“He sounds like a broken, horrible man, and what does that have to do with us? Or this baby?”
“He raised me to care about the business alone, as he did,” Balthazar continued, as if he had no choice. As if these things were being dragged out of him whether he liked it or not. “And I thought it made sense that he should have his other women if he wished, because he was the one who worked so hard to build the Skalas empire. What did my mother do but waft around the house, haggard and pathetic?”
His voice was hard, like bullets, but somehow Kendra thought he was aiming the gun at himself.
“A friend of his started to spend more time with the family,” Balthazar continued, a stark, ferocious thing on his face. He stood there, much too still, and though all Kendra wanted to do was go to him, she knew better. She knew he wouldn’t allow it. “He flattered my father. He took an interest in what Constantine and I were doing. And then, because he could, he started an affair with my mother. Right under my father’s nose.”
“But your father was already having his own affairs, wasn’t he?”
Balthazar shrugged. “He was not a rational man when it came to the things he considered his. When my father discovered this affair, he confronted the two of them. He made my brother and me witness it, because he said it affected the family. I was sixteen.”
“Balthazar...” she whispered.
“My mother was regretful, but she said they were in love. That he was kind to her, which was more than my father had been. That she would sign whatever he liked if he let her go.” His grim expression did not alter in the slightest. “But his friend only laughed. He called my mother names and told my father it was no more than he deserved for some or other business deal. He left my mother sobbing on the floor.”
“You shouldn’t have seen that,” Kendra said fiercely. “Your father should have protected you from that.”
“He was too busy throwing my mother out,” Balthazar said icily. “And when she went, she fell apart.”
He ran a hand over his face, then. Maybe she only thought she saw it shake.
“You don’t have to tell me the rest of this,” she said, even as she racked her brain to remember what had become of his mother. Why did she think it was something sad?
“But I do,” he replied. He started toward her then, slow and deliberate. “My mother descended into a squalid little life of men who took advantage of her. She turned to drink. Then to drugs. One night she took too much and slipped into a coma. She has never awoken. She lies there still, slowly wasting away, trapped in her despair.”
Kendra’s pulse rocketed around inside her. Her stomach twisted. But still he drew closer in that same, terrible way. She wanted to run, but she wanted to stay where she was even more. As if she was proving something.
“My brother and I vowed that we would take our revenge on the man who targeted her,” Balthazar said, the ring of something heavy in his voice. And stamped all over his face. If she didn’t know better, knowing this man as she did, she might have imagined it was guilt. “No matter how long it took. No matter what it entailed.”
“Do you mean your father?”
His smile was thin. “My father did not help, I grant you. But it was not he who pushed my mother over the side of that cliff. It was not he who used her, then discarded her, and laughed about what he’d done.”
“You said he was unkind to her.”
“He was unkind,” Balthazar snapped. “Had she never met this friend of his, she would have survived it like the rest of us.”
“I don’t blame you for hating him,” Kendra said softly.
Balthazar’s eyes blazed. He stopped moving, though he was still more than an arm’s length away from her.
“I am delighted to hear you say that, Kendra,” he said. “Because the man I am speaking of is your father.”
It was like the world dimmed, or she slid off the side of it. She stared back at him, convinced her ears were ringing. Convinced her heart had stopped. Convinced she must have misheard him.
But none of those things were true.
“Your father,” he said again, so there could be no mistake, “drove my mother to her current state. And has never looked back. He prefers to dance around me in business situations as if I don’t know what he did. What he is.”
“But... But you...”
“I assumed you were nothing but another knife he thought to plunge in the side of my family,” Balthazar said. “Some men deal with their guilt in extravagant ways. Of course he sent you to me. I have no doubt his greatest hope was that history would repeat itself.”
“All along,” Kendra whispered. “All along you’ve...” She felt as if she might collapse, but she didn’t. “You don’t just hate me, do you, Balthazar? You want to use me to hurt him. You didn’t take your revenge—you made me become it.”
He bared his teeth as if the pain was too great. As if the villa they stood in was nothing but ash and ruins at their feet.
But she couldn’t tell if he wanted it that way, and it broke her heart.
“And I might have dreamed of your innocence, Kendra,” he managed to grit out, turned once again to a storm. She could feel the rain on her face. She could hear the thunder in his voice. “I might have imagined what it would be like if you are not as tarnished as the people you come from. But that is not who we are. And this marriage is nothing more than a weapon I will use to cut down a monster.”
“Balthazar...” she whispered, agonized. “You can’t mean that. You can’t.”
His mouth was a merciless lash. “You should have run when you had a chance, Kendra. I regret that you are not the woman I thought you were. But you will pay all the same.”
