Modern Romance October 2016 Books 1-4. Julia James
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like that. I don’t want him to think that kind of war is love.”
“It’s not like that. We’re not like that.”
“You can’t even imagine calling your brother. Your twin. You can’t imagine it.”
“Dante has nothing to do with us!” he thundered at her.
“I know,” she said sadly. “And he never did. But I don’t think I’m the one you need to hear that from. And I can’t waste my life hoping you see the light and repair what you broke so we can all move forward. I won’t.”
She was really going to do this. She was really going to leave him, after everything. After they’d made it through what should have been the darkest place. He could see it on her face, in the gleam of moisture in her eyes.
He could feel it in that terrible constriction in his chest.
“Anais...”
“I’m taking Damian back to Maui,” she told him, straightening in the doorway, her tone measured. As if she’d been planning out what she would say and was delivering the news to him as calmly as she could. “I’m not taking him away from you and I won’t keep him from you. You can see him whenever you like. I’m happy to talk about a formal custody arrangement as we work through the divorce, but informally, I’m perfectly fine with whatever works for you.”
“Those are the same papers as before,” he said, unable to process this. Unable to understand. “The ones that claim you were unfaithful and name Dante as your lover.”
“If that’s what you need me to say in open court, then I’ll say it,” she told him.
And Dario understood that he should have viewed that quiet statement as his most decisive victory yet. But all he could seem to feel was a crushing sense of defeat. Of incalculable loss. Of nothing but grief, rolling on in all directions, forever.
She merely shrugged, and somehow that made it worse. “This needs to end, for all our sakes. I don’t care if it takes a lie to do that, as long as it’s over.”
“Anais. Damn it. This is...”
“Dario.” Her voice was hard then. Cold. Very serious. She waited until he met her gaze, and he knew then. He was already in that dark pit. He’d never climbed out. He never would. “You have to let me go.”
IT TOOK DARIO less than a day to determine that he was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. He refused to throw himself into that darkness and hope his work might save him. Not this time.
By the end of the day she left him, taking Damian with her, Dario was fully resolved. He stood on the roof deck without her, staring off into the hectic muddle of the city he hardly saw without her in it, and knew exactly what he wanted.
And Anais had named the single obstacle standing in his way.
Of course, he told himself then, he needed to call his damned brother.
But it took him a little bit longer to actually do it. He’d been so furious at his twin for so long. It was hard for him to let go of that.
Maybe too hard, he thought a few hours later as he waited on the same roof. Maybe some breaches were supposed to be there.
He didn’t have to turn around to know that Dante had arrived. That same intuition that had seemed like magic to those around the two of them, dormant for six long years, prickled alive instantly. He knew the very moment Dante stepped out onto the roof.
He didn’t simply know it. He felt it.
He took his time turning, and his brother was there when he did. It had been six years, and yet it felt...right.
“This is anticlimactic,” he said, eyeing the man standing across from him. It was still like looking into a mirror. It was still as if Dante was an extension of himself. This is right, he thought again. “I thought you’d at least have the good grace to be horrifically scarred or stunted in some way.”
“I could fling myself off the balcony in a show of dramatic atonement,” Dante replied in his usual easy manner, though Dario could see the wariness in his eyes. “Of course, that would likely kill me instantly. Much less suffering for me that way, which I’d think would defeat the purpose.”
Dario had to catch himself then, because he almost laughed at that—and this was the trouble. This was his twin. He knew Dante better than he knew himself, in some ways, or he had. He was genetically predisposed to get along with him. These past six years had been torture—and he couldn’t understand how he’d managed to convince himself otherwise. How he’d believed his own lies.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, he thought then.
“You betrayed me,” he said starkly, and his brother stiffened. “That was all I knew six years ago. That was all I wanted to know. You hurt me. You, of all people.”
Dante only stared back at him, the way he had then, and said nothing.
“Now I want to know the details,” Dario continued. He realized he’d tensed every muscle in his body and forced himself to relax. As best he could. “Anais has a child. He looks just like us.”
He searched his brother’s face. His own face, at a distance, as identical as it had ever been. As children and teenagers they’d played each other for days at a time to see if anyone noticed the switch. No one ever had.
Dario forced himself to ask the question. “Is he yours?”
“No.”
The word was like a stone hurled from a great height, and it landed between them with the force of too much gravity. Dario was surprised the roof deck didn’t buckle beneath them with the wallop of it. He was surprised he didn’t.
Dante looked stricken and fierce at once. “No. I never touched Anais, Dario. I never laid a single finger on her. I never would.”
And Dario realized that he’d known this, on some level. He must have known this, or he wouldn’t have turned and walked away. He wouldn’t have cut Dante and Anais off so completely, leaving them no recourse, if he’d thought they’d really cheated on him, because why would he have cared what they said then? And he certainly wouldn’t have thrown his revenge aside, ignored the way she’d deliberately aired their private business in the papers, all for the sake of a few family dinners. Not if he’d truly believed she was trying to foist off his brother’s child on him.
Because there was only one way Anais could be so sure Damian was Dario’s. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Only one explanation.
This was what she’d meant, he understood now. This was what she couldn’t live with. It wasn’t only that he’d believed the worst of her. It was that he must have been looking for something hideous to believe about her as his way out, because look how quickly he’d taken it. Look what damage he’d done.
What he didn’t know was why.
“You let me believe otherwise,” he said now to the twin who was the lost part of him. How had he pretended all this time that he was whole when that was laughable at best? He didn’t care that his voice was too thick. “Deliberately.”
Dante moved then, closing the distance between them to stand nearer to Dario at the deck’s rail. He frowned down at the traffic on Central Park West, but Dario knew he didn’t see it.
He saw the past. Dario had lived in that past for too long. He wanted out.
He wanted to be free.
More than that, he wanted his family.
“I did,” Dante admitted. He shook his head. “I hated that you listened to Anais more than to me. I hated that she’d come between us when she was supposed to be nothing more than a