And it was high time to prove it.
Chapter Eleven
GIACO HAD WAITEDhis 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 soncapableof 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 exactlyforgottenIvy’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 getright herebetween 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. Thefactof 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?
