Chapter 41
DEX
Knight family dinners are always tense.
Tonight? It seems worse. It feels like a battlefield. And I walk in last. With Daniela on my arm.
Everyone’s seated at the long dining table in my father’s penthouse. No drinks in the Great Room, just straight to the dining table. Jett and Zach are on one side. Rio, Matteo, and Enzo are on the other.
A hush falls for the longest time, and my father looks up, eyebrows lifting. “Well. The prodigal son returns, with his wife.”
Daniela doesn’t flinch. She looks flawless in navy silk, her spine straight, chin high. My father may be powerful, but my woman is unbreakable.
“Let’s just try to get through tonight,” Zach mutters. “We don’t need more drama tonight.”
“I disagree,” I say, stepping forward, “we do.”
My father exhales loudly, clearly irritated. “You obviously have something to say, Dexter. Say it.”
“It’s about the fifty-one percent share of AO Eletronica that you took from Daniela’s father.”
Jett tenses and Zach goes quiet. My father sips his wine, smug as ever. “I didn’t steal anything. I protected our interests.”
“That’s your opinion,” I say. “The way I see it, you manipulated a desperate man and took advantage of a family in crisis. That’s not business. That’s cowardice.”
My father narrows his eyes. “Careful there, boy.”
I nod toward Rio, who leans back in his seat, grinning.
“Rio?” My father’s tone is wary now. “You went behind my back?”
Rio shrugs. “You were so busy underestimating us, you didn’t see what was right in front of you.”
We all watch our father do something he rarely ever does. He looks unsure.
“You’ve been duped,” I tell him. “We faked a hostile takeover rumor. Played on your fear that AO Eletronica would drag down Knight Enterprises’ quarterly report. Leaked whispers about regulatory risks tied to the acquisition.”
Matteo jumps in, voice smooth. “Our outside investors? All carefully selected. People with long-standing confidence in AO Eletronica. Industry players who want it to succeed because they’ve benefited from its innovations or partnerships in the past. And none of them trace back to Dex.”
My father’s nostrils flare; something else we rarely see.
“You thought you were outmaneuvering us,” I continue. “So you offloaded your majority share in AO Eletronica ... to a shell company.”
My father leans “Whose shell company?”
Rio tosses a folder on the table. “Ours. Mine, Matteo’s and Enzo’s.”
We watch as our father tears it open. His face drains of color. For a second, he’s immobile. Then he clenches the papers tightly in his fist until they crumple. A muscle jumps in his jaw. We’re witnessing something we’ve never seen before … this cool and calculated man, whose chest now rises and falls in shallow, angry breaths, like he’s trying not to accept the cold hard fact that he’s been outplayed by his sons. We’re all witness to real gut-wrenching fear flashing across the old man’s face.
I don’t feel the smug satisfaction I expected.
I feel pity. And sadness.
“You can’t reverse it,” I say calmly. “Not without looking like a fool to the board. You signed off on it yourself. Won’t look too good, what with you not realizing the fabricated reports initially. People might think you’re losing it, Father. Getting old, not able to cope anymore.”
Zach looks dismayed, and shifts uncomfortably in his seat. The old man glances around the table at all of us seated around the dining table. His voice is quiet. Lethal. “You’ve been working together.”
“Getting on, is a better word I’d say,” Rio says. “Because we’re family, whether you like it or not.”
The old man turns to Enzo and Matteo. “You two were in on this?”
Matteo grins and lifts a shoulder. “We’re family.”
Rio opens another folder and slides it across the table toward Daniela. “I’ve signed over all controlling interest. Your father now owns forty-nine percent. We, the shell company that Matteo, Enzo and I formed, hold fifty-one percent on paper, but the documents transferring control are right here.”
Daniela blinks, stunned.
“You got your company back,” I say softly, looking at her beautiful face. “All of it.” She clutches my hand beneath the table, and nods, speechless.
The old man rises slowly, livid. “You’ll regret this.” He glares at me. “You think love makes you strong? It makes you weak.”
“Love made me smart enough to know you never bet on fear. Oh, one more thing. We know, I told these guys,” I gesture at Rio, Matteo and Enzo, “And I was going to tell you—” I nod at Jett and Zach who are staring at me, in total shock. I eye the old man. “That you’d planned this all along. To steal the majority share from the start, before you even found out about Arminio’s people fabricating the accounts. You were fine with screwing her father over from the get-go. You were just going to wait out the year.”
“You did what?” A vein pulses along Jett’s temple, and his body tenses, like he’s holding himself back from launching across the room.
“It’s called business,” the old man replies, sipping his wine.
“But … Dad …” Zach’s open mouth can’t find the words to end that sentence.
“Is this what we are now—dirty, sneaky players?” Jett looks like he wants to throw something. Beside him, Zach rests his hand on his shoulder, trying to placate him.
“Like I said. It’s called business.” The old man has no moral compass. He looks at me, eyes blazing with cold fury. “You played me.”
I meet his glare head-on. “You raised me to be ruthless. I finally turned it against the right target.”
Rio lifts his wine glass. “To family dinners.”
"Oh.” I remember something. “The million dollars a month I’m supposed to have received for each month we were married. We made it to about six weeks. Which means you owe me one and a half million dollars."
"Six weeks?" The old man frowns, as if the math doesn’t add up. It doesn’t, and I don’t want to answer him. I don’t want him to have any more personal information about us. But he knows none of this: my brothers working behind his back, or Daniela leaving and divorcing me, and planning to marry Ramos before I raced to get her back. He never even asked about her, or me.
"You need to pay him what you promised," Jett says, his voice as hard as his gaze.
Rio nods in agreement. "You sure do. One point five mill. You owe him that much."
The others murmur the same. The old man looks shocked, for one second I see shock start to glaze over his expression, until he schools his hard, defiant, shameless mask back on and storms out of the room. As soon as the door slams, Rio bursts out laughing. Matteo pours himself a drink. “That went better than expected.”
Enzo smooths his hand through his hair. “I was expecting a chair to fly through the air.”
“I can’t fucking believe this,” Jett mutters.
Zach’s quiet; the old man’s actions sinking in.
I turn to Daniela. “You okay?”
She nods slowly. “I think… I finally am.”
The servers come in setting large bowls of food on the table.
“I’m starving,” Matteo announces, lifting the lids off to see what’s on the menu today.
A delicious aroma fills the air. I take a long inhale, and decide I’m starving too. “Me, too.”
I watch Jett, getting up, and pacing around like he’s going to erupt with all the bottled-up anger. “Come and eat, brother. Don’t let good food go to waste.”
“Might as well fucking eat, if he’s gone,” he mutters. Then he sits back down again. And just like that, we start talking. Wine glasses are refilled and we pass around the bowls of food.
The tension that hung thick in the air, seems to have left with the old man. It’s just us. The Knight boys. My brothers, and we’re eating, for the first time, like a real family.