Chapter Eleven
GIACO HAD WAITED his whole life to walk into a conference room in a gleaming corporate office set high in a skyscraper—this one in the Area de Negocios de la Castellana in Madrid—and finally turn the tables on his father.
He and Pau Calixto had planned this since they’d met at university.
They had lived on the same stair at Cambridge and had met because they were both predisposed to taking long walks in the middle of the night.
By the time Giaco was inevitably sent down in disgrace, he and Pau had cemented a lifelong friendship.
His friend, no stranger to the issues of legacies and difficult fathers, had suggested a remedy years ago.
The catch was, it would take a long time.
It would require that Giaco show the world the worst parts of himself—his basest urges and lowest moments—and claim they were the sum total of who he was, so that Umberto would never think to suspect his son capable of plotting against him.
The shameful truth about that was that he hadn’t minded being seen as the most disreputable man alive. Not at first.
But then again, a man never fully understood the contours of his prison cell until the door was locked tight behind him.
Today, his friend gathered up a few items from his desk and nodded toward Giaco, who stood by the window with Madrid far below his feet.
“Are you ready?” Pau asked, in his usual ruthless, formidable way.
“I’ve been ready since bloody university,” Giaco replied.
Pau only nodded at this. It had been a long road, but they were at the end of it. All that was left was the big reveal that would turn Umberto’s world upside down and keep it there. The good part, Giaco always said, will be the look on his face.
“Five minutes,” his friend told him. “We will start with some niceties to make certain he is not prepared. This will hurt him more once all is revealed.”
There was nothing else to say at this point.
They had plotted this out, every moment of it, across years.
Their plotting and planning put Giaco’s dating-to-wedding itinerary to shame.
Nothing had been left to chance. They had set a trap for Umberto and lured him in, and now all that remained was telling the man that what he thought was a win on his end was, in fact, a severed limb.
They’d distracted him with Pau’s supposed purity tests and the clamor and commotion of Giaco’s very public romantic life while they’d pulled the rug straight out from under Umberto’s feet.
They had always planned on a wedding that would seem like a surrender on Giaco’s end, but the fact that Umberto had managed to manipulate Ivy Amis into it? Fate had clearly been on their side.
This day, this revenge, was nothing but sweet. Giaco had anticipated he would savor it forever.
His friend walked by and slapped him on the back, then nodded toward his wedding ring. The one he was forever fiddling with, and not because it bothered him the way he’d assumed it would.
“Will you tell her the whole truth?” Pau asked. “The whole of the game? Umberto will almost certainly hold on to her inheritance out of spite.”
Giaco frowned. He hadn’t exactly forgotten Ivy’s virtuous reasons for marrying him, but he’d set them aside. He had been working toward this day for so long that he’d developed a kind of tunnel vision. Nothing that didn’t serve the end goal mattered.
The fact of the matter was, Ivy was the only thing he’d seen outside that tunnel in years.
“Let’s handle one problem at a time,” he said, and put his hand on Pau’s shoulder for a moment. They looked at each other, a whole lifetime of working to get right here between them.
Pau nodded again, and then strode from the office to get it all started.
And for the next five minutes Giaco stood quietly in his friend’s office, looking out at the city below him once again. But this time without seeing it.
Because strangely enough, none of this felt the way he’d expected that it would.
He had dreamed about that call he’d received in Capri for long years before it had finally happened.
That everything was in place. That it was done—all done and dusted, save the gloating.
He had fantasized endlessly about the joy he would feel once he knew that triumph was right here, right within his grasp.
He’d been pretty focused on the gloating, too.
But instead, it all felt…hollow.
He twisted the wedding ring on his finger. Surely all he needed was this confrontation with his father. Once that happened, it would feel the way it should.
That was the missing piece, he was sure.
At the appointed time, he walked directly to the conference room and let himself in, sauntering into the middle of a scrum of dark suits, all bespoke and understated.
Giaco, naturally, was in battered jeans.
For a moment, everyone inside the room fell silent at the sight of him. The fact of him, no doubt. What, after all, could Umberto’s feckless tabloid-fodder son have to do with the serious business men like this trafficked in daily?
