Chapter Eight
When Pau returned to the dining room, he brought staff with him, and had them add a place setting the small table. He found the Tavian siblings standing together at the balcony, watching him too closely with matching sets of wary jade green eyes.
“I assume the two of you are no strangers to awkward family dinners,” he said.
They only stared back at him and Pau was not one to wait upon permission anywhere—much less in his own house. He waved his hand at the table in some kind of invitation, then seated himself.
After moment, Giaco and Leontina followed.
He took this as the victory it was. Or, at the very least, as an improvement on letting his best friend punch him in the face.
“Now, at last, I feel at home,” Giaco said with a big sigh and a matching smile when the silence stretched on too long.
“There’s nothing that excites me more than a heavily pregnant silence, unless it is a perfectly placed and diabolically subtle insult that lands four hours later, then keeps recipient up all night. ”
“Remind me when that was,” Leontina murmured, and aimed that smile of hers at her brother. “When you were subtle, I mean?”
Giaco laughed—genuinely this time—and Pau thought that perhaps it was all a bit lighter after that. A bit easier.
And whatever Leontina and her brother had spoken about when he was out of the room, the atmosphere seemed different between them, too. As if they’d finally found some common ground. Or a way to bridge the years that their father had certainly never fostered.
Not for the first time in his life, though for the first time in a long while, Pau wondered what it would have been like to have a sibling.
To have someone else to share all of these experiences with, good and bad and everything between.
His cousin had been around when he was younger, but not in the same way.
And though he knew, of course, that there was a significant age differential between Leontina and Giaco, there was still also a shared sense of who they were.
They had both grown up in that castle. They had both lost their mother. They both still detested their father, openly.
They were Tavians.
He could not help but think it must make things easier, to carry such a load together.
In fact, he knew it did. Because all the things he’d done to prepare the chessboard to take down Umberto had been something he had done with Giaco.
He hadn’t been a lonely vigilante, out there chasing down the man responsible for his father’s death, like every fantasist Hollywood loner film he’d ever accidentally seen.
The taking down of Umberto Tavian had been a joint enterprise, and no wonder these last few months had felt so off.
Pau might have been an only child. He might have felt a deep responsibility to this land and the family’s legacy and the business too, but he hadn’t been alone in this fight of his since way back when he was a teenager.
It made sense that this solo venture of his had made him feel so much like a stranger to himself.
That notion seemed to kindle something deep inside him, a bright pop of something like self-incrimination—because it couldn’t be anything else, he told himself sternly.
It couldn’t be the way he’d felt standing in that examination room, his hand held fast between Leontina’s taut, rounded belly and her palm.
The strange, rubbery, glorious sensation of his own child reaching out to him there—as if his son already knew him.
Just as it couldn’t be the fact that, revenge or no revenge, he had found it remarkably difficult to keep Leontina out of his head since he’d first laid eyes on her in Italy.
He’d studied her, looking for a way in, and had found contradictions and disguises.
Then she had come to him, and he’d found a kind of communion he hadn’t known existed—
But that was merely sex, he told himself harshly, and not something he needed to think about in the presence of his friend. Her brother. The architect of the current swelling on his face.
They ate. They talked of incidental things that caused no dark ripples.
The grape harvest. How Giaco and Ivy were getting on with things now that the glare of the paparazzi was perhaps beginning to ebb.
The connective tissue of their lives that could, Pau supposed, have a thousand reasons to intertwine that had nothing to do with the behavior of one old ogre of a man they all hated.
They talked of the health of the baby. Giaco advanced his choice of name for the child, which was, to no one’s shock, Giaco.
When Leontina laughed at that—laughed and laughed, with no artifice in sight—Pau found that popping sensation inside him even more impossible to ignore. It was the careless joy on her face. It was the way she wiped at her eyes, but not because she was sad.
It made him think a bit too much about how little laughter there had ever been in this house.
That, along with these family dinners that he found he liked even with his bruises tonight, had to become a staple of his child’s life as it had not been of his.
He did not wish to question himself on why that seemed of such critical importance to him now.
After dinner, when Leontina took a long look at the two men opposite her and then excused herself, Pau and Giaco sat there a moment.
The sky above them was an inky black swirled through with too many stars to begin counting.
The air smelled of fall, and of the winter to come.
The staff had rolled the freestanding heaters closer to the table before they’d served the main course, and the temperature was pleasant.
Pau might not have known how to have a brother, so he did what he did know how to do. He prepared his friend’s favorite drink at the bar inside, and then sat there with him in the weight of it all.
Giaco eyed him, but did not speak. An indictment if ever there was one, to Pau’s mind. For nothing was more concerning than Giaco Tavian silent.
Or, a tart voice within him suggested, sounding not unlike Leontina in one of her bolder moods, perhaps you have a guilty conscience. As you should.
“I should have told you what I was doing, Giaco,” he said abruptly, though the words felt strange and acidic in his mouth.
Likely because he had not apologized, to anyone, in longer than he could recall—and not because he believed himself a blameless, spotless human.
But because he had long endeavored to live the kind of life that did not require an apology tour.
“I should not have kept all of this a secret from you.”
“Indeed you should not have,” Giaco agreed, but he did not look murderous. This seemed like an upgrade from earlier in the evening.
“I don’t think that I realized until now…
” He shook his head. “I suspect you might not like it, but I thought that it was the family relationship, the fact that she is your sister, that would bother you. That your brotherly instincts would kick in and you would be angry about it, as brothers always seem to be.”
“I know I have played the part of a man who feels nothing at all,” Giaco said quietly. “But I assumed that you—perhaps only you, across a great many years—knew better.”
Pau inclined his head. “I do know better. Yet it was not until tonight that I realized that this course of action was also, on some level, a betrayal of our partnership. And more, our friendship.”
“You’ve known me a long time.” Giaco swirled the amber liquid around in his tumbler, his bruised knuckles catching the lights.
He had a curious look on his face. Pau didn’t think he’d ever seen it before.
“In that time, have I ever struck you as the sort of person, much less an older brother of a fully grown woman, who would become distraught about a bit of fucking?” He shook his head. “Please. What do you take me for?”
“That’s my point.” Pau shook his head. “The brotherly relationship baffles me. I would have assumed that nothing would bother you, but given that the point was to spring this as a fait accompli upon your father, secrecy had to be maintained. But the swelling of my eye suggests that I was wrong about that, does it not?”
Giaco gazed at him, then set his drink down. Decisively. “Pau. The only thing I care about is if my sister felt taken advantage of at any point in this.” He lifted a brow. “Do you feel that she did?”
Pau felt his jaw tense. Because how could he answer that to Giaco’s satisfaction? He had worried about precisely that and then it turned out that Leontina had been scheming all along. But how could he tell her brother such a thing if he didn’t already know it?
If, on some level, he did not really know who his sister was?
He remembered too late that Giaco was sitting in front of him, watching him, and was not at all certain what expression he had on his face. He tried at once to modify it into something more impassive.
“She does not appear to believe I did,” he said, carefully, and had to clear his throat. There seemed, suddenly, to be too many pressure points in too many places and he was not at all certain that he wasn’t broadcasting them all. “I can only look back at my own behavior and take solace in that.”
He thought he saw Giaco smile, though he hid it as he took a pull from his drink.