Chapter 34
DANI
I called my father and asked him what happened. “You signed another contract, Papai?”
I hear a deep sigh at the other end. “You know.” The fact that this comes as no surprise to him tells me everything.
“When were you going to tell me, Papai?”
“I was hoping it would never have come to this, filha.”
“What changed? What was new that he made you sign another contract?”
“I didn’t read it.”
I gasp and my mouth falls open. I’m glad my father can’t see the shock on my face. “You didn’t read it?” This man isn’t the businessman I knew. My father is a shrewd man, and ordinarily he would check and triple check everything. That he didn’t on this instance tells me just how far he’s fallen. How desperate he must have been.
“Paul Knight was so angry when he discovered that the accounts had been touched, he was furious that we’d gone to such great lengths to mislead him. He warned me that it’s a punishable offense, but I was so desperate …”
Desperate men do desperate things.
“We’ll find a way out of this, Papai.” I do my best to try to reassure him but I feel empty inside. Hollow, like there’s nothing holding me together and I might crumble into a heap of nothingness.
“Paul Knight threatened to expose me, and he told me that the bad publicity would make things worse, and if I wanted to avoid all of that, to just to sign the contract. That’s what I did, filha.”
What worries me is that he did so without reading it. I need to see what has changed. “Please, just send me a copy of the contract.”
“Do you really need to see it, filha?” My father sounds tired. He doesn’t sound like himself, and I feel him slipping away from me again, lost in his own world.
“Yes, I do, Papai. You’ve met Paul Knight, and you should know the type of man he is. This isn’t good.”
“Are you in danger?” He sounds even more worried, so I try to lighten my tone.
“You should have told me the company was in a worse position than I believed. Why did you mislead Paul Knight?”
“I didn’t know what to do, filha.”
“When did he find out? Was it when he stayed behind, when Dexter and I went on our honeymoon?”
“It might have started then. He must have suspected something, because he had his own people in, going through the accounts. I’m sorry, filha. I’ve put you in a terrible position.”
My father’s betrayal and the consequences of it, finally sink in. “I would never have married Dexter Knight if I had known this. We would have found another way. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
I hear labored breathing at the other end of the line. “I failed you as a father. I failed the company... but mostly, I failed you, my daughter. As a father, what I’ve done is unforgivable, expecting my daughter to marry a man she barely knows.”
I soften when I hear the pain in his voice. I can’t let this destroy him. “It was only ever on paper, Papai. Nothing happened. You don’t need to worry.” Now it’s my time to lie. I suck in a breath to stop myself from saying anything that might hurt him, but I’m furious and disappointed that I walked into the lion’s den without knowing what I was getting myself into.
What makes it worse is that I’ve given my heart to Dexter, and now he’s going to hate me. I feel so torn. I sacrificed everything to save the company, but now it’s worse than before. My father blames himself and I can’t let him do that. I can’t let this be the end. I can’t let Paul Knight win.
“Please email me the contract, Papai. Does M?e know?” I hold my breath and pray she doesn’t.
“She knows only what you knew. That things weren’t great. She doesn’t know the truth.”
“Don’t tell her anything.” I can’t have both of my parents worried sick.
“The truth will come out soon, filha.”
“Maybe not. He made you sign another contract. I just need to know what you signed. Please send it as soon as you can, Papai.”
I hang up and feel lost as I pace around the apartment, not knowing what to do.
Do I stay? Do I go?
I won’t know what to do until I see what my father has signed. I need the facts. It was not having the facts in the first place that landed me in this situation. Paul Knight thinks he’s the grand chess master, and that I’m just a pawn.
Not so. I’m determined to exact my revenge, but I don’t yet know how.
I spend the evening alone. Dexter still hasn’t come home, and I doubt he will. He was furious when he discovered I’d been keeping something from him. I shouldn’t have kept this from him. He wouldn’t keep anything from me.
If my father had told me how bad things were, would I have done this?
Yes.
The answer comes back in a heartbeat. Because if the company was in as bad a state as I’ve now discovered, we would have needed Oscar Ramos... or the Knights.
I couldn’t imagine a life with Ramos, but meeting Dexter Knight was the best thing that happened to me.
I’ve met the love of my life. Only, I don’t know if he wants to be with me anymore. I decide that I’ll sleep in my own bedroom, because he probably doesn’t want me anywhere near him. I have a feeling that he’ll withdraw again and this time it will be worse than before.
When he walks in, much later, looking at me like I’m a stranger, everything we had between disappears.
“I’m going to bed,” he announces.
I want to ask him if he wants to eat. Or if he wants to talk. But no, he’s that Dexter again. Guarded. Closed off. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.
He tosses the car keys into the marble console, like he does every day. But he looks weary, aged. As if he’s been carrying a heavy weight ever since the news broke. “I wish you’d told me,” he says again, the blame heavy in his tone.
“I told you, I didn’t know.”
“You knew something.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad, Dexter. You must believe me.”
“But you knew it wasn’t exactly how your father presented it. Fabricating the accounts.” He swipes a weary hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Don’t put your walls up, Dexter. Let me in.”
