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She smiled. Not nicely.
“I came here as a courtesy,” she told him softly. “If you want a war, Dario, I can do that. I don’t really care what you do to me. But you should never have touched my child. We can handle this between us like adults or we can handle it in the papers. Your choice. I have nothing to lose either way.”
“How amusing that you think so.”
“Public opinion tends to back distraught mothers, not the rich, terrible men who abandoned them and their own kids. Maybe you should think about that before you threaten me.”
Dario didn’t know he’d moved, only that he was standing much too close to her, suddenly. He could see the color in her cheeks, the hectic fury that glittered in her eyes. He was aware of the clothes she wore—a sleek shift in a deep aubergine color with a complicated neckline and another pair of extravagant, deceptively delicate-looking shoes, all her thick black hair secured in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck—but more than that, he was aware of her. Every breath she took. Every minute shift of expression on her lovely face. The faint seductive scent she wore, or maybe that was just her skin—
“What the hell are you doing to me?” he growled at her.
“You stole my son, you bastard,” she hissed back at him. “I haven’t even started yet.”
And it hit him then, that she wasn’t playing a game with him now. That the brittle expression behind the fury that he hadn’t been able to read at first wasn’t mysterious at all. It was fear.
Of him. Of what he might do.
He thought he’d never felt so small in all his life. And he couldn’t understand it. Wasn’t this what he’d thought he wanted? This power over her? The upper hand at last? As much his revenge as her just desserts?
“Damian is perfectly fine,” Dario heard himself say grudgingly. From that tiny place inside him that hated what he was doing—hated anything that would put that sort of look on her face, no matter his reasons. “In fact, he’s more than fine. He’s a holy terror.”
Her shoulders relaxed fractionally. Her mouth lost some of its unnatural stiffness. That frozen thing in her dark eyes thawed—if only slightly. And Dario understood that whatever else was true or not about this situation, it was clear Anais truly loved that wild creature of a child. Had he doubted that? Or had he become so used to laying every evil he could at her door that he didn’t know how to do anything else where she was concerned?
The trouble was, he didn’t know how to stop.
“He’s not a holy terror,” Anais corrected him. “Or not entirely, anyway. He’s five.”
“I was under the impression the two are interchangeable.”
She almost smiled. Then she reached toward him as if she meant to touch his arm, yet thought better of it at the last moment. Her hand curled into a fist as she dropped it back to her side, and there was no reason on earth he should feel that as some kind of loss. Or why his forearm should throb as if it hurt where she hadn’t touched him.
“You made your point, Dare,” she said quietly. Her gaze was steady, and she raised her chin as she spoke. “You took me on quite a ride. You seduced me and abandoned me and whisked Damian away from beneath my nose. You made me feel exactly as awful as I suspect you’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.”
She paused, and he didn’t quite understand why he should feel the trickle of something entirely too much like shame move through his gut at that when it was perfectly true. When he’d done all of those things. Deliberately, if not quite as cold-bloodedly as he’d imagined he would when he’d conceived of this plan the night she hadn’t let him step through her front door in Kihei.
“Don’t tell me you’ve come here to claim you’re the victim in this,” he said softly, because he didn’t know what to do with shame. It was foreign to him. It certainly had no place here, with her, of all people. Dario had built the last six years of his life on one inescapable truth: he was the victim of terrible betrayals from the only two people in all the world he’d trusted, but their failings didn’t define him. He’d risen above them. There was no place in his life for shame or anything like it. “I’ll laugh in your face.”
“Are we finished now? Can we end this?” She kept her dark gaze on his. “Quite apart from everything else, I can’t imagine you have any idea how to raise a child.”
“I wasn’t aware anyone did. I thought they learned it as they went, like anything else.”
He could have told her he’d hired a battalion of highly trained nannies to make sure someone in Damian’s vicinity knew a little something about child care, because Anais was absolutely right. He knew nothing about children save that, when he’d been one, it had been largely unpleasant until he and Dante had gone off to boarding school, where they’d had the kind of fun that came hand in hand with daily trips to the headmaster’s office. He could have told her he’d never leave something like the care of an innocent child to chance.
He didn’t.
“Tell me what you want,” she bit out, that cool tone of hers fraying around the edges, and that didn’t please him as much as he thought it should have. “To get my attention? To get your revenge? I think you’ve achieved that.”
“I have what I want from you,” he said, and he didn’t realize until he’d said it that he didn’t really mean it. That he’d said it simply to be cruel. Because he could. Because he was supposed to want to be as cruel to her as she’d been to him, surely. He should have loved nothing more than to stand there watching her press her lips together, hard, as if she was forcing back a sob, and to see how she had to fight to keep from showing him any of that.
