Billionaires: The Rebel. Кейт Хьюит

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.”

      “I was done actually.” She rose to her feet and tucked her bag beneath her arm. “Did you come here to take me to Damian?”

      Dario let out a short laugh. “No.”

      “How long do you plan to keep this up?”

      His gaze was hard then. “I’m thinking at least five years. Just to be fair. I’ll contact you when he turns ten.”

      She wanted to lunge at him for even suggesting something so hideous, but she held herself back. Barely.

      “He’s a little boy, Dario. He has no idea what game you’re playing. He doesn’t deserve this.”

      “He’s a Di Sione,” Dario countered. “He’ll be fine.”

      She let out a low, insulting sort of laugh. “Like you are, you mean?”

      He didn’t like that. His eyes flashed.

      “If you don’t leave this office right now, Anais, I’ll have you thrown out on the street,” he promised her softly. Very softly. “I don’t care what tabloid you hire to plaster it on their front page.”

      She didn’t believe him. But she didn’t push it. She only inclined her head and brushed past him on her way out the door.

      “Remember that you said that,” she advised him. Because this was war, no matter what she felt inside. No matter how much she wished it could be otherwise. He’d made it a war. He’d even taken a hostage—the only person in the world she loved unconditionally. What other choice did she have? “You might come to wish you hadn’t.”