Free A Devil in Disguise by Caitlin Crews Page B

one, directly into his solar plexus.
    She hated him. He hadn’t thought much of it whenshe’d said it, as so many people had said the same over the years that it was like so much white noise. But he was beginning to believe she actually meant it. And more, that she thought he was a monster.
    None of that was new. None of it was surprising. But this was: he knew full well he’d acted like one.
    He’d do well to remember that.
    Much later that night, the investors were finally gone, off to their own debaucheries or beds or both, and Cayo found he couldn’t sleep.
    He prowled through the suite’s great room, hardly noticing the opulence surrounding him, from the paintings that graced the walls of the vast, airy space to the hand-blown light fixtures at every turn and breathtaking antiques littered about. He pushed his way out onto the terrace that wrapped around the suite, offering commanding views across Milan. The spires of the famous Duomo in the city center pierced the night, lit up against the wet, faintly chilly dark. On a clear day the Alps would be there in the distance, snowcapped and beautiful, and he had the fanciful notion he could sense them out there, looming and watchful. But he could see nothing at all but Drusilla. As if she haunted him, and she hadn’t even left him yet.
    Monster,
he thought again, the word on a bitter loop in his head.
She thinks you are a monster.
    He didn’t know why it mattered to him. Why it interfered with his rest. But here he was, scowling out at a sleeping city in the dead of night.
    He couldn’t stop running through the events of the past days in his head, and he hardly recognized himself in his own recollections. Where was his famous control, which made titans of industry cower beforehim? Where was the cool head that had always guided him so unerringly and that had caused more than one competitor to accuse him of being more machine than man? Why did he care so much about one assistant’s resignation that he’d turned into … this creature who roared and threatened, and abducted her across the whole of Europe?
    It was just as his grandfather had predicted so long ago, he thought, the long-forgotten memory surfacing against his will, still filled with all of the misery and pain of his youth. He moved to the edge of the terrace and stood there, unmindful of the wet air, the cold, the city spread out before him. And then he found himself thrust back in time and into the place in the world he liked the very least: his home. Or more precisely, the place he’d been born, and had left eighteen years later. For good.
    The entire village had predicted he would come to nothing. He was born of sin and made of shame, they’d sneered, as often to his face as behind his back. Look at his mother! Look how she’d turned out! A whore abandoned and forced to spend the rest of her days locked away in a convent as penance. No one would have been at all surprised if his own life had followed the same path. No one would have thought twice if he’d ended up as disgraced and shunned as she had been before she’d disappeared behind the convent walls.
    No one had expected Cayo Vila to be anything more than the stain he already was on his family’s name.
    In fact, that was all they expected of him. That was, the whole of the small village and his grandfather agreed, his destiny. His fate. That was what became of children like him, made in disgrace and summarily discarded by both his parents.
    And yet, despite this, he had tried so hard. His lips curled now, remembering those empty, fruitless years. He’d wanted so badly to
belong,
since he’d first understood, as a small boy, that he did not
.
He’d obeyed his grandfather in all things. He’d excelled at school. He’d worked tirelessly in the family’s small cobbler’s shop, and he’d never complained, while other boys his age played
futbol
and roamed about, carefree. He’d never fought with those who threw slurs and insults his