Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream Duet #1)(10)

So, I breathed deeply until my vision stopped swimming and slowly, afraid I’d collapse with the weight of it all, I stood up.

One step at a time, I told myself as I focused on my breath.

In and out.

I rounded the bed.

Then I gently curled my arms around my baby brother and lifted him into my arms. He was sleep heavy, but I welcomed the heft of him, the warmth of him against me. The next breath I took was against his sweetly scented hair.

It grounded me as I carefully carried him out of the bedroom that had become a death chamber overnight and back down the hall to his own room. He barely stirred as I tucked him into his superhero sheets. I pushed his hair out of his face, staring at him with an intensity that made my eyes burn. My fingers found the pulse in his neck before I could stop myself. I needed the resonance of that heartbeat to fuel me on.

I thought of it, of him, as I moved into the kitchen and picked up the landline to call 9-1-1. I tapped the beat out on the Formica countertops as I told them about Aida, then against my thigh as they instructed me to go back into her room to test for her pulse.

I hesitated over her body, fingers outstretched and shaking as I tried to force myself to touch her pale neck again. It was cold and hard, smooth as stone.

The emptiness replaced the tattoo of Brando’s pulse in my chest and echoed through me. I fought against the despair that swelled in my hollow chest, eating up everything inside me until I throbbed with sorrow, but it was a losing battle.

By the time the emergency operator assured me help was on the way, I was curled in the corner of Aida’s room in a tight ball, my wet cheek pressed against the wall.

“Do you have someone you can call?” the female operator asked softly. “A family member?”

A hiccoughed sob exploded from between my lips and tears fell wetly to the ground. I stared at the spot they fell as I fought the sobs back down my throat.

“No,” I whispered coarsely. “It’s just Mom, my little brother, and me. H-he’s only seven.”

“What about a friend?” she offered. “Someone who can come help you.”

I closed my eyes, rolling my forehead back and forth against the wall as I shook my head. We didn’t have close friends. Aida was too busy dating, absorbing the friends of each man she saw until they inevitably broke up and she lost them too. I was too busy at work and school, at home with Brando so I didn’t have anyone close enough I felt I could call with the enormity of this news.

Brando was charming and beautiful. He had lots of friends, but I couldn’t call a seven-year-old for help and I was loath to call any of their parents when I only knew them from school pickup and the odd playdate.

I had never felt so alone in my entire life as I sat there in the corner of Aida’s room, my mother dead in her bed, my brother down the hall due to wake up any time with questions and curiosities I had no answers for.

For one, brief, horrific second, I wished I was dead too.

“Ma’am,” the operator called through the phone where I’d dropped it unknowingly to the floor beside me.

I forced my numb fingers to curl around the plastic phone and bring it to my cheek. “Yes.”

“Is there anyone you can call?” she reiterated. “Even a teacher from school, a friend, or a boyfriend, maybe?”

Boyfriend.

Maybe…

Tiernan.

My head swam as I struggled with the choice. I barely knew the tattooed billionaire with the full mouth and cruel smile. He’d only dated Aida for three months and he didn’t seem like the kind of man to harbor any kind of heart, let alone a sympathetic one. I couldn’t imagine how he would react if I called to say that my mother was dead and…and Brando and I were orphans.

But did I really have a choice?

Aida was gone. Dad was dead. And it seemed my only hope for salvation lay in a man I was certain was a demon in a thousand-dollar suit.

Without answering the operator, I crawled to the bedside table and retrieved Aida’s ancient iPhone. Tiernan was her most recent call.

My sweaty finger left a smear on the glass as I pressed against his name.

Three long, jarring rings later, a rough voice answered.

“Tiernan Morelli speaking.”

I was too grief struck to recognize his last name, to register exactly who he had just proclaimed himself to be, otherwise, none of the nightmares that followed might have ever happened.

Instead, dumb with tragedy, I whispered, “T-Tiernan? It’s Bianca Belcante. We…I mean,” I sucked in a breath like a drowning woman. “I need your help. Will you come?”





Chapter Four





Tiernan Morelli

I need your help.

I sat in my windowless office at Iniquity three stories beneath the teeming city streets with Bianca Belcante’s sweet, lightly southern-accented voice ringing against the walls from the speaker on my desk.

I need your help.

The words were simple, yet the meaning was profound.

Mostly because I realized no one in my entire thirty years on this planet had ever asked me for help. I was the third brother of four in my eight-sibling family. My younger siblings went to Lucian for advice or Leo for protection. Not me.

I wasn’t the kind of man you went to for help unless it involved violence or retribution.

Morellis weren’t shiny and clean and we didn’t pretend to be like our rivals, the Constantine family.