Because there was a part of him, mean and spiked and still raw, that wanted to strike out at her however he could.
And he knew exactly what that black sludge of a feeling was as it moved through him then, rolling over him and sticking to him like a stain. He hated himself. He hated this. He hated hurting her for the sake of hurting her...
When had he become this person? This angry, bitter, horrid man who did these things with such appalling nonchalance?
But he knew. Of course he knew.
And that same old scene unfolded before him the way it always did, with the sickening inevitability of a nightmare. As if he was reliving it instead of simply remembering it. He’d gone out early that Saturday to a meeting with the people at ICE that Dante had refused to attend, in what Dario had thought was his continuing refusal to do his part in their business, and he’d been happy to be headed home after it. Anais had been the only person he could talk to back then, the only person who had understood how torn he’d felt between what he’d believed was the right thing to do for his company and the loyalty he’d felt to his brother. The fact he’d confided in her and had often taken her advice instead of Dante’s was, Dario had been aware, something that had driven his brother—no fan of Anais’s from the start— absolutely insane.
He could see the heedless, carefree way he’d walked into the apartment, throwing his keys on the same table he always did, then heading toward the bedroom to find the lovely wife he’d long since convinced himself was his perfect partner—if nothing more. Never anything more emotionally charged than that.
Because their marriage had been so analytical, so cool and careful, in the light of day. They spoke of their union as if it was a practical business arrangement they’d undertaken for the sake of their common goals with no emotional component whatsoever—and then they tore each other to shuddering pieces in bed every chance they got, again and again and again.
And she was the first person he wanted to find when he had news to share, good or bad. He couldn’t even remember how she’d replaced Dante in that role, only that she had. It was as much because he and Dante had stopped thinking and acting as a single unit in those days—the erosion of trust between them, he thought now, that had followed that incident with the girlfriend they hadn’t known they’d had in common when they’d been eighteen—as it was because of anything Anais had done herself.
Would he have understood what all of that meant in his own time, if she hadn’t played him the way she had? He’d already thought it was astonishing how the two of them, raised in such different yet similarly unpleasant circumstances by hideously selfish parents, had stumbled upon each other the way they had. Would he have eventually comprehended what should have been obvious to him from the start—that their marriage had never been cold in any way at all, and they’d only been pretending otherwise? He’d never know.
Dario could still remember the flush on her cheeks, the wild look in her eyes, when he’d found her standing there in the little hall outside their bedroom with one hand braced against the wall—as if she’d run to stand there, to face him. That was what he’d thought in that last moment before his whole life had imploded.
She’d stared at him, her face pale and her eyes blazing, neither of which had made sense to him. Had he moved closer to her then? He could never remember. Because that was when Dante had stepped out of the bedroom behind her, one of Dario’s shirts wide open on his chest and a look Dario couldn’t read at all on his face.
And Dario couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He’d been eating and breathing the company then, juggling meetings all day and preparing for them all night. He’d barely seen his wife at all. He’d certainly not seen enough of Dante while he’d been shoving his whole face to the grindstone night after night. He’d already been feeling shut out of his own life, a stranger in the two most important relationships in his life. It had been a dark time for him already, and he’d even been worried about how much the only two people in the world he really cared about seemed to hate each other...
But they didn’t hate each other, he’d understood then with sickening clarity. Like a kick to the gut. Clearly, that had never been what was happening between the two of them.
And that was when he’d understood exactly what Anais was to him, what she’d meant to him that whole time. Why he’d moved so quickly with this woman from the start. Why it had seemed something like destined, though he’d never have used that word.
Right then and there, in the hallway with his half-dressed twin, he’d understood his own foolish heart much too late.
Here, six years later in a completely different part of the city and the two of them much different people than they’d been back then, he jolted out of his ugly memories to find Anais still standing before him. Still watching him with that same arrested and fearful look on her face.
He still didn’t know what it meant, what any of this meant—only that he was clearly hurting her. Whatever she’d done six years ago, whatever karmic reward he believed she deserved, he was the one doing the hurting now.
And he couldn’t lie to himself any longer and tell himself he didn’t care about that. But he also couldn’t seem to stop himself.
“The only thing you could possibly do for me requires time travel,” he told her, and he didn’t know where that came from or why he sounded like that, gritty and nothing like calm or cool. But maybe he’d never been fooling anyone with that, anyway. “And for you to be a completely different person than who you turned out to be.”
