“Damian is perfectly fine,” Dario heard himself say grudgingly. From that tiny place inside him that hated what he was doing—hated anything that would put that sort of look on her face, no matter his reasons. “In fact, he’s more than fine. He’s a holy terror.”
Her shoulders relaxed fractionally. Her mouth lost some of its unnatural stiffness. That frozen thing in her dark eyes thawed—if only slightly. And Dario understood that whatever else was true or not about this situation, it was clear Anais truly loved that wild creature of a child. Had he doubted that? Or had he become so used to laying every evil he could at her door that he didn’t know how to do anything else where she was concerned?
The trouble was, he didn’t know how to stop.
“He’s not a holy terror,” Anais corrected him. “Or not entirely, anyway. He’s five.”
“I was under the impression the two are interchangeable.”
She almost smiled. Then she reached toward him as if she meant to touch his arm, yet thought better of it at the last moment. Her hand curled into a fist as she dropped it back to her side, and there was no reason on earth he should feel that as some kind of loss. Or why his forearm should throb as if it hurt where she hadn’t touched him.
“You made your point, Dare,” she said quietly. Her gaze was steady, and she raised her chin as she spoke. “You took me on quite a ride. You seduced me and abandoned me and whisked Damian away from beneath my nose. You made me feel exactly as awful as I suspect you’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.”
She paused, and he didn’t quite understand why he should feel the trickle of something entirely too much like shame move through his gut at that when it was perfectly true. When he’d done all of those things. Deliberately, if not quite as cold-bloodedly as he’d imagined he would when he’d conceived of this plan the night she hadn’t let him step through her front door in Kihei.
“Don’t tell me you’ve come here to claim you’re the victim in this,” he said softly, because he didn’t know what to do with shame. It was foreign to him. It certainly had no place here, with her, of all people. Dario had built the last six years of his life on one inescapable truth: he was the victim of terrible betrayals from the only two people in all the world he’d trusted, but their failings didn’t define him. He’d risen above them. There was no place in his life for shame or anything like it. “I’ll laugh in your face.”
“Are we finished now? Can we end this?” She kept her dark gaze on his. “Quite apart from everything else, I can’t imagine you have any idea how to raise a child.”
“I wasn’t aware anyone did. I thought they learned it as they went, like anything else.”
He could have told her he’d hired a battalion of highly trained nannies to make sure someone in Damian’s vicinity knew a little something about child care, because Anais was absolutely right. He knew nothing about children save that, when he’d been one, it had been largely unpleasant until he and Dante had gone off to boarding school, where they’d had the kind of fun that came hand in hand with daily trips to the headmaster’s office. He could have told her he’d never leave something like the care of an innocent child to chance.
He didn’t.
“Tell me what you want,” she bit out, that cool tone of hers fraying around the edges, and that didn’t please him as much as he thought it should have. “To get my attention? To get your revenge? I think you’ve achieved that.”
“I have what I want from you,” he said, and he didn’t realize until he’d said it that he didn’t really mean it. That he’d said it simply to be cruel. Because he could. Because he was supposed to want to be as cruel to her as she’d been to him, surely. He should have loved nothing more than to stand there watching her press her lips together, hard, as if she was forcing back a sob, and to see how she had to fight to keep from showing him any of that.
Because there was a part of him, mean and spiked and still raw, that wanted to strike out at her however he could.
And he knew exactly what that black sludge of a feeling was as it moved through him then, rolling over him and sticking to him like a stain. He hated himself. He hated this. He hated hurting her for the sake of hurting her...
When had he become this person? This angry, bitter, horrid man who did these things with such appalling nonchalance?
But he knew. Of course he knew.
And that same old scene unfolded before him the way it always did, with the sickening inevitability of a nightmare. As if he was reliving it instead of simply remembering it. He’d gone out early that Saturday to a meeting with the people at ICE that Dante had refused to attend, in what Dario had thought was his continuing refusal to do his part in their business, and he’d been happy to be headed home after it. Anais had been the only person he could talk to back then, the only person who had understood how torn he’d felt between what he’d believed was the right thing to do for his company and the loyalty he’d felt to his brother. The fact he’d confided in her and had often taken her advice instead of Dante’s was, Dario had been aware, something that had driven his brother—no fan of Anais’s from the start— absolutely insane.
He could see the heedless, carefree way he’d walked into the apartment, throwing his keys on the same table he always did, then heading toward the bedroom to find the lovely wife he’d long since convinced himself was his perfect partner—if nothing more. Never anything more emotionally charged than that.
Because their marriage had been so analytical, so cool and careful, in the light of day. They spoke of their union as if it was a practical business arrangement they’d undertaken for the sake of their common goals with no emotional component whatsoever—and then they tore each other to shuddering pieces in bed every chance they got, again and again and again.
And she was the first person he wanted to find when he had news to share, good or bad. He couldn’t even remember how she’d replaced Dante in that role, only that she had. It was as much because he and Dante had stopped thinking and acting as a single unit in those days—the erosion of trust between them, he thought now, that had followed that incident with the girlfriend they hadn’t known they’d had in common when they’d been eighteen—as it was because of anything Anais had done herself.
Would he have understood what all of that meant in his own time, if she hadn’t played him the way she had? He’d already thought it was astonishing how the two of them, raised in such different yet similarly unpleasant circumstances by hideously selfish parents, had stumbled upon each other the way they had. Would he have eventually comprehended what should have been obvious to him from the start—that their marriage had never been cold in any way at all, and they’d only been pretending otherwise? He’d never know.
Dario could still remember the flush on her cheeks, the wild look in her eyes, when he’d found her standing there in the little hall outside their bedroom with one hand braced against the wall—as if she’d run to stand there, to face him. That was what he’d thought in that last moment before his whole life had imploded.
She’d stared at him, her face pale and her eyes blazing, neither of which had made sense to him. Had he moved closer to her then? He could never remember. Because that was when Dante had stepped out of the bedroom behind her, one of Dario’s shirts wide open on his chest and a look Dario couldn’t read at all on his face.
And Dario couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He’d been eating and breathing the company then, juggling meetings all day and preparing for them all night. He’d barely seen his wife at all. He’d certainly not seen enough of Dante while he’d been shoving his whole face to the grindstone night after night. He’d already been feeling shut out of his own life, a stranger in the two most important relationships in his life. It had been a dark time for him already, and he’d even been worried about how much the only two people in the world he really cared about seemed to hate each other...
But they didn’t hate each other, he’d understood then with sickening clarity.
Like a kick to the gut. Clearly, that had never been what was happening between the two of them.
And that was when he’d understood exactly what Anais was to him, what she’d meant to him that whole time. Why he’d moved so quickly with this woman from the start. Why it had seemed something like destined, though he’d never have used that word.