Not Just the Boss's Plaything(53)

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 before him?    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 fútbol and roamed  about,   carefree. He'd never fought with those who threw slurs and  insults his   way-at least, he'd never been caught. He'd tried his best  to prove with   his every breath and word and deed that he was not  deserving of the   scorn and contempt that had been his birthright. He'd  tried to show that   he was blameless. That he belonged to the village,  to his family,   despite how he'd come to be there.

He'd really believed he could sway them. That old current of frustration    moved through him then, as if it still had the power to hurt him. It    didn't, he told himself. Of course it didn't. That would require a    heart, for one thing, and he had done without his for more than twenty    years. Deliberately.

"I have done my duty," his grandfather had said to him on the morning of    his eighteenth birthday, almost before Cayo had been fully awake. As   if  he'd been unable to wait any longer, so great was the burden he'd    carried all these years. "But you are now a man, and you must bear the    weight of your mother's shame on your own."

Cayo remembered the look on his grandfather's stern face, so much like    his own, the light in the dark eyes as they met his. It had been the    first time in his life he'd ever seen the old man look anything close to    happy.

"But, abuelo-" he had begun, thinking he could argue his case.

"You are not my grandson," the old man had said, that terrible note of    finality in his voice. His grizzled old chin had risen with some kind  of   awful pride. "I have done what I must for you, and now I wash my  hands   of it. Never call me abuelo again."

And Cayo never had. Not when he'd made his first million. Not when he'd    bought every piece of property in that godforsaken village, every  house   and every field, every shop and every building, by the time he  was   twenty-seven. Not even when he'd stood over the old man's bed in  the   hospital, and watched impassively as the man who had raised him-if  that   was what it could be called-breathed his last.

There had been no reconciliation. There had been no hint of regret, no    last-moment reversals before death had come to claim the old man three    years ago. Cayo had been thirty-three then, and a millionaire several    times over. He had owned more things than he could count. A small    Spanish village tucked away in the hills of Andalusia hardly registered.

He had not seen himself as any kind of stain on the village's heralded    white walls as he'd been driven through the streets in the back of a    Lexus, and he very much doubted that any of the villagers mistook him    for one. They'd hardly dare, would they, given that he'd held their    lives and livelihoods in his hand. He had not seen himself as having    anything to do with the place, with the Cadiz province, Andalusia, or    even Spain itself, for that matter. He had hardly been able to recall    that he had ever lived there, much less felt anything at all for the    small-minded people who had so disdained him-and were now compelled to    call him landlord.                       
       
           



       

"Not you!" his grandfather had wheezed, surfacing from his final illness    only briefly, only once, to stare at Cayo in horror. It had been some    fifteen years. "Ay dios mio!"

"Me," Cayo had confirmed coldly, standing at the foot of the hospital bed.

The old man had crossed himself, his hands knotted with arthritis, frail and shaking. Cayo had been unmoved.

"The devil is in you," this man who shared his blood had croaked out,    his voice a faint thread of sound in the quiet room. "It has always been    in you."

"My apologies," Cayo had said. His voice had been dry. Almost careless.    What could such a small, shriveled husk of a man do to him now? It had    seemed almost like a dream that he had ever had the power to hurt  Cayo.   Much less that he had succeeded. "I was your duty then, and it  seems I   am now your curse."

As if he'd agreed entirely, the old man had not spoken another word.    He'd only crossed himself again, and had soon thereafter slipped away.

And Cayo had felt absolutely nothing.

He hadn't let himself feel much of anything since he'd walked out of    that village on his eighteenth birthday. On that day, he'd looked back.    He'd mourned what he'd believed he'd lost. He'd felt. Betrayed.    Discarded. All the many things a weak man-a boy-felt. And when he'd    finally pulled himself together and accepted the fact that he was alone,    that he'd never been anything but alone and never would be again,  he'd   brushed himself off and shut down the pathetic part of him that  still   clung to all those counterproductive feelings. He'd left his  heart in   the hill town of his youth, and he'd never had cause to  regret that. Or,   for that matter, notice its lack.

So he had felt nothing when he'd walked into the hall where Drusilla had    waited, her expression carefully neutral as befitted a personal    assistant well paid to have no reaction at all to anything in her boss's    life. He'd felt nothing on the long drive back to his hotel in Cadiz    City, down from the mountains with their Moorish villages and out  toward   the Costa de la Luz, like a trip through his own memories. He'd  felt   nothing throughout the rest of that long night, though the  manzanilla   had first loosened his tongue and then, later, had him  kissing Drusilla   against a wall in a narrow walkway in the old city,  lifting her high   against him so her legs wrapped around his hips,  drowning himself in the   honeyed heat of her mouth, her kiss.