Right then and there, in the hallway with his half-dressed twin, he’d understood his own foolish heart much too late.
Here, six years later in a completely different part of the city and the two of them much different people than they’d been back then, he jolted out of his ugly memories to find Anais still standing before him. Still watching him with that same arrested and fearful look on her face.
He still didn’t know what it meant, what any of this meant—only that he was clearly hurting her. Whatever she’d done six years ago, whatever karmic reward he believed she deserved, he was the one doing the hurting now.
And he couldn’t lie to himself any longer and tell himself he didn’t care about that. But he also couldn’t seem to stop himself.
“The only thing you could possibly do for me requires time travel,” he told her, and he didn’t know where that came from or why he sounded like that, gritty and nothing like calm or cool. But maybe he’d never been fooling anyone with that, anyway. “And for you to be a completely different person than who you turned out to be.”
He realized he was moving as if to touch her again and he jerked himself back. That way led nowhere good, especially in a conference room surrounded by glass walls that his entire company could see through right now.
“Answer me one question,” she said, her voice low and strained, though all he could see on her face was the stubborn jut of her jaw and that same glitter in her eyes. “You’ve made a lot of decisions based on my betrayal. The way you left then. The things you’ve said. The way you made sure I could never contact you and the way you ended your relationship with your brother. What if you’re wrong?”
He laughed at that. “About you?”
“About all of it. About me. About your brother. About what you saw that day. Think about all the things you’ve done, Dare. Up to and including the kidnap of your own child, transporting him across state lines and an ocean, for no other purpose than to get back at me.”
Her hands had curled into tight fists by the time she finished speaking, and she was trembling slightly, very slightly, as if the force of her words was tearing her open where she stood.
And Dario hated this. He hated all of this. He was afraid that what he hated most was that there was no way back. There was no pretending she hadn’t cheated on him, or ignoring who she’d cheated with, and there was no making believe there wasn’t a five-year-old boy in the mix now. There was no road back to what he wanted—what he still wanted, damn her, despite everything—and no way to admit he wanted it.
She was as lost to him as if he’d never met her. More, perhaps.
And what roared in him then was like a hurricane, mighty and vicious.
“That would make me a monster,” he told her softly, hardly able to hear his own voice above the din inside him. “Is that what you want to hear? A petty, vicious man, much like the father you claimed to loathe before you treated your own marriage the same way he treated his. But you see, I don’t spend any time worrying about such things.”
“Because you’re so certain you’re right?” Her voice cut through the noise inside of him, that endless howl of loss. “There can be no doubt once you’ve made up your mind? How delightful it must be, to be so perfect and correct at all times. You must find all the rest of us mere mortals a great trial—”
“I told you before it wasn’t the first time,” Dario bit out, cutting her off. “Did you think you were special, Anais? Did he tell you that you were? Guess what? He lied. You weren’t the first woman he sampled without my knowledge while she was meant to be mine.”
He could feel the mirthless smile on his own mouth then. He could feel that hard look in his eyes, because it was ripping him apart, too. He could see the way she flinched at the sight. And he didn’t tell her the rest of it—that Dante hadn’t known that Lucy was playing them against each other. That they’d both gotten rid of her and supposedly moved on. That he’d had that festering distrust of his brother ever since.
Dario told himself none of that mattered. “But you were the last.”
* * *
It was a war, Anais told herself, and that meant she used what weapons were available to her.
No matter how much she disliked them.
“Are you sure you want to attack a Di Sione in this way?” her aunt had asked on the drive to the Maui airport, in crisp, rapid French. The sugarcane fields had rustled on the side of the road as if they agreed, right down to their roots in the red Hawaiian dirt. “Particularly the one currently held to be the darling of the tech world, feted in every corner of the world’s media? You were adamant that Damian be spared this circus six years ago.”
“Six years ago Damian was theoretical,” Anais had replied in the same language, the Parisian French of her childhood. The language her father had used to savage her mother, and the language both her parents had used to make certain she knew how she’d ruined both their lives and yet turned out so worthless. She kept her eyes on the fields, the windmills climbing up the rich brown mountain in the distance, and she knew her heart was already flying thirty thousand feet above her in Dario’s plane and headed east. “Now he’s a little boy who was abducted off a playground. If the circus is what gets him back, I’ll hire all the clowns myself.”
She’d meant it.
After Dario left her there in his office’s conference space—the room still echoing his harsh words and what was, she supposed, the explanation for why it had never crossed his mind to believe her—she’d gotten to work.
She’d set up interviews. She’d answered all of her texts and voice mails from all of the guttersnipe reporters dying to talk to her so they could twist her words into unrecognizable shapes. She settled herself in the center of the long, polished table in Dario’s conference room and she told her story again and again, to whoever would listen, while his employees walked by and pretended not to stare.
A few hours later, she’d spread the story of Secretly Evil Rich Man Drunk with His Own Power as far and as wide as she possibly could in one day. She smiled sweetly at Dario when he appeared in the doorway again.
If anything, his face looked harder and bleaker than it had before, and her tragedy was that her own heart seemed to hitch a bit at that. It didn’t care that he’d done all of this to himself. It only cared that he was in pain.
She couldn’t even hate herself for that. He was the first person she’d ever loved like this, heedlessly and recklessly and irrevocably. Until she’d had Damian, he was the only one. Apparently, that hadn’t gone anywhere. On some level, she’d always understood it never would.
“Are you finished with whatever performance this was?” he asked in that deceptively quiet voice of his that she recognized now. It meant his temper was right there beneath it, pressing at him to escape and strike. She swore she could see it in the blue glitter of his eyes. “Some of us actually work for a living rather than spin fantasies for the paparazzi. We need access to this room.”