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But Ago didn’t know what he was supposed to do now that he was...here. Inside this cottage. This...love nest. He went and sat, gingerly, on one of the tiny couches. His brother stood by the fireplace, looking somehow both languid and intent at once.
“I’ll start,” Tiziano said when the silence between them had dragged down so long that Ago thought he could likely sing the entirety of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” when he had gone to such lengths to avoid paying attention to all the mawkishly sentimental carols until now. “You seem to be in quite a state about Victoria Cameron, Ago. She is quite beautiful, I grant you, but I thought that the major point in her favor was the ease with which she would fade into any given background. Her main talent, if you will. Because, truly, Everard Cameron is a tedious man. It’s only reasonable that his only daughter should also be a great bore.”
“You don’t know her.”
Ago didn’t recall shooting to his feet, but there he was, standing up and risking decapitation with every breath. It took him longer than it should to realize that his brother was smiling.
“Do I not?” Tiziano asked mildly. “Perhaps you had better tell me about her, then.”
“She’s maddening,” Ago belted out. “Headstrong. Ungrateful. Absolutely reckless. Do know what she was doing when she collapsed? Leaving me.Me.And not for the first time. The first time, she was gallivanting all across Italy, eating gelato and disregarding both my instructions and her duty.”
“Shocking behavior,” murmured Tiziano. “Gelato, I ask you. What’s next? Will she storm the papal residence?”
“I’m sure you find this hilarious,” Ago bit out, because it was very near a pleasure to have a focus for all thismessin him. And what better target was there than a brother as annoying as his? “This is what you have always wanted, is it not? Well, I congratulate you. I am saddled with a scandalous, wholly inappropriate wife when you know full well I cannot afford such a thing.”
Tiziano shrugged. “Then divorce her.”
Ago had been angry with his brother before. Incandescently so, in fact, and more than once.
But he had never, in all his life, wanted to take Tiziano apart limb by limb. With his own hands.
And that was just a start.
Somehow, he remembered himself. Somehow, he pulled himself from the brink. “Don’t be absurd. Divorce is not an option.”
Another indolent shrug. “Why not?”
Ago scowled at him. “Have you taken leave of your senses? You know as well as I do that Accardis do not divorce.”
“My mistake,” his brother said, sounding suspiciously casual. “Because it is far preferable to be endlessly unhappy and raise your children so that they will be miserable too, all to preserve...what? Some notion of a legacy?” Tiziano’s gaze, uncomfortably too like Ago’s own, seemed to pierce him where he stood. “I have a radical idea, brother. What if you figured out how to be happy? Imagine if that were your legacy.”
That was disturbingly close to what Victoria had said, that Ago wished he could get out of his head. Just as he wished that he could banish, forever, the sight of her going over all pale, her eyes rolling back in her head, and coming so close to cracking her head open right there on his stairwell.
At his feet.
He felt as if the floor of this rickety old cottage was rocking and buckling beneath him, though he knew it wasn’t.
He hated it.
But he still knew who he was. Maybe that was all he had left. “I know that you have rejected this your whole life, but it was beaten into me from a young age. What matters is duty. Dedication to our history, our future. All of this sits upon my shoulders, Tiziano.” He shook his head. “The Accardi legacy isn’t simply my guiding light, it’s who I am.”
“But what if,” his brother said, inexorably, “you were someone else instead?”
And if, at any other time, Tiziano had said such a thing to him, Ago would have brushed it off. It was Tiziano playing his usual games, he would have thought. It was Tiziano and his usual inability to grasp the realities of things. Because he was the younger son and it had been different for him. He could do as he liked. He’d enjoyed a freedom that Ago never had, and never would.
And maybe it was that he thought that word.Freedom.
Such a simple thing, or so Victoria seemed to think. Was it possible that the reason he had never thought much of it was because he’d never known it himself?
Did it matter how big a cage was? Or was the point of a cage that the occupant couldn’t leave?
Ago didn’t know. What he did know was that, for once, he stared back at his brother and didn’t dismiss him out of hand.
And something shifted in Tiziano’s expression. He blinked, then straightened from the fire.
“You used to be someone else, Ago,” Tiziano said quietly. “I doubt you even remember. But before you were the worthy scion, you were a little boy. You were funny. You laughed. You made a ruckus. You took great pleasure in pulling pranks, playing games. And when the nannies could persuade you to sit still, you amused yourself by drawing caricatures that made even Father laugh.” He laughed, but it wasn’t his usual, notorious laughter. This sounded far more bleak. “Of all the things I would hold our parents accountable for, if they lived, I think that might top the list. They drained the life out of that boy. And ruined him.”
“It’s called growing up.”
