His smile peeked out like a tiny ray of sunshine through gray storm clouds. “Hey, if it’s good enough for Prince Rhys, it’s good enough for me. He likes sketching in his free time too.”
“Now you’re just making stuff up.” I couldn’t imagine the gorgeous but broody crown prince of Eldorra enjoying something as soft as drawing. He looked like he wrestled bears for fun.
“I swear. I read about it in an interview last year. Besides…” Xavier’s dimples deepened. “I said your hobbies are boring, not you. I don’t find a single thing about you boring.”
My heartbeat stumbled.
God, I wished he were an asshole. It would make things so much easier.
“Yes, well…” I cleared my throat and nudged a paper ball out of the way with the toe of my pump. “That doesn’t change the fact you need to leave your room sometime. I thought you’d—” I cut myself off before the word died. “I thought you’d passed out in here,” I finished, inwardly wincing at the lame substitution.
“I like my room.” Xavier’s smile took on a devilish slant. “You’re welcome to join me. There’s plenty of space.”
Ah, there was the shameless flirt. I knew he was still lurking under there somewhere.
I marshaled my expression into some semblance of professional disapproval, but I didn’t get a chance to respond before a knock sounded on the door.
Its owner didn’t wait for a response; the door opened, revealing Eduardo’s dark suit and somber face.
My sarcastic reply withered, and Xavier’s smile dissolved into grim understanding. He turned to the easel and ripped his near-complete sketch off the canvas. It soon joined the rest of the drawings on the floor.
Acid ate at my stomach. We’d been getting somewhere, and now…
“Xavier. Sloane.” Eduardo’s voice was heavy. “It’s time.”
We didn’t need elaboration, and neither of us spoke as we followed him into the hall. I could practically hear the camera flashes outside; the vultures were circling, and it was only a matter of time before they landed.
We made it halfway before a light touch on my shoulder forced me to halt.
“Before we go in there…” Xavier swallowed, his eyes clouded with turmoil. “Thank you for checking on me.”
The words landed like arrows, each in its vulnerable target.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but in a house filled with his family, I was the first person to check and see if he was okay.
“You’re welcome,” I said quietly.
There was nothing else I could say in that moment.
The only thing I could do was step aside, let him say his goodbyes, and prepare him for the storm to come.
CHAPTER 15
Xavier
It should come as no surprise that a man who’d barely been there for me in life was equally absent in death.
Alberto Castillo, Colombia’s richest man, former CEO of the Castillo Group, and father of one, died at home at five minutes past three on Saturday afternoon.
I made it to his room just in time to witness his last heartbeat.
He never woke from his coma before he passed, and we never exchanged a proper goodbye.
If this were a movie, we’d have some dramatic heart-to-heart or big confrontation before he died. I would unload my grievances on him; he would confess his regrets to me. We would have a cathartic fight or make up. Either way, we’d have closure.
But this wasn’t a movie. It was real life, and sometimes, that meant loose ends didn’t get tied up.
In the wake of his death, I felt a strange mix of nothing and everything all at once. I was relieved that we no longer hung on tenterhooks, waiting for a final health verdict, but I couldn’t fully process that he was gone and never coming back. I despised the last-minute manipulation he’d pulled with my mother’s letter, but the overwhelming closeness I’d felt to her when I read her words was worth it.
Yet constraining that sea of complicated emotions was a layer of numbness I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried.
Top drawer of my desk.
Those were the last words my father had uttered to me, and I supposed it was fitting that our chapter ended with ties to my mother. Dead or alive, she was the bedrock of our relationship.
The pocket watch I found in his desk drawer burned a hole against my thigh.
“Do you think I’m a monster for not crying?” I stared at the scotch in my hand. It was midnight and I was in the kitchen, drinking my worries away, because what else would one do the night after their father died?
“No,” Sloane said simply. “People grieve in different ways.” She poured a glass of water and slid it toward me.
She’d stayed with me through the immediate aftermath of my father’s death, forcing me to eat and turning away my family members when they tried to accost me with questions about my inheritance.
Thankfully, she didn’t smother me with pity. I could always count on Sloane to be Sloane. Whenever I was drowning, she was my anchor in the storm.
Part of me was embarrassed to show her this side of me—raw and exposed, tangled in the pieces of the mask I usually wore for the world. It was easy being Xavier Castillo, the billionaire heir and party boy; it was torturous being Xavier Castillo, the man and disappointment. The one with a fucked-up past and uncertain future, who had plenty of friends yet no one to lean on.