He walks toward me, eyes sad, like this is insolvable. “If you’d told me, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
It’s over. That’s what he’s really saying.
He takes my hands in his, his dark eyes meeting mine. “I just need some time and space. I’m not pushing you away, Daniela. I’m not. I need to work through this myself. Just let me be, for a while, please.”
He’s trying to make me feel better, but I’m already scared. I nod, then retreat to my bedroom and close the door, feeling desolate and broken. My attention shifts when I hear the ping of a notification on my phone. I check it to see that my father has sent me an email with the new contract attached. My eyes scan across the document quickly, and then my heart stops.
My father has signed away control of his company to Paul Knight and the snake now has the majority share.
My insides twist so hard I feel sick. Rage bubbles up, thick enough to choke me. I want to scream, to break something, to tear Paul Knight’s empire down brick by brick and watch him burn in the ashes of what he did to us.
He tricked my father. Manipulated him when he was vulnerable. Pressured him into signing a contract he didn’t read, didn’t pass to legal, didn’t even question because he trusted the devil in a suit who smiled while sharpening the knife.
This is my worst nightmare come to life. I went into this marriage of convenience thinking I was helping my father, and now, Paul Knight owns fifty-one percent of everything my father built.
I read and reread those paragraphs again, disbelief warring with anger. Nostrils flaring, my resentment for this man boundless.
“Papai!” I call my father back quickly, barely able to control my rage. “Did you mean to sign away control of your company?”
He cries out, like he’s in agony, and it tells me he didn’t. I blame myself. I shouldn’t have told him over the phone. I should have flown back home and sat my parents down and explained the seriousness of the situation.
Because I now understand it myself.
What this means for us, for our business.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was Paul Knight’s ultimate goal in the end. If he made my father relinquish control of his company, what was in the original contract? I remember that he never gave us a copy of it, even though Dexter and I both asked for it. Something doesn’t smell quite right.
Paul Knight claimed that he wanted this alliance to get his foot in the South American market, but he’s a wily man, where my father is not.
What if he had ulterior motives from the start?
My father misleading him through the books, a serious offence, might just have given him what he wanted, but much sooner. No wonder he threatened to expose my father, who probably signed under duress. There was a reason we didn’t get a copy of the original contract. I won’t be surprised to discover that Paul Knight planned this from the start.
I tell my father not to worry, that we will fix this. We’ll find out a way. I urge him to get some sleep and promise to call him again tomorrow.
Defeat and resignation are quickly replaced by rage as I rush out of my room and knock on Dexter’s door. He needs to know. He opens the door quickly, an ugly frown on his face. “What?” He’s just come out of the shower, towel around his waist, body dripping wet.
I force myself to look at his face, trying to suppress the memories that light up in my head. “Your father … your father tricked mine.” I’m so filled with rage that I can’t get the words out. I wave my cellphone at him. “He tricked my father into signing over the majority share in the company.”
Dexter shakes his head slowly. “That sonofabitch,” he says, slowly, wiping a hand over his face. “I knew the old man would try to pull a fast one. I just wish it wasn’t this.”
“But it is this. He’s done it.”
Dexter walks around in his room, water droplets trickling down his muscled torso. He looks tortured. Defeated, too. “If I had known I would have been better prepared to prevent something like this.”
“I keep telling you, I didn’t know the whole truth. I wish you’d believe me. But this, your father tricking my father into signing over the majority share in his company, what are we going to do about that?” He’s not listening to me. He seems to be caught up in his own world. “Dexter!” I shriek. “What are we going to do?” I’m trying hard not to become hysterical, but I worry that he’ll repeat his old patterns again and retreat into his safety zone. He’ll choose to be alone.
I found a way to reach him. Made him see that old wounds can be healed, that the past as he believed it was wrong. I thought I was getting through to him, but these recent developments haven’t helped. Yet, I still believe we can overcome this. We love each other. We’re perfect for each other. We want one another. We can fix this.
I reach out and place my hand on his chest. It’s warm and slightly damp, and brings back a flood of memories. “We can fight this, Dexter. We can fix it.”
To my quiet surprise, he doesn’t flinch or recoil from my touch, but his face twists as if he can’t bear it. “I need to tell you something,” he says, in a voice that sounds unfamiliar. Vulnerable. Soft. My stomach hollows out, because his voice, that look, the vibes rolling off him, they all scream trouble. I brace myself for the worst. “I was never supposed to stay.”
It takes a few seconds for his words to sink in. “Stay?” I stumble back a few steps. “What do you mean you were never supposed to stay?”
He closes his eyes and buries his face in his hands.
“What are you saying, Dexter?”
He looks at me like I’m the problem. Like this is my fault. “This was never supposed to happen. I was supposed to walk away.”
I stare at him in shock. “Walk away? From me? From us?”
“From this arrangement. Initially I thought I’d do it after seven months, but then I started thinking, maybe I do it in three months ...”
I gasp in shock, unable to utter a word. Three months?
“I’d decided early on, before we got to know one another …”
My mind goes into overdrive, as Dexter continues, my heart shattering while I try desperately to compose myself in the face of such news. He was going to walk away, before the year was up.
