Chapter Twelve
IT WAS LUNCHTIME when Caio jumped out of the helicopter and signaled his pilot to leave. He’d been terse and short and unsettled all day and most of his team had sighed out in relief when he’d announced that he was taking off for the day.
As the chopper’s wind blew at him, playing with his hair and clothes, Caio admitted the truth he’d been fighting all week.
His heart was not in it anymore. In seeing his plans through—the very plans it had taken him more than a decade to set in motion.
Seeing his stepfather Carlos’s face turn frightfully purple as Caio had walked into his office two days ago to reveal to him that he was the designer of his destruction had not been as satisfactory as he’d expected.
Not when he had to face the diseased spirit of employees who had been with the company from his father’s time.
The last decade and more had not been kind to Carlos. In fact, Caio wondered if his ruin had begun from the day Caio’s mother had died.
It had only left him with disgust as to how many lives Carlos had actually ruined.
And neither had there been satisfaction in seeing his stepbrother Enzo dragged away by the police for embezzling pension funds, for all the Ponzi schemes he’d run using Caio’s father’s name.
Not when Caio had also been witness to Enzo’s wife’s tears—a woman Caio himself had once liked.
In the battle that had resulted between him and Enzo, Sophia had chosen Enzo, knowing of Caio’s imminent ruin, and expulsion from his own father’s company.
But nothing in him today had liked the misery on Sophia’s face or seeing the framed picture of her three kids on her desk whose futures had been shattered by everything Caio had unleashed.
All he had known then was that he had to leave.
Nothing was going as he’d planned. It hadn’t felt like freedom from the fury that had coursed through him, corroding him for years.
It hadn’t felt like relief from the isolation he’d felt, from his family, from his own identity as the son who’d been loved by his parents.
He’d thought he’d feel redeemed, different, maybe even renewed.
But all he’d felt was...this gnawing, aching sense of loss. This emptiness, as if revenge had scoured him and left him with nothing.
Only the thought of returning to Nush had energized him.
He needed to see Nush, needed to touch her and hold her. He needed to make sure she was still there, to reassure himself that she was the only certainty left in his life.
He heard the laughter long before he saw them, as he walked around the house. They were sitting at a table next to the pool, heads bent together, and laughing. The woman was Anushka, Caio knew that. He would know that laughter anywhere.
Finally, he could see them.
She was dressed in a pink top that dangled off her shoulder, and black shorts with her legs kicked out. The man...his profile seemed familiar. Even as Caio frowned, the man pointed to something, Nush laughed and swatted him on the shoulder.
Another step, another hard breath and Caio knew.
He knew who the man was.
As if punched by an invisible first in his gut, every inch of him stilled. It was a wonder he hadn’t put up his fists to defend himself. That was how painfully real that hit felt.
Thoughts and questions swirled through him, like lines in a complex algorithm that flashed across the screen when the program he and Nush built together ran. He couldn’t pin anything down. He even made a half turning motion, some primitive instinct part of him urging him to flee.
It felt like betrayal—her sitting with him. Her talking with him. Her laughter with his brother. Her going behind his back.
“Caio? You’re back.”
Caio hadn’t seen Javier since he had arrived in Brazil. If he was completely honest with himself, he’d been avoiding Javier.
Even though Javi had called his assistant several times, requesting a meeting. He’d even showed up once outside of Caio’s temporary HQ but he’d pretended to have not seen the younger man. Just like he hadn’t set foot in the headquarters of his father’s company.
It wasn’t Carlos or Enzo or his other brother Jorge that he had wanted to avoid. But this young man in front of him, who reminded Caio the most of their mother.
Caio watched him now with the greediness, all the limits and restrictions placed on himself blown to smithereens by his conniving little wife. It was another punch to his gut—how much Javier looked like Caio himself.
He counted to some arbitrary number before he let his gaze touch Anushka.
As if aware of this microaggression, she raised her brows and glared at him, instead of looking even remotely guilty.
He let her see his fury.
She sighed, her large eyes drinking him in greedily. “If you have something to say, Caio, please feel free to do it.”
“We will deal with our...issues in privacy, minha esposa,” he said, enunciating the endearment.
He was blazingly angry and yet the anger seemed to wash away resentment and the sense of betrayal that he wanted to hold on to.
