His younger sister, Leontina, sat opposite Giaco, her posture perfect. She looked like a dancer, he thought. The sort of ballerina who had been caught in a music box, kept under a glass shell, never to see the light of day unless someone wound her up. In the castle, of course, no one ever did.
He had done his sister the very great favor of giving her his distance. He had taken the brunt of his father’s temper as best he could, and he knew he was the child who most often drew Umberto’s fire. He’d thought that was the best he could do for a younger sister he hardly knew.
Only tonight did it occur to him to wonder if perhaps he might have taken a different tack with her. Perhaps offered the family she hadn’t otherwise had. After all, he was the one who had known their mother better. He’d had that gift.
Giaco did not share his musings with the group.
And not only because he didn’t like how said musing made him feel about his actions as a brother all these years.
He turned his attention to his soon-to-be-bride instead, a surefire way to distract himself.
Ivy looked stunning, as always. Gabriele had thrown several epic fits about timeline readjustments and then had come through, as always. Ivy looked like a dream. Her blond hair was piled on top of her head and the moonstone and opal earrings she wore set off her ring beautifully. She was dressed in shades of cream, like a good bride-to-be.
Once again, he thought of the way she’d clenched around his finger and nearly embarrassed himself right there at the table.
The silence in the room marched on, unabated, as this was not a family whochatted. It was a dire, quiet meal, while everyone who wasn’t Umberto waited for the inevitable explosion. Surely everyone else could feel it, pressing down on them like so much memory and too many ghosts.
It took Giaco all the way to the sullen dessert course to realize that normally, he would have provided the comic relief and/or the drama for the evening. He would have been outrageous from the moment he’d entered the room. He would have poked at everyone around the table, made withering remarks on the one hand and talked in overwrought innuendo on the other. He would have made everyone so uncomfortable and so furious that it was likely at least one person would have stormed off, and he would have laughed his way all through it.
That had been his primary role in this family for as long as he could remember. He poked. He prodded. Whatever thunderous, scathing thing his father might like to say or do, Giaco would ruin it in advance. He would steal all the thunder out of the room before it had a chance to start the faintest bit of rumbling.
And he knew why he did it, too.
But his mother would not thank him for continuing to pander to this man, even if it was only make-believed and peppered with a good deal of provocation, too. Not after she’d affected her own escape the moment she’d thought Giaco was old enough to do without her. Not after she’d decided that she no longer wished to worry about any pandering herself when what she could do instead was be done with it.
The trouble was that Giaco couldn’t access that version of him any longer. He could picture that version of himself in his own mind. He could see the sorts of things that he would have said in a situation like this. It wasn’t even hard. It was all right there, on the tip of his tongue.
Yet he also understood that it was what Umberto wanted. It was why he’d forced them all to sit down to this unpleasant dinner in the first place. Hewantedreasons to shout, to be furious with his son. To have more reasons to threaten Giaco.
That Giaco was not giving it to him fit with Giaco’s supposed acquiescence to his father’s demands. It was all part of the plan. What had never occurred to Giaco, in all his plotting, was thatnotacting out,notindulging in a battle of wits with the father he found ill-equipped, would feel like amputating his own limbs.
Umberto probably wouldn’t have minded if Leontina got mouthy instead. Or at least if she drew a bit of fire, as hard as that was to imagine. That would give Umberto an opportunity to berate her for the quiet, forever-hiding-in-plain-sight personality she’d cultivated to deal with him, because Umberto took pleasure in making the people around him feel small.
Giaco could see exactly how to start poking at everyone to make Umberto huff away again tonight, muttering threats at his only son as he went. He’d done it a thousand times before. He’d protected his sister this way. He’d even protected his mother, back in the day.
It was satisfying to draw fire from Umberto, because all Giaco did was laugh at the old man. Which, predictably, drove the narcissistic asshole up a wall.
But despite the fact that everything in himwantedto do it, and he felt somehow misshapen because he was playing the part of the dutiful son he wasn’t, the real truth was that he didn’t seem to have it in him anymore.
Giaco stared across the table at Ivy, whose fault this was. He might not know what was happening to him, not really. He wanted to say that it had started that night in his library, but he knew better. It had started before that.
It had started the moment he’d looked up from that damned hot pool to find her watching him from the window.
The supreme unfairness of this happening now, when he could least afford a misstep, wasn’t lost on him. He was just lucky that he’d intended this little show of meekness. That this wasn’t throwing the whole plan into disarray.
“Well,” Umberto said, glowering at the rest of them as he stood abruptly from his chair. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a meal more tedious. I expect all of you to be on exemplary behavior tomorrow. Or there will be consequences.Direconsequences.”
Then he stormed from the room after all, no poking or prodding required.
Ivy blinked. “He does realize it’s not his wedding, doesn’t he?”
“It’s all his,” Leontina said then, looking up from her lap briefly. Her eyes widened as she looked from Ivy to Giaco. “You must have noticed already. It’s his world. We live in it only because he allows us to.”
“You don’t actually believe that,” Giaco said, frowning at his younger sister. His much younger sister who, as far as he knew, had always believed that their mother—who’d had Leontina as a last-ditch effort to fix her unfixable marriage, only she had not come out a boy—had not died on purpose.
He had made certain she’d never thought that. He’d gone out of his way to make sure she thought their mother hadn’t had a choice about whether or not to leave her. It only seemed right.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” his little sister told him, her gaze grave. “It only matters whathebelieves. I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.”
