For the first time in as long as she’d known him, which was her whole entire life since the day she was born, her older brother looked…nonplussed. Uncertain.
If she’d been less furious, it might have concerned her.
Then she thought of Pau’s perfect face, marred by Giaco’s hands that no one had asked him to throw. And she found she was not terribly concerned at all.
“You looked like you needed it,” her brother said. In a quiet sort of voice that was nothing like his usual performativetheatricsat all.
“Really, Giaco?” She still couldn’t stop crying. And while she thought it was probably the pregnancy hormones making things extra-chaotic, as far as she could tell they only amplified her existing emotions, so there was that. She angrily wiped at her eyes. “Don’t you think I might haveneeded itbefore? Don’t you think a hug might have helped me while I was a motherless girl navigating Umberto’s bullshit all by myself? Or were you too busy making yourself even more famous than you already were to worry overmuch about what was happening back at the castle you got away from as fast as you possibly could?”
Giaco’s mouth actually dropped open.
But Leontina wasn’t done. “I know she died because of me,” she said, throwing out that ugly little truth about their lost mother that she’d been carrying her whole life. “But you have to know it wasn’t really my fault. You didn’t have to hate me too, just because he does.”
Giaco looked as if she’d struck him, maybe taken one of the ornamental swords off the wall and used it to stab him straight through the heart.
“Iprotectedyou!” he belted out, sounding slightly outraged. “Umberto loves nothing more than to destroy anything and everything that strays across his path, or have you forgotten that? Do you really think you’d have survived andthrivedenough to enact your escape if I hadn’t created an enduring distraction? You do me a disservice.”
Leontina shook her head. “All I remember is that youactuallydisappeared while I had to learn how toseemto disappear while remaining in the room. But that’s what she did, too, isn’t it? First one, then the other. Is that our real family legacy?”
But somehow, when she got to the end of that sentence, she was less furious than when she started. It was like it all…blew away like so much smoke, and all that was left were the thorny emotions beneath.
And that wasn’t fury. That was the mess that fury hid.
Giaco slowly rolled himself up and off the floor, displaying the easy athleticism that had done its part in making him more sought after than many of the more typical artsy celebrities of his generation. He went and sat on the low sofa that was stuck against one wall, beneath a giant canvas depicting some or other religious scene involving what looked like a spot of decapitation, in lustrous oils.
Leontina supposed she ought to recognize the painting, but she didn’t. She sat below it on the same sofa as her brother, gingerly. She found herself thinking that it felt right, somehow, that they should be speaking of these ugly, heavy things they never talked about, here beneath a grand painting filled with blood and gore. That tracked, somehow.
“I never wanted you to feel like that,” he said after they’d both settled on the couch, and he’d taken a moment to explore the state of his knuckles, looking raw after his exertions. “I went out of my way to make sure that you didn’t.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him. They were both looking straight ahead at the wall of weaponry, which, again, seemed fitting. It all seemed strange and yet right. “Not really. That was what Father always told me. That perhaps if I had been less disappointing, she would not have chosen to take her life.”
Giaco made a low noise that Leontina wasn’t sure she could identify. “What a foul, vicious man,” he muttered. “You were six years old, Leontina. What could you have done?”
What an odd thing it was, she thought, to have one of the central questions of her existence thrown out like that—like a rhetorical question too absurd to require that she answer it. The sweep of swords and other bladed things she was certain had names, though she didn’t know them, provided a kind of chorus. They seemed to pointedly underscore everything Giaco was saying.
“The truth is that our mother refused to diminish,” Giaco said, intently. “She felt the cost was too high for her to meet, and I believe that she assumed—rightly—” and he flashed a look at her direction, as if he was calling her to account “—that you would be the same as she was in many ways. Inextinguishable. Indomitable. And yet better prepared than she could be to meet these challenges.”
“I don’t think anyone would describe me that way,” Leontina replied softly. “Though it’s lovely to imagine.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short,” Giaco retorted. “You’ve lived with our father for more years than I ever did and have managed to avoid him for most of that time. Unless there are stories you’ve never told me about his coming after you over these past few years?” When Leontina shook her head, he nodded. She’d confirmed what he already thought. “I don’t think that would be possible without the strongest spine and a will to match it. All that plus the sort of humility that allows you to go unseen in the first place. That’s not me, certainly. And we both know that none of that comes from him.”
She felt tears in her eyes again and she looked down at her hands, because, truly, she couldn’t think of a greater gift he could have given her than to suggest that she was anything like their fierce, intimidating mother, who Umberto’s acolytes still murmured about in hushed tones as if they expected her to rise from beyond and flay them into pieces as she’d apparently done nightly while she was here. Not one to suffer fools, even if it would have made her life easier—that was their mother.
But then, Giaco hadn’t merely said that she was like their mother. He’d suggested that in some way, she wasbetter equipped.
It was enough to make her head spin.
“I have her old journals,” Leontina said quietly. “She left them with my old nanny, who you may recall Father chucked out when I was ten. He felt he’d already spent more than necessary on the care of a pointless female. That’s a quote.”
“I remember,” Giaco said darkly.
“She wrote a lot about you,” Leontina continued, still concentrating on the fingers in her lap. “Your gifts, your charms, the kind of man she thought you could be. She loved you very much.” She turned then and smiled at him, and that was far harder than it should have been. Because this wasn’t new—she’d just never said it out loud to anyone before. “She didn’t write that way about me. She hardly mentioned me at all.”
This had always underscored what Umberto had told her, she’d always thought.
But Giaco did not nod solemnly, acknowledging at last what Leontina had known all along. What she expected him to finally admit, here and now, in the face of the proof she’d had all along.
Instead, he let out a short laugh. “Because she didn’t have to,” he retorted.