Giaco looked around, taking in the looks of incomprehension on so many dark-suited faces. He saw the gleam in his friend’s gaze. Then, at last, taking his time so he could best savor what was to come and hold it close forevermore, he turned his attention to his father.
Umberto stared at him, his cold eyes without comprehension. “Have you gotten lost on the way to a whorehouse?” he asked starkly.
“Not exactly,” Giaco murmured. He stood there a moment, making sure everyone was looking at him. Reliving his greatest tabloid scandals, no doubt. Only when he felt they were all sifting through his greatest hits did he take his time ambling around the table to take a seat next to Pau.
He let the awkwardness and confusion build as he lounged there, smiling faintly.
Pau waited even longer.
“I think that it is time I introduce you to my partner,” Pau said, eventually, with his usual quiet menace. When Umberto barked out a laugh, Pau’s dark eyes gleamed even more. “Giaco brings many things to this particular deal, I think you’ll agree.”
“Has he notified the paparazzi that he actually entered a building in which business is done?” Umberto asked, acidly. “I was unaware this fool possessed any other skills.”
Pau gazed at the man who had been a nemesis to the both of them for too long to count. He did not smile, but Giaco knew him well enough to sense his deep pleasure. “Not only is Giaco a full partner in my business, Signore Tavian, but he’s a majority shareholder in yours.”
That sat there, in the center of the conference table, like so much lead.
“Some fathers teach their sons how to be men,” Giaco murmured into the tense silence. “Good ones, even, or so I am told.” He smiled at his father. “What you taught me was how to play shell games with money and, better yet, how to hide my true nature in plain sight.”
And he could see it then. He could see the dawning awareness on his father’s face that he had been outplayed.
The contracts he’d signed when he’d come into this room repeatedly over the past week, filled with his usual gloating arrogance, had in fact signed away a significant portion of his fortune.
If not most of it. The rest of it was tied up in real estate, but this partnership had been meant to ease Umberto’s latter years. Then carry on his name forever.
Giaco watched his father play all the usual chess games in his head and then come up with the only possible answer.
“This is revenge,” he gritted out. “But you would have had to set this up…”
“A very long time ago,” Giaco agreed. He leaned forward, and made sure that his father was staring straight at him.
He took a moment to enjoy the way that vein bulged on his father’s forehead.
It felt like a blessing. “I didn’t like you very much to begin with, but after my mother died?
” He shook his head. “I don’t believe I have ever hated anyone more. ”
“Your mother was mentally ill.” Umberto bit that out.
“I believe that,” Giaco retorted. “Insofar as I believe that spending that much time with you would cause mental illness in anyone. As far as I’m concerned you might as well have shot her yourself.”
And then he settled back to enjoy the shouting—and the vast joy he expected would accompany it.
But that, too, didn’t land the way he’d imagined it would. It took Giaco longer than he cared to admit to realize that where he’d expected to feel a fierce and overarching joy, he felt nothing.
Except empty.
Much later, after the magnitude of what Giaco and Pau had pulled off had been made abundantly clear to Umberto—rendering him little more than an old man frothing at the mouth, impotent and deeply aware of that fact—the two old friends were back in Pau’s office.
Pau poured them both the stiff drink they deserved and they clinked their tumblers together.
“And now you can be anyone,” Pau said. “No longer must you play the dissolute reincarnation of Pan, wreaking carnal havoc wherever you go.”
“The world is mine,” Giaco agreed.
Yet as he sat there, his own words came back to him. Words he’d said flippantly to a scrum of reporters within sight of the Spanish Steps. Words he’d used to paint a picture, to build a narrative.
Empty words, he would have said if anyone had asked.
But now, as he sat in Madrid with his best and only friend, having finally achieved what he’d expected to be the crowning achievement of his life, he realized that every word he’d said that day was true.
I never expected to fall in love, he had told a pack of mercenaries, in service to the story. Always the story. But now that I have, I naturally wish to be with her. Always. I want forever, immediately.
He had not slept much since leaving Capri. Ivy disrupted his dreams. He woke with her taste in his mouth and her scent in his nose and found himself alone in a hotel bed.
It was like leaving her all over again, every time.