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I took a shaken breath, her words before she’d left echoing in my head as I stared around at the remnants of my childhood. Seeing them finally with new eyes.
This wasn’t a collection of things I’d always wanted and never had.
These were reminders of what Domingo had done to me. Reminders of Domingo’s hold on me. Things I was clinging to, to fill up that emptiness inside me. An emptiness that could never be filled. Not while Jenny wasn’t here.
She was the only one who made me feel I wasn’t the same kind of psychopath Domingo had been. The only one who made me feel I could be a good man. The only one who’d made mewantto be a good man.
‘So you believe your psychopathic father over me? He told you that you were like him and so you believe him?’
I paused beside the toy soldier sitting on its shelf. The soldier Domingo had tried to make me burn, and that Valentin had taken and thrown on the roof.
Why had I kept it? Why had I kept any of these things when they were reminders of all the ways Domingo had hurt me? And not just me, but Valentin too.
He had hurt us, twisted us, turned us into his image.
Val escaped, but you never did. You’re still that lost boy with bloody knuckles, listening to a man you hated telling you that your worst fear is true.
She was right, my Jenny. She’d been right all along. He still had a hold on me, even all these years later, and I’d never be free of him until all these reminders were gone.
I picked up the soldier, the edges of the plastic cutting into me, then slowly and deliberately I crushed it.
Then I turned and systematically smashed every case in the room.
‘Feel better?’
I stopped dead, surrounded by broken glass, my breath heaving, my hands bleeding from all the cuts I’d received.
That voice. It was familiar.
I turned.
Valentin stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. The brother I’d last seen three weeks ago, striding into the ballroom to tell me he was going to relieve me of my company. Stealing my bride.
His posture was casual, but the look on his face—the same face I saw every day in the mirror—was not. His gaze burned.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t trust myself, not after our last conversation on the phone.
He gazed dispassionately around the room and then looked back at me. ‘Are you done?’
He spoke in Spanish, our mother tongue, and he looked the same as he always had. He looked like my brother, my twin.
‘What are you doing here? How did you—?’
‘I came back to London with Olivia. We’re married, by the way, and blissfully happy. You can congratulate me at any time.’
I stared at him, my knuckles stinging, shock resounding through me, unable to think of a single word to say.
‘Fine, don’t, then.’ He shoved himself away from the door frame and took a couple of steps into the ruined room, not paying any attention to it. ‘Jenny contacted me. I like her, by the way. She and Olivia got on like a house on fire.’ He took another step, his footsteps crunching on the glass. ‘She told me that you’ve hidden yourself away and are refusing all calls. That you’re quite certain that it’s safer for her and your baby to be far away from you. She’s worried about you.’ He took another step. ‘So I thought I’d better come up here and check, to make sure you’re okay.’
I’d thought about this moment, the moment when I’d see Val again. Thought about all the things I would say to him. Cutting things. Hurtful things. Furious things.
Yet seeing him, with the last remains of our twisted childhood lying in ruins around us, all my rage drained suddenly away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said hoarsely. ‘For the last conversation we had. I was angry. I’ve been angry at you for a long time. But all of that was my fault. Olivia...what Papa did to you...shutting you in your room... It was my fault.’
All the polished charm dropped from Val’s face and his eyes darkened as he looked at me. ‘No, Con. No.’ There was anguish in his words. ‘I’m to blame as much as you. I left you alone with him. I let you believe I was dead. And...Dios, you will never know how sorry I am for that.’
Such a simple thing to say, and yet it made the pain in my heart ease somehow.
