Chapter Six #2
“Your father did not simply destroy my family business,” Pau threw back at his friend, his voice something less than even as it shook with the force of that dark and vicious emotion he held for the man he had long considered his enemy.
His nemesis. “That was bad enough. The legacy of my family was this close to being wiped from the earth, and for what? One old, rich, morally destitute man’s ego? ”
“So you chose to morally bankrupt yourself in response, and at my sister’s expense?” Giaco looked at him with an astonishment that Pau did not think was remotely feigned. “This from a man heralded across Europe for his virtuous center that defines every choice he makes?”
“I am as much a saint as you are a devil,” Pau growled. “We have both used these reputations to our advantage, have we not?”
“I don’t recall prancing into your family in all my state and systematically dismantling your siblings, and not only because you don’t have any.
” Giaco’s mouth thinned. “You, on the other hand, did that and more. A wolf in the manger, when the manger was already heaving with wolves aplenty. Quite an accomplishment, Pau, to out-wolf the kind of people who were at my wedding, where I assume you met her. A thieves’ gallery of the world’s worst, and yet you’ve given them all a run for their money. ”
That was a blow, and Pau didn’t pretend it didn’t land. But he pushed on anyway.
“I will tell you this,” he managed to say with some remnant of his usual equanimity.
“I would lose every single vine that was planted by the hard labor of my ancestors if it meant my father was still here. He’s not like your father, Giaco.
Or like me. He truly was a good man. An honorable man.
He lived by his own moral code and held himself to high standards expected from everyone around him, including me.
” He forced himself to breathe, and not to look away, because he felt perilously close to the emotions he had been trained out of expressing as a child, and he could not see how they would help here.
“And your father deliberately and systematically stripped him of everything that was meaningful to him. His legacy. His honor. And yes, eventually, his life.”
Not to mention any chance Pau might have had to understand his father better. Or get to know him when he was older and, perhaps, a bit softer.
He tried to shove such unruly notions aside.
“I know all this,” Giaco threw back at him. “What I don’t know is how you decided that you should make my sister pay for my father’s sins. I thought that you and I had taken on that challenge. What did Leontina ever do to you?”
That, it turned out, was a far more loaded question than it should have been. But this was not the time or place to discuss the great many things Leontina had done to him, and all of them incapacitating in ways that Pau was not at all certain he was likely to recover from.
“She is my wife,” he said quietly. Intently. “And come the winter, she will be the mother of my son. These are the only facts that matter.”
Pau watched that go through Giaco like an electric current, confirming to him that Giaco did not know about the pregnancy. That he was here because he knew his sister had come here. This meant that he might not know that they were married, either.
He watched his friend go incandescent, and he could feel the violence of it, though Giaco did not in fact lunge across the room the way Pau half thought—and half hoped, perhaps—he would.
Pau thought he could see the exact moment that Giaco counted the correct number of months, and came to the inevitable conclusion.
He’d already understood that Leontina and Pau had met at his wedding. Now he knew what else had gone on.
Giaco looked murderous.
“I’m not one to descend into violence,” his friend said in a low, furious voice, “no matter how much I’d like to indulge the urge to punch you in the face.”
Pau thought better of commenting on that.
This was not the Giaco he’d known for years.
This was not his friend—always more intense than the world believed but fundamentally good.
This was a man who would have no compunction defending his sister, and Pau could not help but love him for that.
Because surely, someone should have defended Leontina all along.
It was not lost on him that her life had been no easier than his. He had thought so even before she’d pointed out how little choice he’d had along the way.
Giaco was still speaking. “I’m also entirely too familiar with the impossibility of denying both passion and emotion,” he said, making Pau think about Giaco’s own marriage.
About the farce it had been at first, or had been supposed to be.
And what it was now—the true love match between Giaco and a woman who was referred to as Saint Ivy in the press, and was highly celebrated for seemingly taming the wildest of beastly men in Giaco.
Pau knew that truly, she had.
And he wanted to argue with Giaco about the words he’d chosen. Passion. Emotion. But somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Maybe because they’d been speaking of his father, who had never told a lie. And therefore Pau could not bring himself to tell one now. Not to the only real, true friend he’d ever had.
“I truly want to understand,” Giaco was saying.
“And while I have been called many things and know myself to be far more and much worse, I hope I’m not a hypocrite.
I cannot possibly blame you for actions I’m quite certain I would have taken myself.
” His dark jade eyes, so much like his sister’s, bored into Pau.
“I must also tell you that if she sheds so much as a single tear in my presence tonight, there will be a reckoning.”
It was quiet between them, then. The quiet seemed to stretch out, encompassing too many years, too many plans, the great revenge scheme they had already pulled off.
And perhaps even those early days, when they’d been lanky, unformed teenagers sharing a stair at Cambridge and had started some stilted conversation lost in time one night.
Then had taken to sloping about ancient courtyards, feeling invincible and overwhelmed at once.
He looked past Giaco to where Leontina had moved and was standing, looking out into the dark.
He both knew her better now and yet felt at times that he knew her not at all.
She stood with her spine straight. And he could tell that she was fighting her emotions even from the back.
He knew every noise she made, every whisper, every sigh.
He knew a hundred different ways she said his name. Sobbed it. Shouted. Cried it out.
And he also knew what Giaco clearly did not, which was that innocent though she may have been, his sister was no sheltered little nun. She’d had every intention of falling pregnant by his hands—or by his cock, to be more precise—and had made sure that it happened.
Then had come here, likely as certain as anyone could be that the wildly virtuous Pau Calixto would, of course, do the honorable thing.
It was lowering to think that even if Pau hadn’t intended to seduce her himself, he very likely would have fallen captive to her that night all the same.
He could not tell this to his friend. He could not explain what had happened to him when Leontina Tavian had looked at him with a boldness he’d never seen on her face before, walked over to him in that stunning dress she’d worn on Giaco’s wedding day, and had smiled directly at him.
When she’d moved closer and asked him if he was having fun.
Then put her hand on his arm and set him on fire.
He doubted his friend would believe him.
“I don’t mean to be provocative,” he said, carefully. But with perfect honesty. “But Giaco, I do not think you know your sister at all.”
He expected that to enrage his friend. But Giaco surprised him, lifting only a shoulder though his eyes remained hard on Pau.
“That is highly possible,” he agreed. “I don’t pretend to be someone other than who I am. Nor the older brother she deserved. But that does not make me any more kindly disposed to you and your secretive campaign to know her biblically, either.”
Pau understood. “Then you must speak to her and satisfy yourself,” he said.
Giaco nodded. He moved toward Pau, and perhaps neither one of them knew if he would take a swing or not—but he didn’t.
Instead, Giaco kept going and opened up the doors to the balcony again.
“Leontina,” Giaco called to his sister. “Come inside.”
Leontina turned and walked toward them, a wary sort of look on her face.
“Let me guess,” she said. “This is yet another example of men getting together and deciding my life and future without any input from me. Do either one of you have any idea what it is like to be—”
But when she reached the door, still speaking, Giaco pulled her close and hugged her, hard.
Pau was standing behind them, so he saw as Leontina first stiffened, looking shocked. How her mouth shut with a snap, then fell open again.
And then, as Giaco continued to hug her, how she shook. Until her whole face crumpled, punching a hole straight through Pau’s chest.
It was no surprise to him when she began to sob.
Giaco held her, murmuring things in Italian. He turned, very slowly, to send a cold, hard look Pau’s way. When Leontina pulled away, Giaco shook his head.
“I told you,” he said. “I warned you, did I not? Brother.”
And then he wound up, swung, and laid Pau out on his own floor.