He realized he was moving as if to touch her again and he jerked himself back. That way led nowhere good, especially in a conference room surrounded by glass walls that his entire company could see through right now.
“Answer me one question,” she said, her voice low and strained, though all he could see on her face was the stubborn jut of her jaw and that same glitter in her eyes. “You’ve made a lot of decisions based on my betrayal. The way you left then. The things you’ve said. The way you made sure I could never contact you and the way you ended your relationship with your brother. What if you’re wrong?”
He laughed at that. “About you?”
“About all of it. About me. About your brother. About what you saw that day. Think about all the things you’ve done, Dare. Up to and including the kidnap of your own child, transporting him across state lines and an ocean, for no other purpose than to get back at me.”
Her hands had curled into tight fists by the time she finished speaking, and she was trembling slightly, very slightly, as if the force of her words was tearing her open where she stood.
And Dario hated this. He hated all of this. He was afraid that what he hated most was that there was no way back. There was no pretending she hadn’t cheated on him, or ignoring who she’d cheated with, and there was no making believe there wasn’t a five-year-old boy in the mix now. There was no road back to what he wanted—what he still wanted, damn her, despite everything—and no way to admit he wanted it.
She was as lost to him as if he’d never met her. More, perhaps.
And what roared in him then was like a hurricane, mighty and vicious.
“That would make me a monster,” he told her softly, hardly able to hear his own voice above the din inside him. “Is that what you want to hear? A petty, vicious man, much like the father you claimed to loathe before you treated your own marriage the same way he treated his. But you see, I don’t spend any time worrying about such things.”
“Because you’re so certain you’re right?” Her voice cut through the noise inside of him, that endless howl of loss. “There can be no doubt once you’ve made up your mind? How delightful it must be, to be so perfect and correct at all times. You must find all the rest of us mere mortals a great trial—”
“I told you before it wasn’t the first time,” Dario bit out, cutting her off. “Did you think you were special, Anais? Did he tell you that you were? Guess what? He lied. You weren’t the first woman he sampled without my knowledge while she was meant to be mine.”
He could feel the mirthless smile on his own mouth then. He could feel that hard look in his eyes, because it was ripping him apart, too. He could see the way she flinched at the sight. And he didn’t tell her the rest of it—that Dante hadn’t known that Lucy was playing them against each other. That they’d both gotten rid of her and supposedly moved on. That he’d had that festering distrust of his brother ever since.
Dario told himself none of that mattered. “But you were the last.”
* * *
It was a war, Anais told herself, and that meant she used what weapons were available to her.
No matter how much she disliked them.
“Are you sure you want to attack a Di Sione in this way?” her aunt had asked on the drive to the Maui airport, in crisp, rapid French. The sugarcane fields had rustled on the side of the road as if they agreed, right down to their roots in the red Hawaiian dirt. “Particularly the one currently held to be the darling of the tech world, feted in every corner of the world’s media? You were adamant that Damian be spared this circus six years ago.”
“Six years ago Damian was theoretical,” Anais had replied in the same language, the Parisian French of her childhood. The language her father had used to savage her mother, and the language both her parents had used to make certain she knew how she’d ruined both their lives and yet turned out so worthless. She kept her eyes on the fields, the windmills climbing up the rich brown mountain in the distance, and she knew her heart was already flying thirty thousand feet above her in Dario’s plane and headed east. “Now he’s a little boy who was abducted off a playground. If the circus is what gets him back, I’ll hire all the clowns myself.”
She’d meant it.
After Dario left her there in his office’s conference space—the room still echoing his harsh words and what was, she supposed, the explanation for why it had never crossed his mind to believe her—she’d gotten to work.
She’d set up interviews. She’d answered all of her texts and voice mails from all of the guttersnipe reporters dying to talk to her so they could twist her words into unrecognizable shapes. She settled herself in the center of the long, polished table in Dario’s conference room and she told her story again and again, to whoever would listen, while his employees walked by and pretended not to stare.
A few hours later, she’d spread the story of Secretly Evil Rich Man Drunk with His Own Power as far and as wide as she possibly could in one day. She smiled sweetly at Dario when he appeared in the doorway again.
If anything, his face looked harder and bleaker than it had before, and her tragedy was that her own heart seemed to hitch a bit at that. It didn’t care that he’d done all of this to himself. It only cared that he was in pain.
She couldn’t even hate herself for that. He was the first person she’d ever loved like this, heedlessly and recklessly and irrevocably. Until she’d had Damian, he was the only one. Apparently, that hadn’t gone anywhere. On some level, she’d always understood it never would.
