did nothing of the sort.
If anything, tonight only proved how wrong they were for each other. How dangerous she was to his control. How easily he could break her spirit.
He pushed away from her. Like the ruthless bastard that he was, he didn’t even try to hold her up when her knees shook beneath her. Her eyes were closed; her face was turned away.
But he didn’t miss the lone tear that tracked a path down her cheek.
“That is all I can give you, Pia. That is all I give any woman.”
He walked out of that room and the house and went outside to wait for Emilio.
“HOW DARE YOU go behind my back after everything I’ve done for you?”
Raphael refused to look up before he finished perusing the design document as Giovanni walked into his office with all the force of a stomping elephant. The rush of affection welling up in his chest was a soothing balm against the guilt festering for the actions he’d taken.
Giovanni meant the world to him.
He had taught Raphael to aspire to bigger dreams, had spotted Raphael’s unusual talent for fixing cars of any kind, believed in his talent and hard work when even his mother hadn’t.
He’d been expecting this siege for a week now. From the minute he’d set about buying more and more stock in the company. Getting the members to oust Gio from the board—whose proxy had rested with Raphael all this time anyway.
If he succeeded, Gio wouldn’t ever be able to bring someone like Stefano onto the board. He’d never be able to manipulate Raphael again. He’d never put Raphael in a situation where he had to face Pia again.
But of course Gio had his spies in the company just as Raphael had his at Gio’s house.
Once he finished, he closed down the design software and leaned back in his seat.
“Good afternoon to you too, Giovanni,” he said casually, and only then looked up to meet his gaze.
A thread of unease wrapped itself around his chest, tugging hard.
His eighty-four-year-old godfather had the stubbornness of a mule and the constitution of a boxer. And yet, his pallor was visible under the olive of his skin. Concern pushed Raphael out of his chair as Gio huffed into his office with short breaths and irately dismissed his chauffeur Emilio.
Who cast a worried glance at Raphael.
“You look like hell, Giovanni.” Try as he might, he couldn’t stop the concern seeping through. Emotion was a weakness that Gio would lap up.
Giovanni walked into the sitting area, his body vibrating with his famous temper. “I look like hell because my godson—the boy I taught everything—is a backstabbing cheat.” A string of Italian fell from his mouth as Gio detailed all the backstabbing Raphael had done.
However pale he might look, Raphael didn’t intend to go on the defensive. “Have you no explanation for why you are trying to push me out of my own company?”
“I’m cleaning house. I should’ve done it years ago.”
“You’re the bloody CEO, Raphael. What more could you want?”
“You and I are both aware that a quarter of the board members are always looking for ways to go behind my back. I’ll not tolerate any dissent. This is my company now, Gio.”
“No one would dare question your command. They know it’s you who drives the stock prices higher. Your reputation is fierce. And if they crawl back to me, it’s because they know you loathe them.”
“I loathe them because they’re not worthy of anything.” Half of them had turned his father away during the hour of his need. “I’ll not allow any vipers on the board.”
He was deceived by the very people he trusted.
Pia’s words wouldn’t leave Raphael alone. In eighteen years, he’d not once looked at it that way. He’d only seen his father’s actions from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old boy. But never as a man who’d been betrayed, as a man who’d been honorable until his last breath.
“Your work consumes you.” He sighed. “I think at the cost of everything else. This compulsion you have to reach even higher goals...”
“It is what keeps my family in the style they’re used to.”
“Si, exactly. This wealth, retrieving your family’s social standing, it’s an obsession. Marco wouldn’t have wanted you to sacrifice your personal happiness.”
Hands clenching into fists, Raphael turned away. “I’m nothing like my father.”
Gio’s head jerked toward him as if Raphael had committed blasphemy. “Businesses fail, Raphael. Men make unwise investments, bad choices.”
His throat raw, Raphael gave voice to the pain he had bottled for years, the complaint he hadn’t let himself make even in the darkest of his nights. “He took the coward’s way out. He should have been a stronger man.” For me. Shame choked those two words.
“He adored your mother—did you know that? He spent years building his little business, trying to win her hand. But at the first sign of calamity, Portia fell apart. She blamed him. Your mother’s inability to cope with the loss, the weight of your sisters’ disappointments, the large unit of leeches that constitute your various uncles and aunts and cousins, and their taunts—that was what sent him to that early grave. No one believed in him anymore, Raphael, not even the woman he loved.”
Raphael felt winded as if he’d been dealt a hard blow. He’d thought of his father as a coward. Instead, had his heart simply been broken? Had he given up on them because they had given up on him? Because he couldn’t bear to be diminished in the eyes of the woman he loved?
His father had been a man who’d cared deeply, a man who’d loved his wife, his family from the bottom of his heart.
His vulnerability had only brought him ruin and a broken heart. “You backed me into a corner. And I fought back.”
A shrewd light entered his grandfather’s eyes. “How?”
“You’d hear it from my own mouth? About Pia?”
He shrugged and examined his nails. “What does my granddaughter have to do with you buying up stock?”
“Basta! Stefano Castillaghi, Gio? You think I’d let that bastard touch VA? Did you think I’d ever give you the chance to pull something like this again?”
“So you claimed Pia.” A cat wouldn’t have looked as satisfied as Gio did. That his hunch had been right made Raphael’s blood boil.
“I didn’t claim Pia as much as I agreed to her scheme about pretending that I did. You terrified her with your demands and your ill health. She came to me as a last resort.”
Silence
