Giaco looked around, taking in the looks of incomprehension on so many dark-suited faces. He saw the gleam in his friend’s gaze. Then, at last, taking his time so he could best savor what was to come and hold it close forevermore, he turned his attention to his father.
Umberto stared at him, his cold eyes without comprehension. “Have you gotten lost on the way to a whorehouse?” he asked starkly.
“Not exactly,” Giaco murmured. He stood there a moment, making sure everyone was looking at him. Reliving his greatest tabloid scandals, no doubt. Only when he felt they were all sifting through his greatest hits did he take his time ambling around the table to take a seat next to Pau.
He let the awkwardness and confusion build as he lounged there, smiling faintly.
Pau waited even longer.
“I think that it is time I introduce you to my partner,” Pau said, eventually, with his usual quiet menace. When Umberto barked out a laugh, Pau’s dark eyes gleamed even more. “Giaco brings many things to this particular deal, I think you’ll agree.”
“Has he notified the paparazzi that he actually entered a building in which business is done?” Umberto asked, acidly. “I was unaware this fool possessed any other skills.”
Pau gazed at the man who had been a nemesis to the both of them for too long to count. He did not smile, but Giaco knew him well enough to sense his deep pleasure. “Not only is Giaco a full partner in my business,SignoreTavian, but he’s a majority shareholder in yours.”
That sat there, in the center of the conference table, like so much lead.
“Some fathers teach their sons how to be men,” Giaco murmured into the tense silence. “Good ones, even, or so I am told.” He smiled at his father. “What you taught me was how to play shell games with money and, better yet, how to hide my true nature in plain sight.”
And he could see it then. He could see the dawning awareness on his father’s face that he had been outplayed. The contracts he’d signed when he’d come into this room repeatedly over the past week, filled with his usual gloating arrogance, had in fact signed away a significant portion of his fortune. If not most of it. The rest of it was tied up in real estate, but this partnership had been meant to ease Umberto’s latter years. Then carry on his name forever.
Giaco watched his father play all the usual chess games in his head and then come up with the only possible answer.
“This is revenge,” he gritted out. “But you would have had to set this up…”
“A very long time ago,” Giaco agreed. He leaned forward, and made sure that his father was staring straight at him. He took a moment to enjoy the way that vein bulged on his father’s forehead. It felt like a blessing. “I didn’t like you very much to begin with, but after my mother died?” He shook his head. “I don’t believe I have ever hated anyone more.”
“Your mother was mentally ill.” Umberto bit that out.
“I believe that,” Giaco retorted. “Insofar as I believe that spending that much time with you would cause mental illness in anyone. As far as I’m concerned you might as well have shot her yourself.”
And then he settled back to enjoy the shouting—and the vast joy he expected would accompany it.
But that, too, didn’t land the way he’d imagined it would. It took Giaco longer than he cared to admit to realize that where he’d expected to feel a fierce and overarching joy, he felt nothing.
Except empty.
Much later, after the magnitude of what Giaco and Pau had pulled off had been made abundantly clear to Umberto—rendering him little more than an old man frothing at the mouth, impotent and deeply aware of that fact—the two old friends were back in Pau’s office. Pau poured them both the stiff drink they deserved and they clinked their tumblers together.
“And now you can be anyone,” Pau said. “No longer must you play the dissolute reincarnation of Pan, wreaking carnal havoc wherever you go.”
“The world is mine,” Giaco agreed.
Yet as he sat there, his own words came back to him. Words he’d said flippantly to a scrum of reporters within sight of the Spanish Steps. Words he’d used to paint a picture, to build a narrative.
Empty words, he would have said if anyone had asked.
But now, as he sat in Madrid with his best and only friend, having finally achieved what he’d expected to be the crowning achievement of his life, he realized that every word he’d said that day was true.
I never expected to fall in love, he had told a pack of mercenaries, in service to the story. Always the story.But now that I have, I naturally wish to be with her. Always. I want forever, immediately.
He had not slept much since leaving Capri. Ivy disrupted his dreams. He woke with her taste in his mouth and her scent in his nose and found himself alone in a hotel bed.
It was like leaving her all over again, every time.
But as he’d told those reporters months ago, instant gratification had always taken too long as far as Giaco was concerned.
He had never felt that so keenly as he did now.
