Beast of Bishop's Landing, page 21
I put my hands up. “I’ll nap. I promise.”
“Eat first.” Eva puts her hands in her pockets. Outside in the hall, her security team assembles. They must have her car waiting already. “I’m leaving a separate team here for you.”
Part of me thinks I should protest. A team of people for me, a Constantine. It was my family that did this to him. That started all of this. But I know, looking at Eva, that it would be a waste of breath.
“I’ll call you if anything happens.” One of the first things Eva did after we finished talking was put her number into my phone. It still doesn’t seem real. Eva Morelli, a contact in my cell phone. That I have the phone at all is a small miracle. I don’t remember putting it in the pocket of my leggings, but I must have.
“Good.” She squares her shoulders. “It’s my favorite breakfast place,” she says on her way out. “Let me know what you think.”
Her favorite breakfast place. The paper bags are thick and heavy, the tops folded over neatly and stapled shut. Each one contains a takeout container that has a familiar shape but feels expensive. Thick, recycled cardboard instead of Styrofoam. Once they’re both out on the table, I lift the lid on the first one.
It’s pancakes.
The most beautiful pancakes I have ever seen. A stack of five, fluffy and perfect. They’re separated from a cloud of scrambled eggs by a cardboard ridge. The container has a special place for a little dish of maple syrup.
I don’t see how it could get any better until I open the second part of breakfast. Half the container bursts with fresh fruit. Strawberries. Grapes. Raspberries. All of it has been dusted in sugar, which is the only way to enjoy fruit at breakfast. The other half is a perfect display of breakfast meats. Four slices of crispy bacon. Two sausage patties cut into tiny triangles and artfully arranged.
Maybe I am hungry.
One of the guards brings me a cup of coffee and a bottle of orange juice while I eat.
It’s just past nine in the morning when I finish. A hollow pit opens in my gut. The food does nothing to fill it.
Leo’s going to be okay. He made it through the surgery. He’ll rest while the painkillers are working. I can get updates from the nurses whenever I want now that Eva’s been here. But I’m achy and tired.
And anxious.
Because.
Leo’s not the only one I’m worried about.
Cash and Dad have no idea where I am. And I have no idea what’s going on with them. I’ve been in the endless night of the hospital, but now it’s a new day, and—oh, god. I’ve been a terrible sister. A terrible daughter. A daughter who sat in this waiting room eating upscale takeout when she could have been doing something, anything, to check in with her family.
I scramble for my phone, abandoned on the round table, and hit the button to dial Cash. Ronan could be back at our house. He could have them both locked in my dad’s workshop.
It takes three rings for the call to connect. “Haley?” Cash’s voice is strung tight with worry. “Are you okay?”
Hearing Cash’s voice knocks me back on the sofa. Ronan didn’t leave Leo’s house and continue his killing spree at mine. Unless—“How’s Dad?”
“He’s fine.” Confusion creeps into his tone. “Tell me if you’re all right.” He curses. “I never should have let you go to that house.”
“You couldn’t have stopped me,” I point out. I’m so glad Cash didn’t try. I was meant to be there. I had to be there, with Leo. What the hell am I doing here, anyway? I should be with him now. “Is Dad really okay? Is Ronan still keeping you there?”
“He never came back after…” A pause. Cash is probably trying to tell if it was yesterday, only yesterday, that he drove me through the shattered gates of Leo’s mansion and left me there. At my request. On my orders, really. “He hasn’t come back yet. But Caroline has someone new.”
“Someone new like Ronan?”
“Yeah. A new body man. Even more dangerous.”
My heart drops. “How do you know he’s more dangerous?”
“I’ve met him.” Cash gives a soft sigh. “I went to Caroline’s to find out where you were.”
“Caroline’s?”
“Ronan was in Leo’s house. I figured—” My brother clears his throat. “Caroline’s man thought I would know where you were, so he tried to convince me to tell him. But I couldn’t, because I didn’t know.”