“Are you finished with whatever performance this was?” he asked in that deceptively quiet voice of his that she recognized now. It meant his temper was right there beneath it, pressing at him to escape and strike. She swore she could see it in the blue glitter of his eyes. “Some of us actually work for a living rather than spin fantasies for the paparazzi. We need access to this room.”
“I was done actually.” She rose to her feet and tucked her bag beneath her arm. “Did you come here to take me to Damian?”
Dario let out a short laugh. “No.”
“How long do you plan to keep this up?”
His gaze was hard then. “I’m thinking at least five years. Just to be fair. I’ll contact you when he turns ten.”
She wanted to lunge at him for even suggesting something so hideous, but she held herself back. Barely.
“He’s a little boy, Dario. He has no idea what game you’re playing. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“He’s a Di Sione,” Dario countered. “He’ll be fine.”
She let out a low, insulting sort of laugh. “Like you are, you mean?”
He didn’t like that. His eyes flashed.
“If you don’t leave this office right now, Anais, I’ll have you thrown out on the street,” he promised her softly. Very softly. “I don’t care what tabloid you hire to plaster it on their front page.”
She didn’t believe him. But she didn’t push it. She only inclined her head and brushed past him on her way out the door.
“Remember that you said that,” she advised him. Because this was war, no matter what she felt inside. No matter how much she wished it could be otherwise. He’d made it a war. He’d even taken a hostage—the only person in the world she loved unconditionally. What other choice did she have? “You might come to wish you hadn’t.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ud6c78c16-a98b-5d31-99c6-d0b62863a869)
DARIO WISHED A lot of things over the next few days.
That he’d thought this plan of his through, for one. That he’d paid attention to Anais when she’d warned him about the likely behavior of a small boy so far out of his element and separated from the only parent he knew for the first time in his young life.
That he hadn’t imagined in all his hubris that he could simply plop a furious five-year-old into his life without any ripple effects. It wasn’t as if the fact they shared genetic material could possibly matter to a small child—hell, it hadn’t mattered to his identical twin brother after an entire lifetime spent in each other’s pockets. He wished he’d thought a bit more before acting.
Of course, that was nothing new. It was eerily similar to how he’d felt when he’d arrived at ICE—having left his wife and his brother and his former company behind him in a bright blaze of a burned bridge—only to discover that the owner was precisely as shady as Dante had worried he was. That all of the company’s business practices were dubious and immoral, exactly as Dante had warned.
He rather doubted that a five-year-old child would appreciate the way he’d handled the ICE situation—with a systemic reworking of the company from the ground up over the course of years, which had included sidelining the owner and making him a silent partner before eventually ousting him altogether.
Dario had only spent a handful of days with Damian, but he knew full well that this child—he found it much too easy to assume the boy really was his son, and that should have worried him more than it did—was never going to be a silent anything.
“Enough,” he said one morning, interrupting another tantrum. The nanny wrung her hands in the background but it had been Damian who’d picked up a two hundred and twenty thousand dollar bronze statue from the coffee table and thrown it. At Dario’s head.
The fact he’d missed—by a mile—didn’t change Damian’s intent.
Nor did it change the fact that Dario now had a very heavy bronze stuck like a fork into his hardwood living room floor.
“I want my mom,” the little boy said, his face—a perfect replica of every photograph Dario had ever seen of himself and his own memories of his brother, save those eyes that could only be Anais’s—very solemn then, with his lower lip on the verge of trembling. “You said she’d come but she hasn’t come.”
“She’ll be here soon.”
And Dario wondered when he’d become such a liar. When he’d started tossing them out so easily, so readily. It made him wonder what lies he was telling himself.
“I don’t like it here,” Damian informed him. But it sounded like more of an observation than a complaint. “I want to go home.”
“What if I told you this was your new home?” Dario asked.
Most of the residents of New York City would fling themselves prostrate on the hot asphalt street outside to get the opportunity to so much as glance inside this particular building, so famous was it after the number of colorful, wealthy characters who had graced its Art Deco halls at one point or another. And most of the world would kill for a chance to spend even five minutes in Dario Di Sione’s highly coveted penthouse, and only partly because of the view.
This five-year-old who was very probably his own flesh and blood looked around as if he was deeply unimpressed, then screwed up his nose and shrugged.
“It’s okay.” He considered. “It would be better if my mom was here, though.”
Dario met the nanny’s gaze from across the room and dismissed her with a jerk of his chin, then returned his attention to Damian.
