by M. O’Keefe
I parked at the bottom of Bishop’s Landing, hiked up the hill, through the woods and strolled into his Bishop’s Landing kitchen like it was my own. I avoided a maid and a housekeeper and grabbed a bright red apple from the bowl on the counter. The house was dark and massive. Empty rooms and empty hallways. Rumor was the Morelli children tended to avoid their family home.
This empty house seemed proof of that.
Interesting.
The first floor had a kitchen, a grand dining room where I imagined the Morellis fought their way through the holidays. A living room with big windows and thick leather couches. All of it was dark. Oppressive. Ugly.
Finally, an office. I sat down behind Bryant Morelli’s mahogany desk loaded with all his important documents and waited for him. Within ten minutes he came in, dressed in tennis whites and barking into his phone. “Tiernan,” he said. “I don’t give a shit. Find him. Find the girl. Bring them—”
He turned and caught sight of me, feet up on the desk. My eyes glued to his, I took a large bite of the apple.
“I need to call you later,” Bryant said and hung up the phone, throwing it onto the drinks cart along the buffet. I chewed and swallowed and let him look at me for a long time.
All while I got a good look at him.
My uncle.
I never had one of those before.
Bryant was a good-looking man. Deep into his sixties but he looked plenty younger. Fit. Strong. All his hair, black with silver sprinkled through it, still on top of his head. We had the same nose, as much as I didn’t want to see it. Same shape to our eyes.
I looked at him and felt nothing. Absolutely nothing about being a Morelli and sharing a bloodline with this asshole. Less than nothing. My bloodline was already rubbish from my da’s side. What was a little Morelli thrown in going to do to me?
What if I’m pregnant?
The thought sent a cold chill all the way through me.
“How did you get in?” Bryant finally asked.
“Through the kitchen.”
“Are there dead bodies on my lawn?”
“It’s not that kind of visit,” I said. “But I didn’t see anyone except a maid and a housekeeper.”
“I need to have a word with my security detail.”
I took another bite of apple.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked, gesturing to the cart. “The return of my long-lost nephew seems like the kind of occasion we should toast to.”
“Only if you’re a Morelli.”
“I hate to break it to you, Ronan, but even if your birth certificate didn’t say it, I’d know you were Gwen’s son. Truthfully, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.” He poured two fingers of the good stuff and walked across the room to set it on the desk in front of me. “You look just like her.” He poured himself the same and then gestured to his face. “It’s your eyes. And the way you look at me like you’d kill me if you had half a chance.”
“My mother looked at you like she wanted to kill you?”
“She looked at all of us that way. Regrettably she was born with a conscience that my father could not beat out of her. And he really gave it his all.” He shrugged. The implications of his words would not move me. Though it seemed my mother and I had abusive asshole fathers in common, too.
“How much do you know about her?” He sat down across from his desk like the power I’d taken by sneaking in and sitting at his desk didn’t matter to him. As a gesture, I quite liked it. I just didn’t have time for this bullshit.
“I’m not here to talk about my mother.”
“Of course, you are.” He smiled at me like he knew me and I took another bite of his apple and stared at him until he blinked. “Humor me,” he said, tilting his head.
“She got tired of being a Morelli and left. Met my father in London. Had me. Died.”
“Oh, that’s only part of the story, I’m afraid. She was tired of us and of being a Morelli her whole life, but she did enjoy being rich. She didn’t leave until she fell in love with a boy my father did not approve of. Came home from some carnival with a diamond ring and a plan to run away with him. Her mistake was telling my father.” He took a sip of his bourbon and sighed. “The boy was killed and Gwen vanished. She wanted to be an artist or some bullshit. Truthfully, I barely paid attention.”
I resisted the images that unspooled in my head. The vision of my mother not as a faceless Morelli but a person wounded by them. In love with someone torn away from her.
A woman so conditioned to unhappiness, my father seemed like home.
“Why did you want Poppy dead or alive?” I asked.
“Right to brass tacks, I’ve heard that about you. You”—he pointed his finger at me over his cocktail—“did not make that easy for me in Ireland. Some of the best-hired guns in the world and you got yourselves out of it. Almost made me proud.”
“Why did you want Poppy dead or alive?”
“Who would have guessed Caroline’s little pet would be so elusive? Or, if Eden’s wedding pictures are the real deal, she’s your pet now. You have to be careful of those Constantine types. They’ll smile to your face and stab you in the back, wedding ring or not.”
I kept my mouth shut and promised silent bloody revenge while Bryant sipped from his tumbler and then smacked his lips. The asshole thought he was toying with me. I put my apple down in the middle of his desk, the juices dripping all over his important shit.
“You can believe the pictures,” I said. “Now answer my question.”
“Well, alive would have been ideal. But dead was not an insurmountable obstacle.”
I picked up my glass and heaved it across the room. It smashed spectacularly against the wall a few feet from his head. Bryant flinched, wiped bourbon off his cheek. And then smiled at me. Like my violence was further proof we were kin.
“Answer the fecking question.”
His eyes widened slightly and he lifted his hand. “I believed she had information regarding the Morelli family and property belonging to the Morelli family that I would like back.”