He says this last part so carefully, his tone slow and measured. He didn’t know. Cash doesn’t want me to tell him. The implications are not great.
“She’s got him looking for you now, Hales.” A deep breath. “All Caroline’s rage is focused on you. So you can’t come home. I think it’s better if you don’t call, either. It’s not safe here.”
I can’t go home, but I can’t go anywhere, really. I can’t leave Leo. I won’t. There’s no way to explain this to Cash. No way to tell him that my need to be with Leo isn’t as simple as love. I’m not sure I would call it that if he pressed me. It feels like a spell. Like gravity. Some power much larger than I am, pulling at my bones, pulling at my heart.
“I won’t come home,” I tell him.
Cash pauses, and I can feel how much he wants to ask me where I am. Who I’m with. What happened at Leo’s house. Giving him the answers would put him at risk. If Caroline’s man comes back to our house—
“Dad’s burning breakfast.” Cash’s announcement, so familiar, so normal, interrupts my thoughts and breaks my heart all over again. “Stay safe, Hales. Okay?”
“Okay. I—” The call disconnects before I can tell my brother I love him, before I can tell him to give the message to Dad, before anything. Next time I’ll say it sooner.
I throw out the takeout bags. It was too much food for one person. I ate it all. It feels good to have eaten, but something’s still not right.
Being away from Leo is not right.
Halfway down the hall, a bank of windows lets light in from one side of the hall. It reminds me of Leo’s house. Of the windows looking down over his courtyard. The angle of the sun as it comes through those windows. I won’t be able to stay there, either. I’ll have to try to fix things with Caroline.
Now’s not the time to think about that.
Leo’s room is quiet. The nurses are outside at their station. They’ve turned off the sound on the machines by his bed, so there’s only the soft whirr of air circulation. In the middle of all this calm, he breathes.
Slowly. Evenly. Like nothing is hurting him. I guess it can’t be, with everything they’re pushing through his IV at this very moment. He sleeps on his good side. The one without the gunshot wound. The nurses wanted him to lie on his back, to give his chest time to heal. It was too much to ask of him. Unconscious or not.
Leo is a powerful man. Physically. Financially. Every other way. But right now he’s vulnerable.
A small armchair is the only other furniture in the room and I drop into it, glad to be off my unsteady legs. My hands shake from the phone call with Cash. From all his warnings that it’s not safe at my home, and maybe not anywhere else.
It’s safe here. That’s the one thing I know for sure. Because the man who dreams in the pristine hospital bed made it that way through the force of his money and his will and his power. So that his family would be safe, even if he wasn’t.
I’ll be the one to watch over him now. He won’t wake up alone again. I won’t let it happen.
I try my best to stay awake. But I’ve eaten pancakes, and the morning light is soothing on Leo’s face, and he’s all right. He’s okay. He’s not in pain.
For once, he’s not in pain.
The rhythm of footsteps in the hall—security going back and forth, back and forth—lulls me to sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Leo
It’s three days before I can bring myself to refuse the painkillers.
The name of the medicine won’t stick in my head. Nothing will. All my energy is taken up by remembering where I am. When I am. Haley spends more and more time in the chair by my bed, though I don’t ask her to. She’s the first thing I see when I wake up.
It’s four days before I can convince Eva that I’ll be fine without the meds.
It’s five days before they’re gone, and I can feel everything.
Being shot hurts like hell. It teases at the pain from my back, the two of them setting each other off. But at least I’m awake now, and aware. Gerard brings clothes from home. He drops the bag, obviously packed by Mrs. Page, onto the windowsill. “Next time you try to kill yourself, I’m not leaving.”
Maybe it’s the lingering effects of being shot, but Gerard’s bold admission makes my throat tight. “Then I would fire you.”
“Fire me, then. You paid me well enough that I don’t need the money. Either way I’m staying.”