Because anything he felt around the blasted woman was far too real and welcome.
Even his body seemed to know that but not his rational mind. “After I deal with the unwanted guest.”
“Caio, I apologize—” his brother began.
Hand on his shoulder, Nush defended Javi as if he were her cub. “No, Javi. Don’t apologize,” she said, standing up. “This is not just his house. It’s mine too. My home. And as such, I’m allowed to have guests. If Caio doesn’t like that, then he can go inside and take his black mood with him.”
Caio couldn’t remember another occasion—not even as a boy—when someone had so outrageously provoked his temper. Not only had she gone behind his back and invited his brother here, but now she dared to defend Javi, to throw herself in front of him as if Caio would eat him alive...
“What the hell are you smiling at, Javier?” The question burst out of him before he had consciously decided that he would speak to his brother.
A part of him wanted to dismiss him, have him thrown out of this house, this new life he was building for himself.
A part of him wanted not even the shadow of his brother to touch Anushka. But clearly, it was too late for that.
The diplomat he always was, Javi just shrugged.
“Congratulations on your wedding, Caio. Your wife is...” His mouth twitching, he cast Nush a sideways glance, and even in just the flash of a second, Caio could see how smitten Javier was with her, and he had to swallow down an irrational spurt of jealousy.
“She is delightful,” Javier finished. “I’m glad to see you settled and happy, finally.
” There was such genuine emotion in Javi’s words that Caio’s own anger ebbed as fast as it had come. And he wasn’t ready for that.
“I’ve been happy for a long time, Javi,” he added, like a petulant schoolboy. Even though he knew his words were false.
“Can you really say that?” Javier demanded in a soft voice. “Because if you’ve been so happy, why have you been hiding from me? Why carry out your elaborate charade of stripping everything from Carlos but avoid me and Jorge?”
“Get out,” Caio said finally in a soft whisper.
“No,” Nush said, defiance shining in her gaze. “Not until you listen to what he has to say. Please, Caio... I went to a lot of trouble to get him here.”
“I told you it was useless, Anushka,” Javi said, his eyes on Caio. “He has turned his back on us a long time ago. It is only you who holds impossible dreams and hopes for him.”
Ire flared in Caio’s depths. “Don’t talk to my wife like that.”
“Why not? The foolish woman thinks the world of you when you can’t even—”
When Caio would’ve punched him in the face, Nush stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Jesus, Caio. Can’t you see that he’s provoking you?” She pressed her forehead into his chest, wrapping her arms around him. “Just give him a chance.”
“You shouldn’t have interfered, Princesa. This is none of your business,” he said, tucking his hands into his pockets and turning away from her. He closed his eyes when he heard her soft gasp. And he had to stiffen himself, stop himself from soothing the hurt.
“Everything that concerns you is my business. This path of destruction you’re on is my business.”
He turned toward her, feeling like a cornered, wounded animal. “Walk away if I’m not good enough for you, Nush. But please, don’t assume to know my pain.”
Nush flinched, and still, she didn’t walk away. “You don’t mean that?”
“Whatever you think this will do, you’re wrong,” he said, gentling his words. “I have had more than a decade to nurse this resentment and anger and pain. Nothing Javier tells me today is going to get rid of it.”
Clasping his face with her hands, Nush pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “This is not a quid pro quo. My promise to you is unconditional. But I can’t see you ripping yourself in half either. Please, Caio, do this for me. I’ve never asked you for anything before.”
She walked away, leaving him feeling alone in the entire world all over again.
Hands tucked into his pockets, Caio turned to his brother. “What’s there for us to discuss, Javi? What can you feel for me after I’ve destroyed your father and brother? Because I won’t take that back for anyone. Carlos and Enzo deserve to rot in jail.”
His brother scowled. “You think I’m here to beg for mercy on their behalf?”
“Or to curse me for ruining them?”
“I know you have had a long time to hate all of us, Caio. And I can’t even blame you for any of it. It took me and Jorge a long time to see Papa’s true nature. It took me a long time to catch up to how Enzo was bullying Jorge right under my nose. The same thing he did to you...”
A feral sound escaped Caio’s mouth but it wasn’t because of the past. It was at the thought of their gentle, quiet, artistic brother Jorge being Enzo’s new victim. He rubbed a hand over his face and found it shaking. “Enzo bullied Jorge?”