And then he left her there, in her wedding gown with his scent all over her like a curse, to let her tears fall at last.
Alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BALTHAZAR MEANT TO leave the island entirely.
He stormed from the bedchamber and pulled on the first clothing he could find in the attached dressing room. He would go to Athens, he decided. He would do what he had always done and lose himself in work. In the business. In the things that made him who he was and more, who he wished to remain.
The things that mattered, he thought.
And thinking of what mattered, perhaps heading back to New York made even more sense. He headed for the office suite he kept in the villa, finding all of his devices charged and ready for him, but he didn’t pick up his mobile. He didn’t give the order to have the helicopter readied for the flight to the mainland. Instead, he found himself staring at the desk before him, seeing nothing.
Nothing but the choices that had brought him here.
And wrapped around everything, shot through it all, he saw Kendra’s face. Her beautiful face and her lovely eyes filled with tears.
Tears he had put there, Balthazar knew.
He saw the way she’d stared at him, clutching that dress to her chest as if he was nothing more than a rampaging beast. A soulless monster, as he’d often been accused.
As if he’d finally become his father.
All the way through, at last.
Balthazar pushed away from the desk, moving without thought, almost as if he was trying to get away from that realization when it should have been cause for celebration. He should have been thrilled that he’d finally achieved what had long been the goal of his entire existence on this earth.
Demetrius Skalas had prided himself on his single-minded, emotionless pursuit of the bottom line. He had eradicated weakness, he had claimed. He felt nothing and took pride in it. He acted only in the interests of the company. Even the succession of beautiful women he sported on his arm, each one a blow to his despised wife, Demetrius claimed elevated his profile in the eyes of the world—and more importantly, in the eyes of the other titans of industry he considered his peers.
All of whom preferred to do business with men they admired.
They had all admired Demetrius.
Balthazar had taken his beatings as a child, and had come to believe that his father was right—they made him stronger. And as he grew, he had dedicated himself, in word and deed, to following his father’s example. To locating and removing every hint of weakness he could find.
In place of any stray emotions, he had tended his thirst for revenge.
And in place of the pesky feelings that plagued other men, he had plotted the downfall of Thomas Connolly and his pathetic son.
Then she had come along and turned everything on its ear.
He found himself outside, the island drenched in the beauty of the setting sun, though all he saw was the past.
A past that was threaded through with the same driving goal, always. Balthazar had told himself that he was giving Tommy Connolly rope to hang himself with while, over the course of years, he’d sat back and watched his enemy’s son steal from him. In the months since Kendra had given herself to him in New York, he had continued to wait.
Now, standing outside as the breeze picked up as the sun made its lazy descent, he had to question that choice.
He had told himself it was because he was waiting. To see if Kendra was with child. To see if it was time to flip the script on his revenge and approach it a different way—one that would involve his in-laws. Surely that required a different tack, he’d assured himself. He’d felt perfectly prepared to handle whatever came of Kendra’s potential pregnancy. First and foremost, he’d been thinking of the child’s legitimacy and the wedding he’d never imagined for himself.
What he hadn’t thought to reckon with were emotions.
Balthazar had congratulated himself on feeling nothing for Kendra—because surely, his abiding, distracting hunger for her didn’t count. Surely his obsession with her, with what she was doing and where she was going and every expression that crossed her pretty face, was about that same physical hunger.
It was nothing more, he’d told himself, time and again. Nothing but sex, lust and need.
He might not have liked those things in him, making him as basic as any other man, but they were understandable.
What he had not been prepared for was her pregnancy. Not the fact of it, which he’d seen coming or he wouldn’t have tracked her. But that wave of emotion that had struck him earlier. It had felt something like sacred when, together, they had held their hands over her belly and the life that grew within.
How could he possibly have prepared for that?
But even as he asked himself that question, he knew that there was another, more pointed query he needed to make. Just as he knew everything in him wanted to avoid it.
He walked until he reached the edge of one of the cliffs, then stood there, bracing himself. His hands were in fists at his side while the sun seemed to pause in its fall toward the sea to hit him full in the face.
A bit too much like clarity for his tastes.
And all he could see was the golden shimmer of Kendra’s eyes, as if she was here before him, watching him.
Waiting for him, something in him whispered.
“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,” she had told him. “You can change your feelings, Balthazar. All you have to do is want to.”
He had never wanted to do anything of the kind. He had never wanted to feel a thing.
And now he felt ravaged by these feelings.
Enemies he could fight. He was good at that. It only took waiting, watching, and then striking their weaknesses when they presented themselves.
But how could he fight this?
Kendra had used the word family. That damned word.
