“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.”
DARIO WISHED A lot of things over the next few days.
That he’d thought this plan of his through, for one. That he’d paid attention to Anais when she’d warned him about the likely behavior of a small boy so far out of his element and separated from the only parent he knew for the first time in his young life.
That he hadn’t imagined in all his hubris that he could simply plop a furious five-year-old into his life without any ripple effects. It wasn’t as if the fact they shared genetic material could possibly matter to a small child—hell, it hadn’t mattered to his identical twin brother after an entire lifetime spent in each other’s pockets. He wished he’d thought a bit more before acting.
Of course, that was nothing new. It was eerily similar to how he’d felt when he’d arrived at ICE—having left his wife and his brother and his former company behind him in a bright blaze of a burned bridge—only to discover that the owner was precisely as shady as Dante had worried he was. That all of the company’s business practices were dubious and immoral, exactly as Dante had warned.
He rather doubted that a five-year-old child would appreciate the way he’d handled the ICE situation—with a systemic reworking of the company from the ground up over the course of years, which had included sidelining the owner and making him a silent partner before eventually ousting him altogether.
Dario had only spent a handful of days with Damian, but he knew full well that this child—he found it much too easy to assume the boy really was his son, and that should have worried him more than it did—was never going to be a silent anything.
“Enough,” he said one morning, interrupting another tantrum. The nanny wrung her hands in the background but it had been Damian who’d picked up a two hundred and twenty thousand dollar bronze statue from the coffee table and thrown it. At Dario’s head.
The fact he’d missed—by a mile—didn’t change Damian’s intent.
Nor did it change the fact that Dario now had a very heavy bronze stuck like a fork into his hardwood living room floor.
“I want my mom,” the little boy said, his face—a perfect replica of every photograph Dario had ever seen of himself and his own memories of his brother, save those eyes that could only be Anais’s—very solemn then, with his lower lip on the verge of trembling. “You said she’d come but she hasn’t come.”
“She’ll be here soon.”
And Dario wondered when he’d become such a liar. When he’d started tossing them out so easily, so readily. It made him wonder what lies he was telling himself.
“I don’t like it here,” Damian informed him. But it sounded like more of an observation than a complaint. “I want to go home.”
“What if I told you this was your new home?” Dario asked.
Most of the residents of New York City would fling themselves prostrate on the hot asphalt street outside to get the opportunity to so much as glance inside this particular building, so famous was it after the number of colorful, wealthy characters who had graced its Art Deco halls at one point or another. And most of the world would kill for a chance to spend even five minutes in Dario Di Sione’s highly coveted penthouse, and only partly because of the view.
This five-year-old who was very probably his own flesh and blood looked around as if he was deeply unimpressed, then screwed up his nose and shrugged.
“It’s okay.” He considered. “It would be better if my mom was here, though.”
Dario met the nanny’s gaze from across the room and dismissed her with a jerk of his chin, then returned his attention to Damian.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. He felt like an idiot. He felt