Page 49 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

‘Clearly not. I thought you’d forgotten all about me. And not one word about my arrival back from the dead, either. It’s almost as if you want to keep that from the media.’ I stared over the endless blue of the ocean. ‘Oh, and by the way, your lawyers can’t stall things for ever. My case is water-tight.’

There was a deep, chilly silence that I found myself listening to intently.

He’d never used to be that silent. Once, he’d been talkative like me. We’d used to tell each other stories when things got bad, about how we’d escape Domingo and what we’d do when we were finally free. Be pirates together, or soldiers. Or cowboys in America.

‘The company is mine.’ His voice was like ice, reminding me so much of Domingo that I could feel all my muscles tense.

You never wanted that for him. You failed him.

The tight feeling wound around my heart and I found myself rubbing at my chest before I could stop it. Yes, I knew that. I had. As had Domingo. Domingo had failed us both.

‘You know why I’m taking it.’ I kept my voice as hard as his. ‘It’s in the best interests of your company and your staff.’

He ignored me. ‘But, if you want Olivia, you can have her.’

‘Really?’ I struggled to hide my shock. It sounded as if she hadn’t meant anything to him at all, which I didn’t understand. ‘Just like that? You’re not even going to make a cursory protest?’

‘It was never Olivia that mattered.’

It felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. ‘What?’

‘I didn’t want her.’ He sounded as detached as he ever had. ‘I never did. What I wanted was my brother. But he made a different choice. So I had to take action.’

The shock deepened inside me and then widened, a freezing lake of it. He wanted...me? But that didn’t make any sense. He already had me. And what choice did he mean? I’d never had any choices except the one I’d made to protect him.

‘What are you talking about?’ I growled. ‘What choice? Everything I did back then was for you, you know that.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ For the first time I could hear a thread of heat beneath the ice in his voice. ‘You chose yourself every single time. You chose that ridiculous feud with Papa.’

‘Ridiculous feud?’ I echoed in disbelief. ‘That man was a—’

‘If you’d only obeyed the rules, our lives would have been easier. But you didn’t. You made it worse.’

A flash of rage went through me. ‘The rules? You think I cared one iota about the rules? You put her life in danger. Domingo told me that, if he caught me seeing her again, he’d do something to hurt her.’

‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Constantine said icily. ‘You were the one who put her in danger, Valentin. It wasyourchoice to keep seeing her. If you’d really wanted to protect her, you would have done what our father asked and left her alone.’

He’s right.

Well, he was. I knew that already and I’d owned it. Yet ice spiralled through my veins all the same.

I tried to ignore it, gripping tightly to my rage instead. ‘Imeantto disobey him. I was trying to draw his attention away from you, you fool.’

‘Yes, that’s it exactly.’ He sounded frozen, like a glacier. ‘You didn’t want to let him win. You wanted to prove a point.’

You didn’t care about Constantine and you didn’t care about her. All that mattered was being stronger than him.

No, that was ridiculous. To have taken all Domingo’s manipulative attempts to bring me in line...to have taken all his beatings and his emotional abuse simply to prove I was stronger? What kind of idiot did Constantine take me for?

‘You can think that if you like,’ I gritted out between my teeth. ‘But I was doing all of that for you. I was trying to protect you.’

‘I didn’t need protecting. And, if you hadn’t made things worse, neither would Olivia.’

You’ve turned him into a victim, the way you turned her into one.

Denial burned like acid inside me. ‘So what is this? Are you defending him? After everything he did to us?’

I shouldn’t have cared. This had all happened a decade and a half ago, and I knew he hadn’t been able to help himself, that Domingo had turned him against me. Nevertheless, a small part of my anger was for him and his betrayal. We’d had no one but each other when we’d been growing up. Domingo had isolated us from everyone, so we had been each other’s friends and confidantes. We’d been supposed to stick together no matter what, to look out for each other, because that was what brothers did.

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