“She doesn’t have anything.”
“Well, it seems she has you,” Bryant said, smiling at me. “The Bulldog is on the end of someone else’s leash. I imagine Caroline is distraught.”
I stood and Bryant had the good sense to recoil in his chair.
“The senator was doing some…work for us.”
“What kind?”
“The sensitive kind. The expensive kind. But, this is all water under the bridge,” Bryant said, crossing his legs, waving his hand like his hunting Poppy down was nothing to be concerned with. “We’re family now. Let’s consider it a wedding present.”
I laughed in my throat. Wedding present? This guy was so full of shit.
“No? You aren’t interested in my gifts?” Something in his eyes got dark and hard and this man, I recognized. The evil in him. Rich. Poor. It didn’t matter. Men like him were all the same at their core. “Then how about this? Let’s call it a retainer.”
“For what?”
“For you. For your…services.” Bryant smiled in that way of rich men who were used to getting what they wanted.
My skin was suddenly too tight. Perhaps I should have expected this. He wanted violence. I wanted peace. “Why are you the one doing the hiring? Lucian is the CEO of Morelli Holdings.”
He scoffs. “On paper, perhaps. The board thinks they can use him. He’s a weapon in my arsenal, but I still control the family. And without having to babysit Morelli Holdings, I work on my own businesses on the side.” I knew all about Lucian and Leo. It had been a part of my job, knowing as much as I could about the Morellis. The family was fractured. Lucian had taken over the business. Leo had built his own small empire. The father was getting pushed out. “What if I don’t want to work for you?”
“Then we might have trouble.”
“Trouble is my business, Bryant. I’m not scared of trouble.”
“You already sound like a Morelli
.”
“What about the lawyer? I am guessing you had something to do with his disappearance as well?”
“What lawyer?”
“Don’t be stupid, Bryant.”
“That Bishop’s Landing man?” Bryant shook his head. “He’s a minnow, Ronan. I’m after bigger fish. You, namely.”
I walked around the desk towards the door, leaving my apple and my uncle where they sat. “Don’t get up,” I said. “I’ll see myself out.”
“Ronan.” I heard him get to his feet behind me. Against my better sense I turned. He stood there in ridiculous tennis whites, surrounded by so much wealth and privilege it was like he was on a different planet. “I know you’re struggling with it right now. But you are a Morelli, It’s in your blood. It’s in your temper. The way you fight. The way you survive. You’re mine, son. Come, take your rightful place at my side. I can make you a king.”
I thought of the way my temper leaped every time Father Patrick called me son. How it grated against my soul. This man, this blood relative, said it and I felt nothing.
I didn’t want to be a king. But a man like Bryant would never understand that. He thought he was the envy of all men.
“I am not,” I said. “I’m Gwen’s son and you fuckers broke her heart and kicked her out.” I thought of my da, the kid next door with the skateboard. The priests. Tommy. All of it added up to something small and sad. “I am no one to you.”
Bryant’s smile vanished and his face was hard and cold. The patriarch of a family that eats its own. “Refuse me, Ronan and I’ll be forced to bring Poppy in for a conversation. As the senator’s beneficiary I’m going to need what I paid for, or my money back. And…you know how those conversations go, don’t you? I think you’ve been the one asking the questions a time or two.”
“Are you that crazy?” I asked. “To be threatening my wife right in front of me? I could kill you right now and the only one who’d hear you scream is the goddamn maid.”
He stepped back, his hands up. “I apologize,” he said. “If you change your mind about Gwen, I have a box of hers around here somewhere. Art and pictures. Nonsense really, but as her son—”
I slammed the door behind me as I walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
Poppy
“Ronan will not like this,” Raj said for the millionth time. He was with me in the back of the town car as we left the city behind on our way to Bishop’s Landing.
“Calm down.”
“Easy for you to say,” Raj grumbled, looking out the window. “He won’t fire you.”
“He won’t fire you either.”
“Because he’s going to kill me.”
“No one likes a drama queen, Raj.”
He laughed and looked at me with wide eyes. “You really seem different today.”
“The power of sleep,” I said. But it was more than that. I’d showered and shaved my legs and used new lotion and makeup. My hideous hair was still hideous. But a little product made it look slightly better. Like I’d made an edgy choice I couldn’t quite pull off rather than having been attacked by a raccoon in my sleep.
I relished my new underwear, sexy and lacy and far more fancy than I usually wore but I was going to enjoy a lingerie renaissance. Not only because it made me feel good but I liked thinking about Ronan seeing me in this underwear.
I liked imagining the clench of his fists as he tried to resist me. And then the way he’d tear it off me when all his efforts at resistance failed.
This won’t happen again. Yeah, I’d like to see Ronan try to say that once he’s seen the strategically placed pink bow on my knickers. Over the black lace and silk, I dressed in black linen palazzo pants and a bright red silk tank top.
The scar on my shoulder, healing nicely, was on full display. It looked badass, I thought. Caroline would find it horrific and that was part of my plan. Look at me, I was saying. Look at everything that’s happened and I’m still standing.