“But now I’m implicated in this mess,” he says, more to himself, swiping a hand over his face. “All this means now is that my father will find a way to get one over me. The only reason I agreed to marry you was to get one over him. To spite him.”
My head starts to spin. This can’t be real. After everything we shared, everything we did, the intimacy we had. Those hot, passionate nights in bed. Were they lies? Was he using me? “You don’t mean that,” I whisper.
“I just want to be honest with you. In the beginning, I married you out of spite, not love, but then it turned into love.”
A heavy rock sinks in my belly. He married me out of spite. Whatever he said after that doesn’t register. I barely have time to compose myself. To force myself to stand straighter. To remember who I am. That I am built strong. That I can handle men who treat me badly. “It was never supposed to be about love,” I remind him. “It was just an alliance.”
“Yes,” he says, agreeing easily, while my heart sinks further down my stomach. “It was an alliance, but now …” His gaze settles on me. I like to think it’s because he cares about me, but I can’t trust my stupid heart and my silly feelings. “But now, not only am I involved with you, it’s become even more complicated. As you’ve discovered, my father has found a way to punish your family. He’ll punish us, too. I know this. Because that’s the kind of man he is.”
He’s angry. He’s angry at himself for giving into his feelings for me. That’s what my heart tries to tell me. He thinks we’ll both have to suffer for it. But the logical part of me wants the truth. “Did none of it mean anything? Our nights together? The things we said to one another?”
“They meant everything but I just need some time and space to think this through,” he says, a faraway look in his eyes.
It’s the “but” I hear, loud and clear.
“I told you we’d have to pay for it. This is what my father does. I’ve never trusted him, and I told you to be careful. Why do you think I initially stayed away from you, Daniela?”
“There are so many reasons and you keep giving me new ones,” I snap. “Every time I come to you, you push me away. Every time.”
“I just need to come up with something. Please trust me, Daniela.” His eyes search mine, like he needs confirmation.
But I know who he is. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I know the type of monster who raised him after his mom passed away. I’ve met the Knights, and Dexter is a product of a fucked-up family with more money than morals.
Dexter is a man who doesn’t commit. Nothing confirms that more strongly than him telling me that he was going to walk out on this deal. Not seven months, like he originally wanted, but three.
Three.
It hurts more than I can bear. He’s just told me he’d planned to never keep his end of the deal. To make things worse, his father is the one who ruined my father’s business, and possibly his health. I can’t be a part of this anymore. Dexter didn’t care about me. He didn’t care about the alliance. He only agreed to this deal to seek some sort of twisted revenge on his father. I was just collateral, and now he wants me to give him time and space to come up with a plan?
No way.
He clearly wasn’t falling for me, despite his hollow words, because if he was, he wouldn’t have an exit strategy in place. This man is used to hookups, friends-with-benefits. Those types of entanglements.
I’m not, and I’m done with him. And I’m done with his family.
I go back into my room, to read the contract again. We’ll be sleeping in separate rooms again. Our passionate nights together will stop. In their place will be unbearable, slow-burning, maddening tension.
The only thing that matters right now is how I’m going to fix this, because Paul Knight will control my father’s company over my dead body.
I’ll find a way, or make one.
I call Raquel and tell her everything, the state of my father’s company’s, and what my father did. The fact that I didn’t know, and Paul Knight’s ultimate revenge. And then I drop the biggest shock of all. That Dexter and I had a marriage of convenience. It was fake, and we tricked everyone. I tell her I’m sorry, and that I hated lying to her.
Her reaction is everything I expected. She’s shocked, and dramatic, and then calming and strategic. She understands why I did it, and then, dispensing with emotions, she cuts to the chase. Asks me to send her the new contract, as well as the original one, that my father signed before the wedding. The one Dexter and I asked to have a copy of, but which Paul Knight never gave us.
I promise her I’ll get a copy from my father and send it to her tomorrow. I tell her that I love her, that I’m sorry I deceived her, but she cuts me short and tells me the past doesn’t matter, that we need to fix things now. She tells me not to worry, that she will always be there for me. No matter what.
I realize then how it’s the men in my life who have fallen short, but the women? They’ve always been there for me.
After speaking to Raquel, my future path is suddenly clear. Dexter is too complicated and too wounded. I don’t trust Paul Knight and I refuse to be trapped just because he tricked my father. I now realize that the Knights are just as bad as Oscar Ramos. It’s common knowledge that Ramos’s empire is built on questionable business practices, just like the Knights, but with Ramos, I know what I’m getting into. Underneath their veneer of respectability, the Knights are no better.
I don’t need them.
But I do need a billionaire to save my father.
My father was wrong to mislead the Knights, but I will never accept Paul Knight’s trickery, and I can’t let this be the end of my father’s legacy. If it means marrying Oscar Ramos, I’ll do it.
I try to push down the revulsion I feel at the idea of being with him. I’m not in the slightest bit attracted to him, but I have no choice. I’ll do it, because for me, family is everything. Something Dexter doesn’t understand, and maybe never will.