On the sixth day, I get out of bed and grit my teeth through a shower and putting on a new set of clothes. Gerard has only brought plain T-shirts, no dress shirts, probably on Eva’s instruction. His shadow appears at the door. I must’ve made a noise pulling the T-shirt over my head, but he doesn’t comment. “Lucian called,” he says instead. “He’s on his way.”
Christ. I don’t bother asking why my older brother is making an appearance. To make a pest of himself, I’m sure. “Is she still asleep?” I ask Gerard.
Haley is resting across the hall. It was a discussion, getting her to agree to a nap. In the end I forced the issue. She’s been by my side without fail, but now she has to sleep.
“Yes.” Gerard watches me pick up my phone.
It hurts. Everything still hurts. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to meet with my brother in a hospital bed. Let’s find a waiting room, or better yet, some fucking coffee. I need caffeine if I’m going to face my brother right now.”
“There’s no reason to rush into—”
“This isn’t rushing.” The one concession I’ll make is walking to the door at a measured pace bordering on slow. Any faster and my stitches stretch in a hot line. Gerard steps to my side in the hall and we go down to a larger waiting room at the opposite end. “This is family bullshit. If you’d rather sit it out—”
“No.”
“Then save the objections.”
The two of us take our seats at a round table by a window. There’s an empty foam cup with dark dregs of coffee inside. It looks like it came from a vending machine, which means I won’t be drinking it. I wouldn’t admit this to Haley, but I’m a coffee snob. Only French roast for me. I scroll through my phone and pretend the walk here didn’t tax me. That my chest isn’t throbbing. That my entire back isn’t sparking with nerve pain.
None of that matters. My focus now has to be on making plans. This game between me and Caroline started a long time ago, and now the pieces have been knocked around the chess board. Now Haley’s part of it. That was Caroline’s mistake. And mine, too, if I’m honest.
I used her, and I ended up getting attached.
Which has put me in the position of protecting a Constantine from her own family.
I will. Of course I will. But with distance between us. That wild emotional scene when I woke up before was the result of painkillers and shock. The sense I had of the world shifting into balance must have been an illusion. The relief I felt—
It was a feeling for another man. Not me. I don’t love people like that.
I can’t. It’s too dangerous.
Scenes like that can’t continue. They won’t. For Haley’s sake. She wants her freedom. Of course she does. Birds always want to fly away. I can’t keep her safe if she’s roaming the skies.
I’m still thinking of Haley when Lucian arrives.
His voice carries down the hall, but the words aren’t clear. I don’t need a transcript to know he’ll be greeting the security with mild barbs at the number of guards in the hall. Someone points him in our direction. Gerard maintains a carefully neutral expression.
My oldest brother appears in the doorway a few moments later. He’s dressed for the office, and he’s alone. “I have to say, Leo, I am fucking offended.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Lucian strides across the room, unbuttoning his jacket, and takes the chair across from me. “You’re in the hospital for days and you don’t so much as call?”
“I wasn’t feeling up for visitors.”
Lucian purses his lips. He is the last person on the face of the earth who can give me shit about being allowed to visit. “What did you do to Caroline Constantine?”
The words crowd to the tip of my tongue. Let’s start with what Caroline Constantine did to me. But the secret has scarred over. I won’t tell Lucian unless I have to. “I took a meeting with her.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Leo.” A flash of true irritation in his eyes. “She didn’t send someone to murder you in cold blood because of contract negotiations.”
“She obviously didn’t like the outcome.”
He looks tense. There are bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping. “If you don’t tell me what the outcome was, then I’ll have to expend valuable resources in order to—”
“Caroline wanted me to dissolve the contract with Phillip. I wasn’t about to do it for nothing.”
Lucian scents blood in the water. A gleam comes to his eyes. “A buyout?”
“A payout. I whipped her bloody and sent her away.”
Gerard makes a sound that could be disapproval, but remains stone-faced.
