Abby Green - The Platinum Collection - Affairs To Remember

The man smiled, but it didn’t meet his eyes. ‘I’m your older brother—half-brother. My name is Cesar Da Silva. I came today to pay my respects to the woman who gave me life...not that she deserved it. I was curious to see if any more would crawl out of the woodwork, but it looks like it’s just us.’

Alexio erupted beside Rafaele. ‘What the hell—?’

Rafaele was too stunned to move. He knew the Da Silva name. Cesar was behind the renowned and extremely successful Da Silva Global Corporation. His mind boggled to think that he might have met him and not known that they were brothers. With a sickening sense of inevitability, he didn’t doubt a word this man had just said. Their fraternal similarities were too obvious. They could be non-identical triplets.

That half-memory, half-dream had always been all too real—he’d just never known for sure, because whenever he’d mentioned it to his mother she’d always changed the subject. Much in the way she had never discussed her life in her native Spain before she’d met his father in Paris, where she’d been a model.

Rafaele gestured to his brother, ‘This is Alexio Christakos...our younger brother.’

Cesar Da Silva looked at him with nothing but ice in his eyes. ‘Three brothers by three fathers...and yet she didn’t abandon either of you to the wolves.’

He stepped forward then, and Alexio stepped forward too. The two men stood almost nose to nose, with Cesar topping his youngest brother in height only by an inch.

Cesar, his jaw as rigid as Alexio’s, gritted out, ‘I didn’t come here to fight you, brother. I have no issue with either of you.’

Alexio’s mouth thinned. ‘Only with our dead mother, if what you say is true.’

Cesar smiled, but it was thin and bitter. ‘Oh, it’s true, all right — more’s the pity.’

He stepped around Alexio then, and walked to the open grave. He took something out of his pocket and dropped it down into the dark space, where it fell onto the coffin with a distant hollow thud. He stood there for a long moment and then came back, his face expressionless.

After a charged silent moment between the three men he turned to stride away and got into the back of a waiting dark silver limousine, which moved off smoothly.

Rafaele turned to Alexio, who looked back at him, gobsmacked.

‘What the...?’ he trailed off.

Rafaele just shook his head. ‘I don’t know...’

He looked back to the space where the car had been and reeled with this cataclysmic knowledge.

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