Chapter Seven
In the pantheon of things that Leontina had imagined might happen that day, Giaco appearing at all—much less to give her a hug and then follow that up by getting into an actual fistfight with Pau—would not even have made the top hundred possibilities she might have come up with.
At first, it was as if she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
Because it didn’t make sense. Her brother was the life of every party. A bright sort of beaming creature whose primary weapons were his words and his insinuations—not his fists. She would have said he didn’t have it in him to throw a punch at anyone.
Yet here they were.
Leontina stood, frozen into place, as the two men engaged in a fistfight on the floor.
Though she retracted that word as soon as she thought it. It wasn’t a fight. Pau was letting Giaco hit him. He wasn’t doing anything to fight back, and was only barely defending himself. It seemed her brother lost his taste for waling on a man who threw no punches himself, and fast.
“Asshole,” Giaco muttered, rolling off his best friend and then slumping there on the floor beside him.
The two of them lay there a while, breathing more heavily than usual.
By contrast, Leontina could hardly breathe at all. In fact, she didn’t think her nose was working the way it should have be—
She realized belatedly that she was sobbing.
But not because she was sad or upset. She was sobbing because she was furious.
She was outraged that they were fighting for her honor without even discussing it with her. She was furious that they had moved into another room to discuss their feelings about the decisions she’d made about her life.
And the fact that her older brother had finally shown that he cared didn’t make it any better. Not now.
None of these competing furies diminished any as Pau rolled gracefully to his feet, then brushed himself off without seeming to be the slightest bit interested in the fact that he had a bloodied lip. To say nothing of what looked like the beginnings of a black eye.
And more intense emotion on his face than Leontina had ever seen there. Nothing cold. Nothing measured. Under different circumstances, she might have stopped and stared.
But this was not the moment for that sort of thing. Not with her brother here, messing with the delicate balance that she and Pau had managed to keep in place since she’d come to Calixto Estates to inform him about his paternity.
This was not the moment to ask her husband what could put that look on his face. What could make him simmer and shine with things she didn’t know how to name—
Or why, when his gaze met hers, he swallowed hard. Then let all that intensity fade away.
A lot like he locked it up somewhere inside him, but she couldn’t follow that line of thought, either.
Not right now.
“Are you satisfied?” Pau demanded of Giaco, turning his dark gaze on her brother and letting it stay there. “Because I don’t intend to do this again. So if you are not, this is your moment. This is your only moment.”
Giaco only sighed, and muttered a quiet yes with a few choice insults appended to the end. In three separate languages, for effect.
“I cannot argue with you on your character assessments,” Pau said darkly. “My brother.”
And then, without so much as a glance in Leontina’s direction, he stalked off, out of the room.
Leontina could not stop crying. Snuffling and crying, and it only made her angrier.
“Leontina,” Giaco began, though he did not bother to rise from the ground.
“You’ve never hugged me in your entire life!” Leontina threw at him, letting her voice do what it would. Which in this case was to threaten the chandelier above them. “Why would you do it now?”
For the first time in as long as she’d known him, which was her whole entire life since the day she was born, her older brother looked…nonplussed. Uncertain.
If she’d been less furious, it might have concerned her.
Then she thought of Pau’s perfect face, marred by Giaco’s hands that no one had asked him to throw. And she found she was not terribly concerned at all.
“You looked like you needed it,” her brother said. In a quiet sort of voice that was nothing like his usual performative theatrics at all.
“Really, Giaco?” She still couldn’t stop crying.
And while she thought it was probably the pregnancy hormones making things extra-chaotic, as far as she could tell they only amplified her existing emotions, so there was that.
She angrily wiped at her eyes. “Don’t you think I might have needed it before?
Don’t you think a hug might have helped me while I was a motherless girl navigating Umberto’s bullshit all by myself?
Or were you too busy making yourself even more famous than you already were to worry overmuch about what was happening back at the castle you got away from as fast as you possibly could? ”
Giaco’s mouth actually dropped open.
