Heartless - Jade West Page 0,65

Blow my brains out and kiss goodbye to your heir in a heartbeat.”

He smirked back, coldly, and for once inside I felt something. I felt a shiver of fear.

“Maybe it’s not you who will be wiped out, son. Maybe you’ll be confined to darkness in a cellar, not in the ground. One thing you can be sure of, though, I’ll be wiping out Elaine Constantine if you so much as set a foot in her direction, and I’ll make sure we don’t take the credit for her demise.”

“Trenton told you I have feelings for her, did he?” I scoffed.

Father stayed smirking. “No. He didn’t say that, actually. He told me you were hunting her down in a way he’d never seen before, and he had his . . . suspicions. I’d have killed you by my own hands by now if I believed for a second you would ever care for a Constantine bitch.”

He wasn’t lying, and I didn’t blame him.

I should kill myself by my own hands for even contemplating I might want anything more from that bitch than her blood and pain.

“I’d never love a Constantine woman,” I told him, and my voice was seething.

“I damn well hope not.” With that, my father pulled his knife from across the table and offered it to me. “Swear it, then. Swear on the Morelli oath. Swear to God and the Virgin Mother above.”

I shouldn’t do it. Even with that shiver of doubt and sin inside me, I should never have taken that knife from him. I was damning myself to hell for all time.

But I didn’t care.

For once in my life, the Morelli oath meant less to me than a woman I should despise.

I ran the blade down my palm, slicing deep and true. The blood dripped, running a vein of a river as I squeezed my fingers closed tight.

“I swear to God above, on the Morelli name, I despise the Constantine bloodline and always will.”

I wasn’t lying. I despised all of the Constantine bloodline. I hated everything about them, every fake smile and mockery they made of their adoring media platform around the globe. I hated their corruption, hidden so sweetly behind their societal facade.

I despised Elaine Constantine and everything she stood for.

My father nodded at that and took the knife away. He cast a glance at my oath cut and tossed the knife on the table.

“You cut too deeply with that, boy,” he said, but I shrugged as I wrapped a napkin around the wound.

“I always cut too deeply. Greater blood makes a stronger promise.”

He stood up from his chair and went back to his side of the table. “You need to be more careful who you demonstrate that to,” he said. “If people for a second thought you were the man you are . . .”

I’d heard this before, so many times that I shrugged again. “I don’t make oaths very often. Not anymore. Nobody is going to see my faculties for what they are. Not from one tiny slice on my palm.”

I was right on that. Nobody had ever seen my body for the beast it was, not even my mother. The secret was bound deep between me and the man who raised me to be his heir.

“Our empire was built on oaths,” he told me. “And so was the strength of our lives. Never forget that, and never stop investing in our family’s promises to the Lord.”

I looked at the painting of Jesus above his head at the rear of the dining hall, and I wondered just what it must be like to live in families built without the constant pursuit of Godliness, tainted in a world based on lies and corruption.

Our past lineage was evil, and our present hierarchy never faltered from the same, so again, I didn’t understand why my father was so keen to avoid conflict with the bloodline who’d built theirs on destroying ours.

“We could ruin the whole sorry lot of them,” I said. “We’re strong enough. We need to strike the first blow. Now.”

“No,” he said and sat back down on his side of the table. “We’re not striking anything against the Constantines, not until I decide we are ready.”

It frustrated me and always had how my father was so determined to control everything about our family from the sidelines, even though he’d already given me control of our future.

“Go back to Holdings in the morning,” he ordered. “If you take another day out from business, I’ll be sending Seamus