Page 158 of Dex

“You got your company back,” I say softly, looking at her beautiful face.“All of it.”She clutches my hand beneath the table, and nods, speechless.

The old man rises slowly, livid.“You’ll regret this.”He glares at me.“You think love makes you strong?It makes you weak.”

“Love made me smart enough to know you never bet on fear.Oh, one more thing.We know, I told these guys,” I gesture at Rio, Matteo and Enzo, “And I was going to tell you—” I nod at Jett and Zach who are staring at me, in total shock.I eye the old man.“That you’d planned this all along.To steal the majority share from the start, before you even found out about Arminio’s people fabricating the accounts.You were fine with screwing her father over from the get-go.You were just going to wait out the year.”

“You did what?”A vein pulses along Jett’s temple, and his body tenses, like he’s holding himself back from launching across the room.

“It’s called business,” the old man replies, sipping his wine.

“But … Dad …” Zach’s open mouth can’t find the words to end that sentence.

“Is this what we are now—dirty, sneaky players?”Jett looks like he wants to throw something.Beside him, Zach rests his hand on his shoulder, trying to placate him.

“Like I said.It’s called business.”The old man has no moral compass.He looks at me, eyes blazing with cold fury.“You played me.”

I meet his glare head-on.“You raised me to be ruthless.I finally turned it against the right target.”

Rio lifts his wine glass.“To family dinners.”

"Oh.”I remember something.“The million dollars a month I’m supposed to have received for each month we were married.We made it to about six weeks.Which means you owe me one and a half million dollars."

"Six weeks?"The old man frowns, as if the math doesn’t add up.It doesn’t, and I don’t want to answer him.I don’t want him to have any more personal information about us.But he knows none of this: my brothers working behind his back, or Daniela leaving and divorcing me, and planning to marry Ramos before I raced to get her back.He never even asked about her, or me.

"You need to pay him what you promised," Jett says, his voice as hard as his gaze.

Rio nods in agreement."You sure do.One point five mill.You owe him that much."

The others murmur the same.The old man looks shocked, for one second I see shock start to glaze over his expression, until he schools his hard, defiant, shameless mask back on and storms out of the room.As soon as the door slams, Rio bursts out laughing.Matteo pours himself a drink.“That went better than expected.”

Enzo smooths his hand through his hair.“I was expecting a chair to fly through the air.”

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Jett mutters.

Zach’s quiet; the old man’s actions sinking in.

I turn to Daniela.“You okay?”

She nods slowly.“I think… I finally am.”

The servers come in setting large bowls of food on the table.

“I’m starving,” Matteo announces, lifting the lids off to see what’s on the menu today.

A delicious aroma fills the air.I take a long inhale, and decide I’m starving too.“Me, too.”

I watch Jett, getting up, and pacing around like he’s going to erupt with all the bottled-up anger.“Come and eat, brother.Don’t let good food go to waste.”

“Might as well fucking eat, if he’s gone,” he mutters.Then he sits back down again.And just like that, we start talking.Wine glasses are refilled and we pass around the bowls of food.

The tension that hung thick in the air, seems to have left with the old man.It’s just us.The Knight boys.My brothers, and we’re eating, for the first time, like a real family.

Epilogue

DANI

Dexter told me to meet him here, in The Midnight Lounge, the place where we had our first date.Where we started so see each other for who we were.

It was here that we were trying to work out our backstories.What we’d tell people who asked questions about how we met and how he proposed.

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