Beautiful Nightmare (Dark Dream 2)

Our stand-off was cut short by the vibration of my cellphone and the simultaneous metallic ring of the landline going off throughout the house.

Walcott must have picked up the house phone, but I let mine ring for a long moment while I stared down Beckett Fairchild, searching for cracks in his conviction.

I found none.

Instead, he seemed to grow even larger, swollen with conviction.

Finally, I broke eye contact and answered my cell without looking at the screen.

“Hello?”

A moment later, Walcott burst through the office door, his face beneath the molten scarring white as snow.

“Tiernan,” my head of security at the casino said in a voice trembling with anger. “Someone set off a bomb at Inequity. No one was there because it’s Christmas, but the casino… it’s fucking gone.”

I stared across the room over Beckett’s shoulder at Walcott as the cold fury crept through my veins like ice, freezing my resolve in place, clarifying my mind.

“Well,” I said to Carter. “It seems Bryant landed his first punch. He took out my club in New York.”

A ripple of shock ran through the room. We all knew Bryant was capable of disgusting deeds, but he’d never taken it quite so far against his own family.

“Okay, Beckett,” I said the cold knife of my anger cutting a smirk into my face. “Welcome to the fucking club. I don’t give a shit anymore, if you can help us take down that fucker, you’re in.”

22

TIERNAN

Of course, Bryant was too much of a suspicious asshole to meet anywhere outside of his control, so the exchange was scheduled to take place two days after Christmas at the Morelli Mansion.

A place I was essentially banned from.

Happily, I had a very loving, alcoholic mother who was all too willing to sneak her favorite son into the building from the separate entrance to her wing of the house. It had its own security system, only the video monitors played in the central security room at the heart of the house and if the guards were too busy watching for the arrival of Santo and Beckett, I’d be able to slip inside without any fanfare.

There was no fucking way I was going to miss the takedown of Bryant Morelli. It was glaringly and darkly funny to me thinking back to when I’d believed Bianca was my enemy when all along it had so clearly been my own father who hated me and hunted my joy down at every single fucking turn my life took.

Now, he’d taken Inequity from me.

An underground club and casino that had taken me a decade to make into what it was today, a well-known, elite’s haven for sin and indulgence. It produced enough revenue in one month to keep an entire small town afloat for a year.

Bryant thought it would be a devastating loss, a crippling financial setback. He’d always assumed because of my dyslexia that I was all brawn and no brain, but whatever I lacked in reading ability was more than made up for by my talent with numbers and a natural business acumen I’d probably learned from the prick himself.

Inequity was the obvious diamond in my crown, but I had many other ventures hidden in the shadows that Bryant was none the wiser to. Thanks in large part to those and Henrik’s investments, I’d have Inequity up and running in a new location before the year was out.

Bryant had landed a punch, but it hadn’t knocked me out. It had only stirred up a lifelong history of bitterness and wrath that tangled inside me like a payload I was ready to catapult at my father.

To my shock, it was Lucian who waited in the SUV idling in the driveway that morning while I said goodbye to my Belcantes. I crouched before Brandon so I could accept his hug on his level and Picasso took the opportunity to jump onto his hind legs to lick my face. Brando dissolved into laughter, encouraging his dog to attack me with kisses.

It was just the kind of silliness I hadn’t had in my life for decades and just the kind of silliness I found my heart warming over. It almost hurt, the frozen organ de-thawing after so many years of arctic existence.

Bianca watched us with her pouty lower lip caught between her teeth, her hands wringing behind her back. There was anxiety in every inch of her, but when I caught her eye as I rose she smiled valiantly.

I caught her around the waist, bending to kiss her forehead. “I’ll be fine. You forget, I’m most people’s worst nightmare.”

Her laugh was half-hearted. She preoccupied her nervous hands by smoothing them down my black compression shirt, tracing the hard ridges of my pecs and abdominals beneath the stretched fabric. “A beautiful nightmare.” She corrected, finally looking up at me with luminous eyes like morning sunlight on lake water. “My nightmare, okay? Don’t let anything happen to you.”