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‘What is it?’ she demanded, her voice suddenly more powerful and commanding than the elements raging beyond the windows.
‘It’s a file I requested to be compiled on Bartlett.’
‘Do you not think that you offered the best deal to Bartlett?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you not think that you deserve to win this contract on your own merit?’
‘Yes,’ he growled, his anger, his fear, all working to meet her tone.
‘Then explain to me what that is.’
‘It’s insurance.’
‘Insurance?’ she spat.
He had never heard her tone so dark, so angry, and he hated that he had made it so. Hated that he had tainted her in any way because of his need for revenge.
‘That isn’t insurance. That is the complete and abject desecration of a person, Antonio. Your PI has dug up dirt on Mandy Bartlett and—what? You were going to use it to blackmail Bartlett into letting you invest in his company?’
He met her accusations with silence. There were no shields to protect him from the truth of her words.
‘Is this because of what I said the other night? Because I followed her on social media and saw that she was young and foolish?’
The heartbreak in Emma’s voice was too much for him to bear. But he simply couldn’t tell her that she was wrong.
‘Did it give you a lead to where your PI should look?’
‘Yes,’ he said, the word drawn from the very depths of his soul.
She turned her back to him and finally he glanced at the open folder—pictures of a young student spilled from it. Snapshots of a small blonde partying with her friends. And while one or two showed a happy, fun-loving girl, a few he could see peeking out beneath showed that she had started to experiment with drugs, that images of her scantily clad, showed her in poses that were highly salacious.
The thought of sharing them with the girl’s father turned his stomach.
But the accusation, the pressure of the weight in Emma’s eyes made him angry. Angry that his father had forced him to this—angry at himself. So he turned that anger and used it against Emma.
‘It’s hypocrisy. That I needed you to make me seem more palatable to Bartlett when his daughter is—’
‘Stop,’ Emma commanded, her hand coming up between them to accentuate her words unconsciously. ‘Stop right there. It’s not hypocritical to hold to a moralistic lifestyle while another human being chooses not to. This is a young girl taking a bad path. Those frozen snapshots aren’t the whole picture of who she is and what she will be. Though they will be the only picture if you give them to her father.’
She was almost out of breath. She desperately wanted him to see what he was doing, to see where he was going. It was a path she wasn’t sure he was going to come back from.
‘Mandy Bartlett is a young girl making mistakes and hopefully she will learn from them. What she is not, Antonio, is a pawn to be used in a sick game between you and your father.’
‘It is not a sick game, Emma. My father deserves to burn in hell for what he did.’
‘Because he left you? Antonio, I realise that it must have—’
‘No!’ he roared. ‘This isn’t about him leaving, nor blackening my mother’s name, nor forcing us to leave our home. Dio, we could have handled that. But Cici... She had more than just nightmares after the divorce,’ he said, his voice hoarse with the emotion he had bottled up for years.
* * *
As if it were yesterday he remembered his mother’s frantic phone call from Italy, just six months into his time in New York, begging him to come home immediately. She had been incoherent, and the only thing he’d managed to gather was that Cici was in hospital.
Nothing—nothing—had ever made him feel so terrified as those seven hours on the private jet Danyl had secured for him.
Until he’d seen the sight of his sister’s small, impossibly emaciated frame. The doctors had explained that she must have been hiding it for years.
