Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream Duet #1)(39)

“What do you want to see first?” Elias asked. “The family donated a Picasso years ago. I think it’s just around the corner here. Are you into Picasso?”

My heart stopped.

A Picasso?

Dad had always talked about his art collection. It was something he’d first started accruing because wealthy people had expensive art, but when I got old enough to find a passion for it, he started to buy paintings I loved. He’d always said one day, they’d be mine.

Instead, he’d died in an inexplicable accident and left Aida, Brando, and me a sum total of nothing.

“Yeah, I like Picasso,” I whispered, letting Elias lead us blindly through the corridors until we entered a large white room filled with cool light and warm, brightly colored paintings.

My eyes fell on it immediately.

The painting Dad had bought for my twelfth birthday, just a few months before he died.

Child with a Dove was one of Picasso’s early Blue Stage paintings depicting a young girl in a blue dress cradling a dove to her chest. Dad said he would hang it in his office at the Constantine Compound so I’d always be with him even when I was far away in Texas.

My feet took me to the painting without conscious direction from my brain, Gabriella and Elias trailing behind me.

Beneath the ornate frame a small gold plaque read “Donated by Lane Constantine.”

My fingers twitched as I lifted them to the cold metal, as if touching his name might connect me to him for just a brief moment.

“Is he your favorite?” Elias asked, tugging on a lock of my hair playfully. “You look awestruck.”

I jerked away, hand falling to my side, breath short in my lungs. “Yeah, you could say that. My, uh, my dad used to call me his dove.”

“That’s really sweet.” Gabriella stepped closer, squeezed my shoulder in sympathy. “You do kind of have that energy.”

I grinned, trying to shake off the melancholy that shrouded me. “Only until you piss me off.”

They laughed, distracted for a moment that I used to take a photo of the painting on my phone. I could have stood there for hours staring at the painting that connected me to my dad as much as my stolen locket had, but my new friends wanted to move on. It was clear neither of them cared about art much, but they humored me as we drifted around the museum.

My phone buzzed in my bag, but I ignored it for the rest of the hour. Tiernan may have been my guardian, but he wasn’t my goddamn keeper.

When we left the gallery behind, stepping into the icy cold late-October evening, I finally took my phone out and read the five notifications I had there.

Tiernan: You do not amuse me. Who are you with?

Tiernan: Bianca Belcante, if you do not respond in the next five minutes, you will be punished.

Tiernan: I see you are feeling particularly childish today. Fine. I’ve enabled tracking on your phone. Ezra will be at The Met in thirty minutes. If you are with anyone inappropriate, your punishment will be furthered. And, Bianca? You do not want to test what I am capable of.

Tiernan: That’s it. Ezra is no longer coming for you. I am. Be out front of The Met in twenty minutes.

He didn’t have to type out the “or else…” because it was implicit in his tone even over text.

Elias looked at my grimace and winced in sympathy. “Everything okay?”

“No,” I said honestly, anger sweeping through me like a tornado, sucking up every positive thought I might have harbored about Tiernan. “My guardian is a possessive, over-protective, bossy jerk.”

Gabriella laughed. “Tell us how you really feel.”

I smiled at her, but the ends of my lips were mangled with irritation. Who did Tiernan think he was? I might have been only seventeen, but I’d been independent for years. Aida never checked in with me. If anything, I checked in on her and on Brando. I was responsible, a sixty-year-old soul in the body of a teen. I had never done drugs, had a single sip of booze, or even kissed a boy unless you counted Quinn Masters forcing himself on me in that locker room incident.

I didn’t need Tiernan to baby me.

I didn’t want him to.

All the crackling electric irritation beneath my skin amped even higher as I stood there and stewed. He’d ruined a perfectly lovely afternoon with his alpha-male bullshit and I wanted to ruin his.

An idea crystalized in my mind and a slow, wicked grin overtook my face.

“Hey, do you have to be home right away?” I asked my new friends as I dug into my backpack and counted the wad of hundreds Tiernan had handed me that morning. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now…”

*

It hurt.

There was no way around the pain. A tattoo on any part of the body was bound to hurt, but one etched into the delicate skin of the wrist was especially painful. A small part of me nestled into the deepest, darkest folds of my being might have enjoyed the teeth-clenching hurt, the buzz of it zigging through me until all my nerves danced, but I’d gotten good at ignoring it.

Elias and Gabriella sat beside me in solidarity, chatting about mundane school gossip and the upcoming Lane Constantine Memorial Ball as the man with a dyed-green fauxhawk bent over my wrist with his vibrating tattoo gun.

I was underage, but Tiernan had given me two thousand dollars in bills and I’d put them to good use to convince the man with the tattoo shop on the outskirts of the Upper East Side to ink me. I’d also turned off my phone so Tiernan, the asshole, couldn’t find me.