Beautiful Nightmare (Dark Dream 2)

He had to.

“What did you do?” Walcott demanded, an edge to his voice he’d never used with me before.

He was disappointed in me.

It hurt, but he could join the fucking club. No one was more eviscerated by the nightmare of this night than I was.

“I went to that cursed painting and cut it open,” I explained as I dug the key out of my pants pocket with a wince.

“Stop moving,” Henrik muttered, pouring water down my bare torso over the wound to gage how bad it was.

“We find what this key opens we find Lane’s hidden will.” The words should have been triumphant. I’d been working toward exactly this for so long…Even Bianca finding out I was a Morelli had sounded deplorably delightful in those early days when I’d hated her just for being Lane Constantine’s spawn. That look of heartbreak so clear on her face would have overjoyed me. I would have introduced to her to that crowded ballroom stuffed with plastic figurines of shallow, callous people as Lane’s bastard and watched her humiliation and Caroline’s like some sick fuck.

And I would have loved it.

Maybe it’s too late for you, a voice in the back of my head that sounded like Bryant’s whispered, you are a monster. And monsters don’t get to have hearts.

But I’d been born a man, a boy. I still had vague recollections of happy days from my childhood before my twelfth birthday when I’d been too young to draw Bryant’s particular notice and Leo had still protected me like he did the rest of our siblings. When my brothers and sisters had loved me and my mother hadn’t yet been driven to drink. They’d lain like half-forgotten relics in the fallow dirt of my soul until Bianca and Brando arrived to unearth them.

And now that I knew I was once capable of love and devotion, I couldn’t help but harbor this stubborn hope that I could have those things again.

Sharp pain burst through my shoulder as Henrik dug the bullet out of my muscle with a pair of medical pliers. When I looked at him in reproach, he only lifted an eyebrow as if I deserved the pain.

I couldn’t argue with that.

“Bianca found out I’m a Morelli,” I said, almost to myself, staring at the innocuous key in my stained hand.

“I figured when you said Bryant showed up. I’ve no doubt he relished telling her the truth,” Walcott muttered bitterly.

“Silly little thing tried to defend me from him at first.” My bitter laughter tasted acrid on my tongue. “Can you imagine? A slip of a girl in a feather dress against Bryant Morelli.”

“Yeah, I can see her doing that,” Henrik murmured softly, as he pulled the bullet from my flesh and dropped it with a plink into a metal dish. This wasn’t the first or last time he’d retrieved a bullet from one of us. “That girl has got the heart of a lion.”

“True,” Carter murmured.

I leveled him with a cool look, trying not to wince as Henrik began to stitch me up right there in the foyer. “Thanks for your feedback.”

He sighed at me, his temple and jaw already beginning to bruise. “I didn’t show up to fight with my fucking father. I showed up to help you. You know, as your brother. Or are you still acting like you don’t have brothers?”

Fuck.

Okay, that hit the mark.

But I didn’t so much as blink at the barb. “Half-brother,” I allowed, because there was protection in being the one to admit it first. “And it’s not as if you’ve ever forgiven me for what happened with the belt.”

“According to who?” he snapped. “You haven’t spoken to me in years.”

I arched a brow. “According to tonight when you put a gun in my face.”

“You always were so dramatic,” he countered, as if we were two boys insulting each other in mom’s garden again. “You have no idea why I was there tonight.”

“It seemed fairly obvious,” I said drily then hissed as Henrik pulled taut on the last stitch.

Carter eyed my wound. “How does it feel?”

“One guess.”

He winced, an odd reaction. “Gunshots are the fucking devil.”

I tried to shrug, but the action was too painful so I only lifted a hand and let it fall into my lap. “And you know about that how? No, don’t bother answering. I already know you’re neck deep in secrets.”

Carter blinked then huffed out a heavy exhale and looked at the ceiling as if beseeching God for patience. “And people wonder why the hell I left all of you for England.”

“I never wondered,” I offered, because I could still remember the bone deep sense of relief I’d felt when he got accepted to Oxford and moved across the pond.

Carter was the brightest of the Morelli men—and the kindest. Despite what I’d done to him, he’d turned into an upstanding citizen, a man all of the Morellis could be proud of because he was that much better than the rest of us.