Beautiful Nightmare (Dark Dream 2)

Carter didn’t give him the satisfaction of replying. Instead, he took his handgun from his shoulder holster and calmly clicked off the safety before training it at Bryant’s head.

Our father chuckled, seriously perverted delight suffusing his features as he clapped his thick hands. “Look at the sons I’ve raised. Angry, violent men. Tools. My tools. It’s almost funny to think you would try to stage a rebellion. You breathe because I allow you to breathe. What I allow you to have, I can take away like this.” He snapped his fingers then sat back in his high leather chair, getting comfortable before he turned his gaze to me once again.

“You don’t believe me? Look at Tiernan. Here he stands looking victorious, so ready to hurt the man that raised him knowing he wasn’t his own son, knowing he’d never be good enough to live up to the family name. Such lack of gratitude when I gave him everything.”

I shifted uneasily, because he seemed so certain.

“Look at him,” he urged again, looking around the room. “He doesn’t have any idea that as we speak, I’m taking away the last thing that matters to him.”

Fear impaled me straight through the chest like a thrown javelin. I staggered under the weight of the blow, pain and fury exploding through every inch of my body.

“What have you done?” I asked through numb lips.

Bryant grinned, all teeth and red gums. “I told you those old McTiernans shouldn’t have given you that house. I never liked the independence it gave you. So I’ve taken it away.”

Whatever logic or control that locked the beast inside me in chains to the bottom of my soul snapped with a serious of painful jerks, my torso quaking with the impact. There were no thoughts in my brain. No reason. No boundaries.

Only pure, distilled agony and cold, bone breaking fury.

I was on him in a second, lunging across the desk to tackle him, dragging him from the chair to the ground. He fought me, maybe, but it was futile. I didn’t feel his nails rake my skin, or his teeth bite hard into my forearm. I was made animal, made heathen by this fury. Brandon’s Hulk had nothing on the strength and brutality of my emotions as I started to pound Bryant Morelli into the ground. My fist connected with his chin.

At first, no one tried to stop me. Distantly, I could hear them arguing about what to do, but nothing registered.

Nothing except the fear that Bryant had taken my Belcantes from me the way he’d taken everything else.

“What did you do to them?” I roared so powerfully, the words tore up my throat and left blood on the back of my tongue.

“I told you not to fall in love with a Constantine,” he rasped. “I warned you nothing good would come of it.”

As if on cue, somewhere in Bishop’s Landing there was a fierce roar and then an echoing, resounding boom!

Everything in me stilled, flash frozen with fear. I looked over the desk at my brothers, their eyes wide with shocked horror.

No.

No. No. No.

The framed family photo that excluded me, the one I’d thrown a dagger into, had been reframed and placed back on his desk. I reached for it then, slamming it on the corner of the wood so the glass shattered and rained down beside Bryant’s face. My fingers pinched the edge of one long shard of glittering glass and I raised it high over my father’s face.

“You’ll fucking pay for this,” I whispered through my ravaged throat, my entire body quaking with so much rage there was no way to purge it but through violence. “Every day for the rest of your life you will live locked up in this house like the animal you are. We’re taking everything from you, you fucking psychopath. No more fucking freedom. We are going to watch your every move to make sure you never interfere with our lives for your own agenda again. And if I go back to Lion Court and find my family dead, I’ll string you up right here in this forsaken room and I’ll take strips off you every single day until you bleed out and die.”

There was no more laughter in his face, only a sick, descending kind of realization. His eyes darted around the room, searching for a savior in any of his sons.

No one moved a fucking inch.

And I wasn’t going to waste any more time on the pure evil that was Bryant Morelli.

I wanted to slam the shimmering, blood-smeared glass down at his face. I could barely hear over the lion roar of vengeful hatred in my fucking broken heart. I wanted it to split open flesh and muscle, to dig into the bone of his cheek and jaw as I carved the same path his belt buckle had once carved in me.