They went straight back to Spain, rather than going to California.
Pia had a very difficult conversation with her brother while Angelo was barking orders into his own phone.
“You should have told me the minute you knew he’d been here uninvited. Do you know how they behaved toward Poppy?” Rico had never spoken to her so harshly.
“Angelo is not one of them.” She would not allow that comparison. Ever. “Look,” she tried in a more conciliatory tone. “I understand why you’re angry, but it wasn’t my story to tell.”
“Now it is? When everything is going to hell in a handcart? He didn’t even have the mettle to tell me himself?”
“I wanted to do it—”
Rico hung up on her before she could explain.
She didn’t mention Rico’s reaction to Angelo. He was moving beyond damage control into aggressor. His press release dropped while they were in the air and he had a news conference scheduled immediately after they landed. He not only didn’t ask her to stand at his side for it, he sent her to her mother’s.
“I want to be with you,” she argued.
“No, you don’t.”
She caught her breath, hearing it as an accusation until he added, “I want to know you’re insulated from any further acts of aggression. Darius is in custody, but that doesn’t mean Tomas won’t try something.”
Now she would be worried sick about him, standing at a podium like a target, but he was in crisis mode. She didn’t add to his concerns by arguing. She did what she had always done when there were bigger problems to solve. She stepped out of the way.
Going to her parents’ house was no picnic. Her father was in Madrid, which made little difference aside from the fact her mother commented, “I suppose he’ll have to hold a press conference of his own.”
Pia felt rather helpless. “Angelo didn’t mean for this to happen, Mother.”
“Didn’t he?” La Reina asked with a blithe look. “He seems to have been seeking blood this whole time. Why on earth did he insist on that pageant of a wedding otherwise?”
Pia never talked back to her mother, not in an outburst of emotion, but she cried, “That was for our baby! You were on board with a big wedding, too.”
“Pia.” Her mother’s tone dripped with condescension. “That was not the wedding I envisioned for you. This is not the marriage. Especially now.”
“Well, he’s the husband I wanted,” she spat back, shaking at the confrontation while her mother only gave her a faint frown.
“Are you able to take hold of your emotions and discuss damage control?” La Reina stirred cream into her tea, the clatter of her spoon jangling Pia’s nerves.
The man she loved, really, truly, deeply loved, was going through hell. Pia wanted to cry and rage and throw a tantrum, she was so upset for him, but the one thing her mother had taught her was to shove aside that sort of reaction and think logically about what could be done on a practical level.
Dragging in a deep breath, she found her composure and firmly pressed it over her shredded control. “Of course,” she insisted.
“Do you have any influence over him at all?”
She almost lost it again, but managed to hang on to a civil tone. “He is entitled to his outrage, Mother. Were you aware of what his mother was going through when it happened?”
“I barely knew them,” she dismissed. “There was a rumor the stepdaughter had been with the gardener’s son and that’s why she wasn’t out in society. Until this press release, I believed the news reports that she had died after a brief illness.”
“Doesn’t it sicken you that the truth has been covered up? Or are you only upset that we’ve been attached to it?”
“Why are we attached to it, Pia? You’ve never been promiscuous. Have you heard any of the statements he’s made? He loathes what we represent. He is not Poppy or Sorcha, coming into our lives through honest fallibility and with an earnest desire to be one of us. He targeted you. All of this has been orchestrated for maximum damage to more than his brothers. He’s trying to take down the aristocracy.”
“That’s not true.” She didn’t explain that Angelo hadn’t known who she was that first night. Her family still thought they’d been dating in private before the masquerade ball. “His mother was treated horribly,” Pia continued fervently. “If he married me to champion her, I can live with that.” Mostly. Of course she wanted her marriage to be more than that, but at least it was an altruistic motive, not the calculating one her mother was suggesting.
“You continue to possess an unfortunate streak of compassion.” Her mother sighed. “If he wanted help with his battle over his mother, he should have gone about it differently, not seduced you into his scandal. He manipulated you into helping him achieve influence. Now he’s swinging a scythe with the Montero name on it.”
She shook her head, but her mother was sowing a seed of doubt.
“This isn’t justice he’s seeking, it’s vengeance,” her mother continued. “You understand he’s been buying up his brothers’ debts? Placing liens on their properties? Buying stocks in a hostile takeover to force them out? His aim is to ruin them, Pia.”