But Leontina wasn’t done. “I know she died because of me,” she said, throwing out that ugly little truth about their lost mother that she’d been carrying her whole life. “But you have to know it wasn’t really my fault. You didn’t have to hate me too, just because he does.”
Giaco looked as if she’d struck him, maybe taken one of the ornamental swords off the wall and used it to stab him straight through the heart.
“I protected you!” he belted out, sounding slightly outraged.
“Umberto loves nothing more than to destroy anything and everything that strays across his path, or have you forgotten that? Do you really think you’d have survived and thrived enough to enact your escape if I hadn’t created an enduring distraction? You do me a disservice.”
Leontina shook her head. “All I remember is that you actually disappeared while I had to learn how to seem to disappear while remaining in the room. But that’s what she did, too, isn’t it? First one, then the other. Is that our real family legacy?”
But somehow, when she got to the end of that sentence, she was less furious than when she started. It was like it all…blew away like so much smoke, and all that was left were the thorny emotions beneath.
And that wasn’t fury. That was the mess that fury hid.
Giaco slowly rolled himself up and off the floor, displaying the easy athleticism that had done its part in making him more sought after than many of the more typical artsy celebrities of his generation.
He went and sat on the low sofa that was stuck against one wall, beneath a giant canvas depicting some or other religious scene involving what looked like a spot of decapitation, in lustrous oils.
Leontina supposed she ought to recognize the painting, but she didn’t.
She sat below it on the same sofa as her brother, gingerly.
She found herself thinking that it felt right, somehow, that they should be speaking of these ugly, heavy things they never talked about, here beneath a grand painting filled with blood and gore. That tracked, somehow.
“I never wanted you to feel like that,” he said after they’d both settled on the couch, and he’d taken a moment to explore the state of his knuckles, looking raw after his exertions. “I went out of my way to make sure that you didn’t.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him. They were both looking straight ahead at the wall of weaponry, which, again, seemed fitting.
It all seemed strange and yet right. “Not really. That was what Father always told me. That perhaps if I had been less disappointing, she would not have chosen to take her life.”
Giaco made a low noise that Leontina wasn’t sure she could identify. “What a foul, vicious man,” he muttered. “You were six years old, Leontina. What could you have done?”
What an odd thing it was, she thought, to have one of the central questions of her existence thrown out like that—like a rhetorical question too absurd to require that she answer it.
The sweep of swords and other bladed things she was certain had names, though she didn’t know them, provided a kind of chorus.
They seemed to pointedly underscore everything Giaco was saying.
“The truth is that our mother refused to diminish,” Giaco said, intently.
“She felt the cost was too high for her to meet, and I believe that she assumed—rightly—” and he flashed a look at her direction, as if he was calling her to account “—that you would be the same as she was in many ways. Inextinguishable. Indomitable. And yet better prepared than she could be to meet these challenges.”
“I don’t think anyone would describe me that way,” Leontina replied softly. “Though it’s lovely to imagine.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short,” Giaco retorted.
“You’ve lived with our father for more years than I ever did and have managed to avoid him for most of that time.
Unless there are stories you’ve never told me about his coming after you over these past few years?
” When Leontina shook her head, he nodded.
She’d confirmed what he already thought.
“I don’t think that would be possible without the strongest spine and a will to match it.
All that plus the sort of humility that allows you to go unseen in the first place.
That’s not me, certainly. And we both know that none of that comes from him. ”
She felt tears in her eyes again and she looked down at her hands, because, truly, she couldn’t think of a greater gift he could have given her than to suggest that she was anything like their fierce, intimidating mother, who Umberto’s acolytes still murmured about in hushed tones as if they expected her to rise from beyond and flay them into pieces as she’d apparently done nightly while she was here.
Not one to suffer fools, even if it would have made her life easier—that was their mother.
But then, Giaco hadn’t merely said that she was like their mother. He’d suggested that in some way, she was better equipped.
It was enough to make her head spin.