Fallen Rose by Amelia Wilde
Chapter Four
Leo
The dining room. It’s the place where I watched Haley’s face light up at the sight of her Jane Eyre. Now it’s crowded with people who don’t fucking belong here.
Four representatives from the teams who were supposed to be guarding the grounds.
Six more people Gerard brought in.
All of them talk at once.
In the middle of this crowd from hell, I’m on fire. Worse than fire. The pain in my back has reached my ankles. The back of my skull. It’s like being cut with a knife—long, thin stripes of agony that come over and over and over until I can’t tell them apart. My head howls with it. My body has been screaming with it since Eva shook me awake in the night.
Eva told me the news. Gerard tells me she insisted on being the one. I’ll never forget it. At the same moment I became aware of the cold sheet—I was just touching Haley’s face—Eva said, “Haley’s gone. Caroline’s bulldog took her.”
The next moment, I became a column of flame and rage.
I am that column now.
There is a fine line between the performance of fury and letting it sink into the bone, and I’m standing on it. One step and I could let go. I could stop holding it back. I could become the snarling creature who bared his teeth at my father until all his attention was on me.
Gerard won’t shut the fuck up. “—move away from the house. I don’t feel confident in—”
“Confident?” I snap at him. “I don’t want your fucking confidence. I’m not waiting for you to feel secure. We’re getting her back. There’s your certainty. It’s happening.”
“Leo.” Eva’s been at my side since she woke me up. She stood in the doorway to my closet and watched me yank a shirt over my head. All my muscles ache. I should be resting. That’s what Carina said, and what Eva repeated, and I will be damned if I’m going to rest with Haley gone. “You need to calm down. Take a breath. We can go to your office.”
“No,” I thunder at her. “Fuck no. I’m not going to calm the fuck down.”
My voice echoes in the room. Conversation comes to a startling halt. My temper is getting away from me. Just a little. Just enough to scare Eva. But I can’t shut it off any more than I can shut off the shrieking pain all down my spine.
Someone from the household staff steps to my side, silent, keeping his eyes off mine. He has a case in his hands, the top held open so I can see the knives inside. I choose one and slip it into the Kevlar sheath on my belt.
Eva watches this with her bottom lip between her teeth. She bites down so hard the flesh is white. Nervous. She’s nervous about what I’m going to do.
I take her face in my hands. It’s too gentle a motion, too careful, and it’s because we’re so close to that line. I would love so much to let the beast take over, and I can’t do it yet. So I take exquisite care with every fucking movement.
I kiss my sister on the forehead, then put both hands on her shoulders to move her aside.
And then I’m going. Striding out of the room. There are more people outside the dining room. More guards. One steps into my path. “Mr. Morelli, it’s not secure outside—”
I have his jacket in my fists before he’s ready. No one is ever ready for me when I’m like this, when I’m on the verge of chaos. He’s a strong man but I’m stronger. I am fucking furious.
It boils and burns, every muscle acidic with it. One step, two, and I have him slammed against the wall. The roar of rage is louder than his skull meeting plaster. My teeth grit together so hard they crack. “It’s not secure anywhere, you fucking fool. You let that bastard take her.”
The rage settles inside me, deeper, deeper, until there’s nothing left of me—of Leo Morelli. I’m the Beast of Bishop’s Landing now.
He struggles against the wall. “Everyone who was on shift at that time has been removed from the property. They’ll be sequestered until the investigation is over.”
“Explain it to me some more.” It’s a taunt.
He looks confused, torn between his duty and his fear. “Sir—”
They’re beginning to gather now. Closing in. I can see Gerard out of the corner of my eye.
“The only reason you remain alive is because I haven’t yet reached for the knife at my belt.” I keep my tone level, like we’re having a conversation at a dinner party, but the dead silence in the foyer means they can all hear me. Good. “When I let go of your jacket, you’ll have a choice. You can stay out of my way and live, or you can put your body in my path and die. It makes no difference to me.”
A single nod.
I hold him another heartbeat because that’s all I’m willing to spare, and then I let go.
It’s not a guard who blocks the way when I turn back.
