your whole world will be dead around you within days.” He laughed and lurched towards him with a boom of his hands to illustrate.
Finally, I snapped to my senses. “GO!” I screeched and shunted him from behind. “Just get the fuck out of here!”
Silas didn’t speak, because he knew the monster was telling the truth. As much as he would have hated to admit it – Lucian Morelli was right. If the eldest child of the Morelli family was killed at Tinsley Constantine’s birthday ball, she would be the first one to have her throat slit in the aftermath.
Tinsley and then me.
Again, maybe it would be a blessing in disguise.
Our family had been up against his for decades, billionaires out to kill for the thrill, just so long as we were spilling the blood of the other. My family was better than his at hiding our corruption from the world – smarter and more cultured – but that didn’t matter. We were all bound in the same pit of cruelty and criminality, pursuing wealth and power at any cost.
Drugs, arms, trafficking, fraud . . . it didn’t matter. We were all up to our necks.
It made no difference to anyone but us, of course – the police and the courts were so tightly in our back pockets that they’d have rolled over and shown us their bellies in a flash.
“Get the fuck out of here, Morelli!” Silas snarled again, and Lucian laughed as he pulled his mask back on.
“I was leaving anyway,” the monster told my cousin and slapped his shoulder on the way past. “This place is a joke. Your party is a sorry excuse for one.”
He was right on that score, too. The party really was a joke. False dumbasses singing to the same dumbass tune. Nobody really gave a fuck for anyone else in our world.
I looked at the asshole once more, soaking him in under the harshness of the bathroom lighting.
Even though the man was Lucian Morelli, and I hated him with every scrap of my soul, he was seriously damn beautiful. His features were preened but rugged. His jaw was firm, sculpted like a statue.
He was the opposite of me and of all of us Constantines. Dark to our fair. His hair was styled in thick dark sweeps away from his forehead, and his eyes were deadly black. His shoulders were huge, but he was toned all the way down to slim hips. The tuxedo he wore fit perfectly to his insanely hot frame.
Lucian Morelli was a god.
An evil god.
“Never come back,” I told him. “I mean it, Morelli. If you ever come back here, I’ll scream until I’m dead.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” he said and smirked once more before he stepped out.
The door closed behind him before Silas grabbed my arm and yanked me over. He shoved my clutch to my chest and shook his head at me.
“Get yourself to rehab before you get us all fucking killed. He gets three minutes before I tell security he’s on the grounds, then I’m done with it. And I’m done with you, too.”
“He grabbed me and pinned me,” I told him, but Silas sneered at me.
“I saw the way you were looking at him, Elaine. You wanted him. You wanted that scum to fuck you. You don’t deserve to call yourself a Constantine.”
The cousin I’d been so close to through my childhood stared at me with disgust in his eyes. Almost as much disgust as he’d had for Morelli.
Betrayal and shame burned through me.
Silas didn’t hang around to make sure I was okay, just stalked out of there without a goodbye. Yeah, it was definite. The one final member of my family who didn’t wish I’d rot in hell, besides cousin Harriet who loved everything with a pulse, had written me off. Silas was now on team hate Elaine with the rest of them. Great. What an achievement.