“He moved us after that, to be safe. Stopped spending so much money on us.” A hesitation like a hiccough. “Stopped spending so much time with us.”
“Sounds like an asshole to me,” I grated out as we whizzed over the bridge and finally broached the outer ring of Manhattan. “You’ve romanticized a ghost, turned him into something he never was.”
“What would you know about it?” she asked, suspicion laced through her tone. “You speak as if you knew him.”
“No,” I muttered darkly. “I didn’t know him.”
The truth was, I’d heard rumors that Lane Constantine was a good father. It fucking rankled me to know that he’d loved his kids while Bryant had not. No matter what I did, what he took from me to force me to live in his shadows, I’d never be good enough for my father because I wasn’t really his.
I didn’t want to be good enough for him anymore.
I wanted to be good enough for my brothers and sisters, even Leo, who’d abandoned his protection of us for long enough for me to be forced to take a belt to Carter on my nightmarish twelfth birthday.
That was why I was doing this, driving Bianca toward her humiliation and the Constantines’ public shaming.
For my siblings and for the name of my real father.
If I could justknowhim, maybe I could finally shake the yoke of Bryant from my shoulders and become a different kind of man.
We were quiet after that, each of us mired in our own thoughts. It was only when we approached The Met that she murmured, “I think it was a Morelli who took me, or one of their henchmen. I have nightmares sometimes about the face of the man who took me.”
Ice water poured down my spine. “What makes you think that?”
“When he talked on the phone, he mentioned he was doing it for the sake of the family. Capital ‘T,’ capital ‘F.’ He mentioned the name Bryant.”
My head rang as if I’d been hit at the temple with a baseball bat.
Had someone in the family tried to abduct Bianca as a girl? To what fucking end? To humiliate Lane and Caroline? To blackmail them for money?
Was that person still out there, waiting and watching for Bianca to reappear?
If it was Bryant, who the hell would he have trusted with the task if notme?
“I think you just passed it,” she said softly and I noticed we were half a block beyond the turnoff for the museum.
I sucked in a controlled breath, hoping it would calm the tornado ripping through me.
Was I putting Bianca in danger by outing her to society?
I had refused to think about what would happen after.
After she found out I was Tiernan Morelli.
I hadn’t known she had this history with my family, this full-bodied fear. She wouldn’t trust me after this, wouldn’t stay in my house a moment later. She couldn’t take Brando from me, not really, but she was almost eighteen, she could file for emancipation or run away.
My chest filled with acid, burning and tight. She’d be alone and vulnerable to my enemies, to the Constantines’ enemies, to the Constantines themselves.
What would they do with Lane’s bastard daughter? A daughter who stood to inherit a substantial amount of Lane’s holdings.
“Tiernan,” she called a moment before a soft hand traced the length of my puckered scar beneath the flimsy cover of my beard. I shivered at the intimacy, pulled from my paralysis. “Thank you for bringing me here tonight. It means more than I can tell you.”
“It’s nothing.” My voice was shredded.
Her hand dropped to her side, but she smiled at me, a little shy but feeling bold. “You know, I’m almost certain you aren’t as much of a monster as you make yourself out to be.”
I snarled at her. Why the fuck did people keep implying that?
She didn’t flinch at my gesture or when I reached out to crumple her silken curls in my fist. When I brought her close, leaned over the console between us, her lips fell open like my aggression was the key to the lock of her arousal.