Worse, she had suggested that the two of them could make their own, and he had seen the hope in her gaze when she’d said it.
God help him, but he had no defense against hope.
He wanted to reject it the way he had rejected her. He wanted to already be far away from here, winging his way back to the only life he knew.
But he couldn’t make himself turn around. He couldn’t make himself leave.
Because her hope was infectious.
And if he accepted that, he accepted that he was far, far weaker than he’d ever imagined.
Because he’d dreamed all of this, hadn’t he? Balthazar had tortured himself, not simply with fantasies of availing himself of her beautiful body and slaking that hunger for her that had haunted him across the years. But more, he’d dreamed of her innocence. And not because he had ever put any great stock in virginity, as it was simply one more thing men liked to use for barter, whether women wished it or not.
But because innocence felt like a shortcut to a different life.
He thought of his poor mother, wrecked so many years ago. Long before she’d been tossed out by his father, she’d been left to fend for herself while Demetrius had cheated on her. After they’d divorced, Demetrius had repeated his behavior with any number of subsequent wives—but none of them could claim they hadn’t known what they were getting into.
His first wife, the mother of his sons, had been blindsided. And what had been the sin that Demetrius had believed deserved the way he’d responded? Balthazar had stopped asking himself that when he was still a boy.
But he knew the answer now.
His mother had felt far too much and Demetrius had despised her for it.
Balthazar had learned to do the same.
He looked down at his hands, uncurling his fingers so he could see the flat of his palms.
He could still feel the warmth of Kendra’s belly, the life she carried within. And then, finally, asked himself the question he’d been avoiding since the night he’d realized that he’d had sex with Kendra Connolly without using any protection.
Did he truly wish to do to his child what his father had done to him?
He thought about taking his own hands, the ones he gazed at there on that cliffside, and raising them against his own child. He thought of carrying out this second phase of his revenge as he’d planned when the child was no more than a possibility instead of a fact, taking it to its logical extreme.
Did he plan to make his baby hate its mother?
Was that who he was?
His heart kicked at him, too hard and too loud. And Balthazar tried to tell himself that there was no other way. That he had committed himself to this path and that was the end of it. But the dreams he’d had told him differently.
So had Kendra.
And if Balthazar could decide to be any man he chose, there was only one real question left. Would he choose to be this one?
Because suddenly, as the sun painted the sky the bright, brilliant shades of gold that reminded him only of Kendra, he looked back and saw the life he’d been living in a very different light than he would have if he’d considered it six months ago.
He had become his father after all. Cold. Unfeeling. Half monster, half machine, and proud of the worst parts of both. Dedicated entirely to a business that already had made him more money than he could ever spend in his own lifetime. Or ten successive lifetimes.
As if that mattered.
It seemed to him here, now, that it was stark. Empty.
A lifeless existence.
Until Kendra had come in and infused the prison he hadn’t even realized he lived in with all of her bright color.
How could he sentence his child to that same cell?
And it took him a moment to realize that what walloped him then was grief.
For the mother he had lost when he was young, then had pushed away when she returned because he’d thought that might please his father. Only accepting the guilt and shame he’d felt over her treatment when it was too late for her. No amount of revenge in her name was ever going to change the fact that he wa
s the one who had abandoned her.
And another kind of grief seized him, because while he had seen his father for who he was, Balthazar had always imagined himself immune. He’d been expected to be immune. He’d known Demetrius was a cruel man, certainly. A viciously cold one. A father who could not love and refused to allow such soft sentiments in anyone near him. A man who had raised two sons with enough violence that they felt that they dared not attempt it themselves.
Balthazar could do the same, of course. That had been his plan.
But for the first time he understood, not only how much damage had been done to him, but what he had lost.
How much he had lost.
That he had such darkness in him made him despair of himself. But the greater punch of grief was that, had it not been for Kendra and this baby he would have sworn he did not want, he might never have seen the truth about himself so clearly.
If it weren’t for Kendra, he would never have known.
He tried to fight it, but it was no use. Night was coming, bringing with it the heartless stars, each and every one of which seemed to punch their way inside of him.
And he could call it what he liked.
But Balthazar understood that the emotion he’d been avoiding the whole of his life had come for him, at last.
And it was no mystery to him why his father had abhorred them so. Emotions were messy. They tore through him now, storm after storm, never ceasing and always changing, making a mockery of the anger he tried to throw up as a shield.
He took it, one hurricane after the next turning him inside out and then slapping him back together as if he could ever be the same.
When he knew better. Because he’d seen colors now, and there was no way to go back from that. There was no way to make himself willfully blind.
Even if he had tried, he knew that he didn’t have it in him to sentence his child to that same stark and lifeless fate.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 14