I’d slipped my feet into wedges that gave me a few inches. And the person I looked at in the mirror was put together and confident. And, a little bit, a stranger. I liked her.
When we rolled up to the gates of the Constantine compound, I unrolled my window and leaned out to talk to the armed guard.
“Tell Caroline that Poppy is here to see her. Poppy Byrne.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I don’t need one.” I rolled the window back up and within seconds the gate was sliding open and the town car eased its way through the old-growth oak trees that lined the drive. Despite not wanting to, I remembered climbing those trees with my sister and Winston Constantine before he was too old to play with us.
My hands in my lap shook with sudden nerves and deep rage. Past the last tree, the front of the house appeared with its marble steps and Corinthian pillars. And there like a Greek goddess secure in her kingdom was Caroline. Blonde and beautiful as ever, her face making the appropriate expression of worry and relief.
Caroline was wearing her signature cream, a pair of pants and sweater. She’d tried so hard to make me over in her own image. Blonde hair, pale dresses. Young and feminine and forgettable. It was all part of Caroline’s systematic control of me, couched in care. In love. In favors and generosity.
But always at the root of it—control.
“You can stay in the car,” I told Raj when he reached for the door.
“You’re joking. Ronan honestly will kill me.”
“Ronan’s not here.” And I needed Caroline to tell me the truth, something she wouldn’t do with a stranger in the room. Caroline controlled the narrative and I was done with the story she’d been telling me. The driver opened my door and I stepped out, watching Caroline every minute. I saw for a second that she didn’t recognize the person standing in front of her, and when she realized it was me with new hair and new clothes, a badass scar on my shoulder, her eyes went wide. That was real. All real. I knew that because she immediately covered her honest reaction with a trembling hand pressed to her mouth.
“You’re alive,” she said, tears in her blue eyes, and man, you had to give the woman credit. If I wasn’t looking, if my eyes hadn’t been opened to her duplicity, I would have sucked down her concern for me like mother’s milk.
“I am,” I said, coming to a stop on the bottom step. We were nearly eye to eye.
“Where’s Ronan?” she asked, glancing over my shoulder. And then at my shoulder.
“Not here.” I saw that register. A slight widening of her eyes. The twitch of her lip like a smile before she hid it.
“What happened?” Caroline asked, reaching for my hands, my scar. “When we heard your driver was killed and you were missing, I had no idea—”
“Stop,” I said and pushed her hands away. “Just…stop. We’re going to talk, but if you keep pretending like you didn’t know exactly what was happening, I’m going to leave and go right to the Morellis.”
And like a switch was flipped, Caroline stopped. The tears dried up and the tremble in her hand was gone and she looked at me with new eyes. Wary eyes. “Well, well,” she said, her voice colder. “I wonder what got into you. My bulldog, perhaps?”
I nearly laughed. “Are you asking me if I had sex with Ronan? Have you not heard the news, Caroline?”
She went excruciatingly still. “I married your bulldog.” I held out my ugly unholy ring. She stared at it, speechless. “Invite me in, Caroline. I have some questions I need answered.”
Inside, there was a man standing at the door. Thick neck. Hands tucked behind his back. His eyes locked on the middle distance. Ronan’s replacement. Did Caroline pick him up off the streets of some city? Feed him and train him to believe she cared about him even a little bit, only to make him a killer? I doubted it. This guy seemed like hired meat. He had none of Ronan’s lethal edge. His keen hunger. His beautiful intelligence.
I took the sweeping staircase on the other edge of the foyer to the second floor and then the smaller staircase to the thi
rd, where Caroline’s windowed aerie of an office looked over the rolling green hills of Bishop’s Landing.
I’d been in this office a million times, the last just a few weeks ago, when we talked about the foundation. When she granted me control of it and I felt so proud. So strong. The version of me then couldn’t even dream of the version of me I was now. Caroline’s assistant Justin jumped to his feet behind his desk, unable to hide his surprise at seeing me. He at least looked happy. “Poppy. You’re here.”
“I am. We’ll need some coffee,” I said. Inside the office, Caroline made her way behind the desk and I realized how she was going to try and recalibrate the power dynamic. She was going to take over from behind that desk because that was what she did. She’d control the conversation, feed me lies and gaslight me into believing her. And that no longer worked for me.
“How much did you know?” I asked before she even had a chance to open her mouth.
“About what?” Caroline asked, and I saw right through her wide-eyed innocent act. God, how long I’d been a fool.
“Let’s start with Theo the driver.”
“Did I know he was a Morelli hitman? No.”
“Did you know the senator was working for the Morellis?”
“No. Though at the end I had my suspicions.” She tilted her head, her eyes all over my scar. “You were shot?”
“Are you going to pretend to care?”
Caroline had the gall to look hurt. “I know it might not seem like it where you stand, but I always cared.”
“That must be why you married me to the senator,” I said, like it all made sense. “All your care certainly explains why you sent me back to him. Your care has been so good to me—” I shut my mouth, tilted my face away from Caroline. I just couldn’t stand to look at her anymore.
“Are you forgetting about your sister?”
“What about my sister?”
“You couldn’t have handled that situation on your own. You needed help. I helped.”