Lucian rubs a hand over his mouth. My brother looks me up and down in the familiar way I’ve always hated. Like he’s trying to see into my brain, to see what made me do what I did. I watch him discard the first few things he’s planning to say. “Which painkillers do they have you on?”
“None.”
Lucian narrows his eyes. “Whose choice was that?”
“Mine.”
“How much does it hurt?”
He wishes he knew. “It hurts less than having to listen to your questions.”
He laughs, sounding slightly awed. “Such a temper.”
I resist the urge to cover my face and shut him out. Shut everything out. That’s why they call me the Beast of Bishop’s Landing. It’s easier to rage at everyone. They stop probing for my secrets that way. “Is there a reason you’re here?”
Lucian shakes his head. “I’m here to help you with whatever foolish plan you have before you get yourself killed.”
“Sorry, big brother. I managed to stay alive without you.”
“And what about the rest of the family? What about Eva? Or Sophia? Or Lisbetta?”
“Lizzy’s at a boarding school in fucking Austria. She’s fine. She’s safe.”
“We need to talk strategy,” Lucian says. “I’ve sent my people to your place already.”
“I have enough people.”
“Obviously not, if Caroline’s bulldog walked into your house and shot you.”
Gerard stiffens next to me. It would be a terrible reflection on his work if he hadn’t stopped Ronan. “I let him come.”
For the first time, there’s a flare of anger in Lucian’s eyes—and something else. Regret? Grief? The Morelli family knows coldness, not emotions. “You did what?”
“I’d had enough, so I sent Gerard and the rest of the staff away and let Ronan come.”
His jaw tightens. “You don’t have enough people covering the grounds as it stands. And now you’re sending them away? If you still want to die—”
“I don’t.”
“Regardless, you need people to—”
“Unnecessary.”
“Leo.” His hand balls up into a fist on the table and unclenches. “Don’t make this difficult.”
The way he says this is so strange it takes me a moment to sift through the meaning. His words are an old threat. The kind he used to make when we were children, if he was around to make them at all. But his tone is all wrong.
More like please, just let me do this one thing for you.
Our father didn’t bother beating up Lucian, because Lucian doesn’t feel pain. He tried to keep it secret but we could all see. It didn’t give my abusive father any joy to beat the shit out of someone who laughed his way through it.
So he turned to the rest of us.
I tried to deflect most of the attention, especially away from my sisters. Lucian could have done more to protect us, but he distanced himself from the family. Part of me resents him for that. The other part of me is jealous he could.
“Fine.” I don’t have the energy to argue. I don’t want him to know that either. “How are the rumors in the city?”
“About you?”
I gesture vaguely to the hospital waiting room. “About all this.”
“Quiet, and Eva played it close to the vest. The next time you get shot, you could do me the courtesy of letting me know.”
“You want me to call in sick? Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t work for you.” True, if only technically. Everything we do is funneled through Morelli Holdings, but I keep my day-to-day largely separate from Lucian’s. Separate office. Separate address.
“I thought you might be dead. It’s unusual for Morellis to disappear off the face of the earth, and I thought—” The briefest pause. “We might not be close, but we’re brothers.”
Lucian sits across the table in his six-thousand-dollar suit as if this is the boardroom at Morelli Holdings. But there’s no mocking smile on his face. No wild gleam in his eyes, the way there is when he’s watching people scene at his club. I don’t share things with Lucian as a general rule—none of us do, which is why Eva didn’t call him. And why it took him so long to find out I was here.
He looks for all the world like he might have been worried.
He looks like he might still be.
I turn my phone around and push it across the table to him, a movement that costs me more than I let on. “This is what I have planned for the trip home.”
Lucian glances down and scoffs. “Not if you want to make it there alive, it isn’t. Not now that Caroline wants you dead.”
This is the moment to tell him about Haley, if I’m going to. To tell him that it’s not just me Caroline will be after. To tell him that another Constantine’s beating heart is my highest concern.
