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And Ago thought then that he would prefer to launch himself through his windows to the streets far below than continue this conversation. The speculation in Tiziano’s gaze made him consider it.
“You will be delighted to hear that I am, after all, a mortal and fallible man like any other,” he managed to grit out, though it caused him literal pain. “But I have taken responsibility for my failings.”
He stood as straight as he could, and found the play of expressions he couldn’t quite read over his brother’s face unbearable.
“Let me make certain I’m understanding you, brother,” Tiziano said, his voice a lazy drawl. Which meant he was primed and ready to lean into the mockery he was so good at.
But Ago found that he was finished with this conversation.
“Spare me, please, the schadenfreude,” he growled. “How the mighty have fallen, and so on. I have said all of these things to myself, and more. I’m sure that, in time, I will learn to live with what I have done.”
His younger brother studied him as if he made no sense.
“Felicitations,” he said. After a very long moment. “That sounds very much like love’s young dream. Romantic to the extreme. Lucky Victoria.”
Ago thought he could hear his own teeth grinding together. “I know nothing of romance and have no plans to learn,” he told his younger brother icily. “What I know is responsibility. I abdicated my own but briefly, and now must pay the price. That is all there is to it.”
Though it did occur to him, as he made such sweeping statements, that his supposedly biddable bride was even now gallivanting about Europe. Flashing the proof of the scandal he would prefer to hide away everywhere she went.
And that was all it would take to start a landslide of gossip.
This was what happened, Ago knew. This was what his grandfather and father had warned him about, again and again. All it took was one little slip. One mistake, and then everything else was a slippery slope straight on into utter disgrace.
This was why he had never made any mistakes.
The only question now was whether or not he could stave off the worst potential consequences. Because so far, a few desultory rumors were the only evidence of his sin.
All he needed to do was locate and collect his bride, and this time, not foolishly assume that the obedience she had showed her father would automatically transfer to her husband. He ought to have been grateful. Because now, he knew precisely where he stood and would not forget it.
Yet he found thatgratefulwas not at all how he felt.
“Ago.” He had almost forgotten that Tiziano still lounged there before him. Almost. “You do know that Victoria is...a person. A woman, now pregnant, who is possessed of all her own thoughts, and emotions, needs and wishes and hopes. As the baby will be when it is born. And most people on this earth are not as amenable as you have always been to hiding themselves away in a very small, steel-lined box.”
“Thank you, Tiziano,” Ago said, forbiddingly. “For demonstrating to me, yet again, the difference between us. The box around me, as you put it, is called duty. It is steel-lined indeed, little as I think you know what that means.”
And though his brother laughed, Ago had the strangest notion that he’d...missed something here. An opportunity, perhaps, to have a different relationship than the one he and Tiziano had always had. The opportunity to be more than the heir and the spare, which was all they had ever been raised to be.
Not exactly the closest relationship, he could admit.
But all he could think about was the scandal that could even now be making its way into every tabloid paper in Europe, branding Ago as no better than any other too-human fool. When he had worked so hard, and sacrificed everything, to never, ever put so much as a foot wrong. To be something more than a man.
An Accardi, his grandfather thundered inside him,cannot lower himself to be something so prosaic as a mereman.
He wanted to rage at his brother. Or better still, Victoria herself.
But he knew, down deep, that the real villain in this was himself.
That was what made it so difficult to bear.
He decided to abstain from any more of Tiziano’s witticisms. Or worse still, the way that his brother’s dark gaze, so much like his own, turned too knowing for his tastes. Ago took the opportunity to quit the room, leaving Tiziano behind in his office as he stalked down the hallways of Accardi Industries’ sleek headquarters, taking no particular pleasure in the way the very sight of him sent his underlings into their usual flutter.
He ignored the secretaries in a tizzy and the junior executives who flattened themselves against the wall, eyes wide, as he passed. He marched down to the security chief’s office and was gratified when the man met him at the door.
“I trust the situation is already close to being resolved?” Ago asked thinly.
“There is good news,” the man replied, looking less panicked than before. That had to indicate progress, surely. “We think she’s in Cinque Terre.”
And it was a measure of how disquieted Ago was that he didn’t pounce on the wordthink.
