Not the way I thought I did.
If he wanted to form some kind of…connection again, I could do that if he was willing to meet me halfway. But I was done with working hard for people who didn’t care about me or didn’t love me in the right way.
Done with Bryant.
With the fall of the Constantines to get his approval or to win back the love of my siblings.
Even with my mother, who loved me like she did her booze and pills, as a crutch and not a child.
“What do you need then?” Carter asked, genuine curiosity in his tone.
“Tiernanny,” a small voice cried from the top of the curving marble staircase.
Brando grinned at me as he flew down the steps, his Hulk figurine in one hand and Picasso running at his heels. Blond curls flew back from his cherubic face and his smile was so bright, it made me blink rapidly as if I was looking into the sun. Momentarily blinded, I let him dart across the foyer and crash into my good side, hugging my waist as tight as he could.
I looked down at that halo of hair and thought of the child who’d been stolen from me by Bryant. I thought of the way Bianca prioritized this little man before everything else in life when normal seventeen-year-old girls focused on trendy clothes and school gossip.
And I got it, how she could do that so easily in spite of the demands of her age.
Because this kid was pure sunshine casting light deep into the shadow recesses of my soul.
My throat closed and breath refused to leave my lungs.
“Who hurt you?” Brando asked, his expression falling as he noticed the bandage Henrik had placed over the round in my shoulder. His little hand brushed the edge of the tape there. “Why’d they do it?”
There was something in the way he asked me that hurt. Not ‘how did you hurt yourself’ but ‘who hurt you.’ This was a boy used to the concept of people hurting each other. The innocence I’d first sensed in him and Bianca wasn’t because they hadn’t seen the worst of the world, but because they had and they still chose hope instead of despair.
Before I could curb the impulse, I reached up and took his hand in mine, engulfing it in my entire palm. He seemed startled, but a little pleased at the contact.
“My dad did it,” I told him honestly, catching his gaze and locking it tight to mine. “His name is Bryant and he is a very bad man. If you ever see him, I want you to run the other way and call for help, okay?”
Brando frowned fiercely. Beside him, Picasso felt left out and raised onto his hind legs to lick our held hands.
“You should run away from him too,” he advised me somberly. “Anca and I didn’t have a dad for a long time and we turned out okay. Now, we’ve got you and Ez, Henrik, and Wally.”
“Yeah,” I said through the emotion clogging my throat. “Yeah, buddy. I’ll stay away, too, that’s good advice.”
“Anca told me the only people worth loving are the ones that love us back,” he recited proudly, then looked around the foyer. “Where is she?”
His question echoed in the silence.
I was a killer.
A liar.
A bad man through and through.
But the thought of lying to Brandon felt like the penultimate sin.
I swallowed thickly and looked up at Walcott who immediately stepped forward to sweep the boy up into his arms.
“Bianca was having such a fun time at the party with her friends, I told her to stay and enjoy herself. In fact, one of them asked her to go away for Christmas break. I told her we would miss her, but she should go enjoy herself. What do you think?”
He squinted at me. “Can I go, too?”
“No, buddy, she’s on a girl’s only trip. But you, me, and The Gentleman will have our own Christmas holiday, how does that sound?” I asked, a small part of me shocked that I was bargaining with a seven-year-old like I’d been his guardian for years.
The old Tiernan would’ve locked him in his room until I could drag Bianca home so I didn’t have to deal with him.
But Brando had awakened that small part of me that had once yearned and mourned for the unborn child I’d lost when Grace was driven to take her own life. I couldn’t look into those clear blue eyes and see anything worth hating in them.
“Can we get a tree?” Brando asked, jumping slightly in Walcott’s arms. “Mum never let us get a real one and I want one so bad!”
“Sure,” I agreed, a reluctant grin tugging at my mouth.
“It should be ten feet tall, at least,” Brandon declared, casting a speculative eye around the foyer. “We can put it in here between the stairs or in the living room right in the corner by the fireplace.”