It’s Eva, looking rumpled and exhausted and scared. She hasn’t changed out of the clothes she was wearing when she woke me up. She’s stayed in soft leggings and a sweater all day. “You don’t have to do this,” she says. “Let them help you. Don’t leave when you’re like this.”
“I’ll be back soon, sister mine.”
She glances at someone behind me—Gerard, probably—and plants her feet.
I go around her. I’m already gone. I have to get the fuck out of here before I kill someone in the foyer, before I lose myself to that violence. I’ve reserved it for someone else.
In my garage I choose a nondescript SUV, black and featureless, and drive out into a winter night. Snow spirals in front of the headlights. A separate part of me, one not being consumed by blistering pain, is in control of the vehicle. The roads to Bishop’s Landing are bathed in shadows.
It hurts so fucking much.
The pain is all-consuming and irrelevant at once.
It changes nothing. I’m done waiting.
I have waited for hours with Haley in the clutches of a monster, and it’s over. I know she’s at the Constantine compound. I’ve surveilled multiple Constantine properties for years, so I have video of a car arriving in the night. They bundled her inside with her jacket over her head like I wouldn’t know what the fuck they were doing. I know she’s there.
I just need confirmation she’s still in the main house. Caroline’s house. Confirmation they didn’t take her somewhere else—a warehouse, a hospital. An unmarked grave. No. I can’t think like that or I’ll drive this vehicle through the front door.
I would do it, too. Except that Haley might get hurt.
Instead I have to sit in this SUV until I see someone leaving. It’s hell to drive. I can’t keep my back fully away from the seat but it wouldn’t matter if I could. It’s reaching around to my ribs now. The fronts of my legs. Everything hurts. There is a rumor in Bishop’s Landing that I train to stay fit for killing people, but the truth is that when the pain gets this bad, it can cause a cascade of knots and cramps in my muscles that require movement to work out.
I try to stay ahead of them.
I’m not ahead of them now.
As I roll through the maintained, lighted street adjacent to the Constantine compound, a car pulls out of a side gate. The driver lifts a hand to shield his eyes against my headlights.
It’s Rick Joseph Jr.
I suppress a brief urge to run him over with the SUV. It would win against his piece-of-shit car. But he has been useful to me in the past. He likes money, and he likes chances, and the fact that he wants to be a Constantine means he’s worked to get as much access as he can.
He can be bought. I’ve done it many times before. I’ll do it again.
It’s painful to turn away from the Constantine compound when I think Haley’s inside, but I force myself to do it. This is the only way I can be sure to get her out safely. Without a single scratch on her beautiful head. I have to trust that her family won’t hurt her. At least not right away. She’s one of them, after all.
I turn down a side street and race Rick to his apartment. It’s the kind of bullshit place up-and-comers in Bishop’s Landing scramble to rent, with fake columns on the ground floor and glass windows above. It takes nothing to get Rick’s apartment number from the doorman, who doesn’t give a fuck about his job. It takes a pathetic amount of money to buy his silence. The veneer of fanciness on this place doesn’t prevent me from forcing the lock on Rick’s door.
I have just enough time to stand in his shithole living room before he arrives.
He was at Caroline’s house.
Caroline’s focus is on fucking with me at this moment, which is why she’s taken Haley.
Rick was there because he’s working with Caroline. They’ll have a mutual interest.
I’m waiting for him when he opens the door and steps in.
I must be a nightmare, coming at him out of the dark, but I’m merciful. I take his shirt in my fist and punch him before he has time to panic and run. His head snaps to the side.
Rick’s an asshole, and an opportunist. “What the fuck—”
“What the fuck is right, Rick. What the fuck have you been doing at Caroline’s? And here’s the more important question, are you ready to die for it? Because I’d love to kill you.”
I back him up against the door in an adrenaline haze and punch him again. He was with Haley. I know he was. He was with her, and he was with her because Caroline wanted him to be there, and I could kill him. I will fucking kill him.
The second hit is too much for him, and when I release his shirt, he folds.
He gets his hands underneath him and starts to push up. I kick him before he can get to his feet, sending him back to the floor. One more kick to the rib. Every muscle tenses to deliver another one, and another, until he’s dead, but I haul myself back from the edge with both hands.
