I grew up camping with my brothers in the Italian hills, surrounded by the vast sky that once made me feel small and alone.
I don’t feel that now.
What stirs in me is a lethal pang of inevitability. One I have to ignore.
I pour more whiskey into my tumbler, moderation be damned. “Philip never took you camping?”
“No. My parents were always silver-spoon, excessive-thread-count kind of people.” She exhales a weary breath. “Maybe if my father had learned to rough it, we wouldn’t be millions of dollars in debt to a client.”
“He,” I clarify. “His debt isn’t yours.”
She meets my gaze over her shoulder. “You’re kidding, right?” She rolls her eyes and turns back to the water.
My jaw locks.
She’s right, no matter how much I wish she wasn’t.
But she’ll recover from this. The worst has come and gone.
So why the hell do I itch to go to her? To appease a torment I didn’t cause and shouldn’t care to fix?
Fuck.
I down the whiskey, shove to my feet, and cross the deck in tortured steps until I’m beside her, mere inches separating our arms on the railing.
“Forget the blood debt.” I focus on the fish cutting through the glow of the yacht’s underwater lights, refusing to look at her. “As long as the Cavallo-CrossPoint relationship runs smoothly, you’ll never have to think about it again.”
She remains quiet. The silence gnaws at me.
“You’ve got the CEO role you always wanted,” I add, unable to leave the void between us unfilled. “And bargaining power to ensure Philip never tries to claim it back. As long as you assign someone even half as qualified as you to handle our portfolio, there won’t be any issues moving forward.”
She inhales deeply, exhales slow, as if weighing every word she doesn’t speak.
“Just say it, Isla.”
Her gaze travels farther down the yacht, as far from me as possible. “Despite what I said in my statement this afternoon, dissolving our companies’ relationship wasn’t some PMS-driven, knee-jerk reaction to claiming power. Your ethics have changed, Raffael. And I don’t like that I have to grin and bear watching it contaminate CrossPoint.”
I wrench my fingers around the railing.
“Will you tell me why?” She turns to face me. “Your reputation was pristine. Failing companieswantedto handcontrol to you and your brothers because they trusted you’d treat what they built with respect. But you completely decimated Harrington Vale Holdings and then Novacore Industries, both in very public executions.”
I should’ve brought the fucking liquor bottle with me. “Not every company can be salvaged.”
“I understand. But Novacore wasn’t failing. They were surging. Iran those reports. You were circling them before the scandal with the managing director broke. And the moment it hit, you sunk them with a lowball offer and then dismantled the R&D division, laid off hundreds, and sold their patents to competitors.” Her stare bores into the side of my face, her judgment cutting through skin and bone.
“Sometimes business isn’t just business.” My nostrils flare. “Things change.”
“Yeah.” She drags in another one of those pained breaths and returns her attention to the ocean. “I guess they do.”
Her disapproval chips away at me, one sharp shard at a time.
I used to live for her unspoken praise. The subtle curve of her lips when I crushed a boardroom meeting. The glint in her gaze when I turned intimidation into art.
Her pride fucking fed me.
But this? The criticism? It twists the knife her suffering already drove between my ribs.
“A lot has happened in the last two years.” I push from the railing, my instincts demanding I walk away.Now. Before I say too much.
