Page 27 of Bound Enemies
Pau supposed that somewhere on the other side of all that, he’d imagined that he and Giaco would meet and discuss what had happened. The new future that Pau had created thanks to Leontina. The final nail in Umberto’s living coffin. Complete with a new addition to Giaco’s family—sugar to sweeten a bitter pill.
He had certainly not expected that this would all happentonight.
His entire bodyhurt, yet he knew perfectly well it was not arthritis. He had a good idea what else it could be, and all of it earned. Shame. Guilt. Regret.
The consequences of his actions in the decidedly human form of his best friend, who was currently looking at him as if he’d like to kill him. With his bare hands.
The way Pau had known all along he would, one day.
Pau was tempted to let him.
Maybe if Giaco took a few swings at him, it would ease the tension enough that the two of them could have a conversation. It wasn’t as if Giaco was a stranger to using relationships to further his own ends. The last ten years or so of his own life told that story eloquently enough, as did his very tactical and strategic marriage—the one he’d let his father believe he was forcing Giaco into.
No one had expected that Giaco and his forced bride, who also happened to be his former stepsister, Ivy, would fall in love.
Yet, somehow, Pau knew better than to bring that up. Just as—somehow—he understood that Giaco would not view his sister as fair game in the kind of sport they’d both indulged in all these years. Not that Giaco had ever declared Leontina off-limits, but then, he would have assumed that was unnecessary.
“Giaco,” he said warmly, in greeting, as he always did. “Brother.” He did not say that last part ironically, and he watched his friend’s brow rise. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been shocking how much that felt like a strike straight into his solar plexus. “Perhaps you and I should step inside for a small moment.”
“There’s nothing you can’t say in front of me,” Leontina argued, scowling at her brother. She looked as displeased to see him as Giaco was with Pau.
“I was friends with your brother first,” Pau told her, as evenly as possible. And he did not take his eyes off Giaco. He wasn’t that foolish. “I owe him this much.”
“I would say you owe me thisat the very least,” Giaco interjected, sounding almost merry—though his dark green eyes were still dark. “If I start to make a list of the things I think you owe me in this moment, my dear friend, we will become voluminous within seconds.”
But he didn’t make any move to lunge at Pau’s throat, so that was something.
Pau inclined his head. He looked at Leontina, who gazed back at him with mutiny in her gaze. Her chin rose up, belligerently, but as he gazed at her, she lowered it again. Eventually she blew out a breath, and nodded.
He felt a rush of another one of these dark, overwhelming emotions that swamped him every time he looked at her. He did not pretend to know what they were.
But it took greater effort than perhaps it should have to tear his gaze away from her, and follow her brother back into the monastery.
Giaco roamed bonelessly into the room, as was his custom, somehow eating it up with a glance. Pau closed the door to the balcony behind him, made sure it was shut tight so Leontina need not hear any of what was about to come, and waited.
He watched his always larger-than-life friend as Giaco put on a small performance of casually wandering about the room, taking in the stylized details and modern flourishes as if he had wandered into a museum somewhere, before he looked back at Pau.
“Who knew there was such a thing as Catholic chic?” he asked with a mildness that Pau did not believe at all.
“I forget you’ve never been here before.” Pau chose to ignore the undercurrents entirely. “Having heard so much about this place over the years, I trust you have found it exactly as described.”
“Save for the serpent nestled within,” Giaco replied, as swiftly as a knife strike deep into Pau’s gut. His dark eyes blazed. “What the fuck, Pau?”
Pau had known this man for nearly half his life. They had met and bonded as teenagers let loose in the august university where Pau had been expected to excel, and Giaco had intended to—and succeeded in—living down the lowest expectations of anyone who encountered him, particularly if they knew his father.
Theirs had always been the sort of friendship that defied explanation. Pau had considered it often in the intervening years. There was something about the people a person met the first time they were on their own. The first time they were out in the world, playing at adulthood on their own. There was something about those bonds.
Or there was something about this one. Because even after Giaco was summarily sent down from university in the middle of their first year, they had stayed in touch. Even when Pau had started his life of respectability and duty while Giaco chased starlets through glittering parties all over the globe, they had remained close.
And after his father died, when Pau had discovered who had engineered that death, Giaco had been his first call.
You know I’ve always hated that miserable excuse for a man, Giaco had said with a quiet ferocity after Pau had laid out all the facts he’d uncovered, yet could not prove in any sort of way that would hurt Umberto.Now I detest him even more.
Pau had not known until that moment how deeply he had needed his friend to believe him. Or how certain he had been that in the moment of truth, Giaco would close down and protect his family rather than his friend. But he hadn’t.
Nor did he ever.
Instead, the two of them had crafted a long-term plan to destroy Umberto from within. They would each lean into their strengths. Giaco, already a prolific despoiler of women, had catapulted himself into internationally renowned infamy. Pau, who rarely attracted any notice, had certainly gained some in the wake of his father’s death—and he’d leaned into that. Because it was up to him to rebuild Calixto Estates for the sake of his father’s honor and also to use it to lure Umberto back in.