I stalk into his living room, putting distance between me and that asshole, that motherfucker. There are tricks, there are strategies, to bring myself back when it’s like this, when it’s bad like this, when my fury swallows me whole. I remember the first lines of books. Backward and forward. Random bullshit from my library. It doesn’t matter. Count the words. The pain has me in a tight grip. A crushing grip. But I have to calm the fuck down, if only slightly. Enough that I don’t actually murder Rick Joseph Jr. Because if I murder him, I can’t use him.
He groans when he hears me coming back, and does it louder when I pick him up and pin him to the door by the throat. I want to drive the tip of my knife into his artery until he bleeds but I won’t be able to stop. As it stands he’ll have a black eye and maybe a cracked rib.
“You’ve seen her. Haley Constantine. At the compound.”
Rick doesn’t struggle. “Yeah.” I’ve knocked the wind out of him. “Yeah. She’s there.” He blinks at me in the light coming from his microwave. “Why do you—why do you care?”
I drive a fist into his chest and he makes a sound like a wounded animal. My control is paper-thin. “Tell me how she is. Is she hurt? Is she afraid? Is she hungry?”
Rick’s eyes slide to the left, and my heart implodes. “She’s okay.” He grunts again, and I discover I’ve moved a hand to a kicked rib and driven my knuckles into it. Good. I add more pressure and his teeth grind together. “She’s okay, I swear to God. How could anyone not be okay in a goddamn mansion? Two-thousand-thread-count sheets, and all she can talk about is leaving. Talking shit about her family. Saying Caroline’s holding her against her will.”
The edges of my vision dim. This bastard. This son of a bitch. He talked to her, and he didn’t believe her. My pulse races faster. I’m going to crush the life out of him. Now, now, now.
“She won’t—” Rick sounds more pained by the word. “She won’t stop talking about you. Talked about you on our date. Did you hit it, man? I’m not mad about it.”
An image of Haley springs into my mind. Sweet, soft Haley, who is filthy for me, who cries for me, couldn’t keep my name out of her mouth even in Caroline’s lair. I’m out of my mind, thinking of her trapped there. I’m out of my mind. But the last thing I want is for her to hear from Caroline that I’ve killed Rick. That I’m a murderer. She’ll think I’m not coming to get her.
That’s the only thing that pulls me back from the edge.
I yank him away from the door and throw him into his apartment. Rick crashes over a coffee table and crumples, clumsy and beaten. He puts one hand up to shield himself while I tower over him. “The next time Caroline invites you to her house, what are you going to do, Rick?”
He hesitates for only an instant. “Call you.”
I crouch down next to him so he can see my face. “If you touch Haley, I’ll kill you. No lock in the world can keep me out. No security firm can keep you protected. There’s nowhere you can run. I’ll find you, and I’ll gut you where you stand.”
One more kick. That’s all I allow myself. I stand up and aim for his ribs.
Rick curls into a ball, heaving, and I leave him there.
Winter air snaps into my face as I step out into the cold, already dialing. I swore I wouldn’t do this, not unless I had to, but we’re here now. We’re fucking here. The time has come.
My brother answers on the first ring. “I thought you’d never call.” There’s noise in the background. He’s at his club, or out somewhere.
“Hell must have frozen over.” I wrench open the door to the SUV and climb into the driver’s seat over the frantic protests of the pain.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Lucian says to someone nearby, and the background chatter fades out. It sounds like he’s walking fast. “What’s going on?”
“War,” I tell him, my throat tight.
“This is Caroline, isn’t it?” He swears with creative aplomb. “I can’t believe you fucking whipped her. Of course she’ll react like an injured dog. All for a goddamn business deal.”
“It was more than that.” The words emerge before I can stop them. If it weren’t for the phone, I’d have both hands over my eyes.
He’s quiet. “Leo.”
There’s so much unspoken between us. So much history and abuse in our family. I don’t have time for any of it, not with Haley hanging in the balance. “Like I said, hell has frozen over. Because I’m reaching out to you, brother mine. I need your help.”
