by Olivia Gates
Lysandros’s bolstering touch on her back felt like a whip on her aching flesh. “We know it hurts now, but it’s for the best, sis. He would have picked your bones and spit you out sooner or later. We just forced him to do it now before he damaged you for life and did the same to Alex.”
Damon, her closest brother, and clearly the most disturbed by her role in the whole thing, shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you fell for his act, how you—”
“Stop it.”
She couldn’t bear it. Being touched. Hearing anything. Logic, consolation, blame, promises that she’d get over it. She didn’t want to get over it. Didn’t want anything. Didn’t want to breathe. To be. To…to… And she wailed, “Leave me alone. Just leave me.”
She sank into turmoil after that, barely seeing their faces darken with concern, or hearing their protests that she shouldn’t be alone now. Then she saw or heard nothing but the bloodred cacophonous landscape of her own shock and grief.
Her brothers’ accusations, the corroboration of Aris’s silence, then his threats, his desertion, hacked at her, gored her mind as they rewrote all their time together, his every word and look and touch with their macabre interpretation.
She knew hearts didn’t get crushed. Not by emotions.
She didn’t care what she knew. Hers was. Ruptured, mangled into a bleeding mess inside her.
It had all been a lie.
It took her two days to come out of her haze of misery.
She did only to call her brothers. They came to her condo one after the other, and she saw her condition reflected in the horrified looks in their eyes.
The moment they were all there, she started. “I want you all to do something you’d never do of your own accord. But if you care about me and Alex, you’ll do it.”
Damon groaned, “Theos, Sel. We only did what we did because we care, because we want you to be happy.”
“Too late for that.” She heard her lifeless voice, saw its effect in their pained grimaces. “But you can help give me closure. Please, let Aris…” She paused, swallowed. She couldn’t call him anything else yet. “Let him back into the contract.”
They exchanged an uncomfortable look. Then Nikolas sighed. “Believe me, Selene, if we could pay for your peace of mind with that, we would have considered it a very cheap price.”
“You mean you won’t?” she choked.
Lysandros shook his head. “We can’t. Sarantos already carried out his threat. He wrested the contract out of our hands. He’s now the builder, and he’ll decide who the outfitters will be.”
Damon exhaled. “We’re damned if we know how he managed that.”
But she suddenly did. In the last days, when he’d seemed to open up to her, she’d told him everything, too. Among the confidences had been information she realized now that he could use—and evidently had used—against Louvardis.
So this was her confirmation that his manipulations and exploitations knew no bounds.
Only one thing was left inside her now. Fear. For Alex.
What would the monster she now knew Aristedes Sarantos to be do to get his son?
Even if Alex had started out being the pawn Aris had played to checkmate her and her brothers, she had no doubt he wanted him now. From the depths of his fathomless abyss of a heart.
But then, she’d been certain he’d wanted her.
She hoped she was wrong about his feelings for Alex, too.
Or she’d have to fight the devil for her son.
The next day, she dragged herself into her office.
She had to prepare a battle plan in case Aris decided to fight her for Alex. So far, she could see no way to block him if he decided to play dirty to get Alex.
She jerked as her door burst open. Her PA’s mortified voice blurted out in the background.
“I tried to stop him, but—”
Everything tapered off into a vacuum.
A vacuum that Aris filled.
So it’s true, she thought. She felt nothing. Not shock, not anger, not pain. Nothing. He had finished her.
He closed in on her like a stalking tiger, pinning her with the power of his inescapable intent and her dreadful fascination.
He came around her desk like he had that day a lifetime ago, slapped the dossier he was holding onto its surface. He glared at her, his face a mask of fierceness. That face that had filled her fantasies, commandeered her emotions since she was old enough to realize her femininity. That face she’d always felt was carved of power and nobility, but that camouflaged his cruelty and deceit.
“I think congratulations on your sweeping victory are in or—”
Her words backlashed in her chest. Aris swooped down, clamped her arms in a convulsive grip, hauled her out of her seat, brought her slamming against him, again like that day from another life.
After a moment of paralysis, she squirmed in a silent struggle as he held her captive.
Suddenly the mask of his intensity cracked, contorted with an array of what so uncannily simulated distraught emotions.
She began to struggle for real now, desperate not to be snared in his heartless manipulations again. “Let me go,” she cried out, a trapped beast’s last desperate protest before it was devoured.
“Never.” His growl consumed her in its finality and inescapability as his lips crashed down on hers.
Ten
Aris was kissing her.
Kissing her as if she were the air he’d been suffocating for, as if he’d absorb her into a being that had been disintegrating without her.
No. She wouldn’t let him draw her into the illusion again. She wouldn’t let the heart and body that were starving for him tell her what they were dying to believe.
She struggled harder, against her own overriding needs, the clamor of everything in her urging her to surrender, take whatever she could have with him, of him, on any terms.
He at last wrenched his lips away, leaving hers stinging and swollen and bereft. She almost pulled his head back down, sealed their lips again, and her fate.
The moment of madness sheared past, and she had to hurt herself now, badly, to prevent worse future injuries.
“What will you do now?” she moaned. “Take me, and keep me, against my will?”
His eyes stormed as they bored into hers. “It won’t be against your will. Whatever else you feel or don’t feel for me, you want this.” He pressed her against the wall, lifting her off the floor and into his power, his hunger hard and imprinting every inch of her. “You want me, Selene.”
She jerked her head away as he swooped down again to claim her lips, had the heat and insistence of his hunger trail a path of devastation down her cheek and jaw and neck instead.
And she sobbed. “It doesn’t matter anymore if I do. It’s over. You have your victory. And you’ll have to be content with it, because you won’t have more from me.”
His feverish lips stopped feeding at her pulse, stilled. Then he set her back on her feet.
Another agonizing moment pounded by as he stood there, his body curved over hers, a prison of passion she almost begged with every breath to never escape. Then, before she broke, succumbed, uttered the plea for a life sentence, he stepped away.
He brooded down at her until she could no longer bear the abrasion of his will-bending influence.
“Why are you here?” she choked. “You didn’t think you’d pick up from where you stormed off three days ago, did you?”
“I’m here to tell you I don’t care.”
She lurched as if he’d slapped her.
Would even he be so cruel as to come here, kiss her within an inch of her sanity, only to tell her he didn’t care about her?
And he was piling confusion on misery. “I don’t care what happened. I don’t care if your brothers pressured you, or if you felt you owed it to your father’s memory to see through his will.”
She shook her head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking ab
out how your brothers eliminated me from the contract using information only I knew. Until I told it to you.”
Everything went still again. Then she jerked with the slam of comprehension.
That was why he’d looked at her so strangely when he’d gotten that phone call, the one informing him of her brothers’ coup. He…he… “You thought I gave them information?”
His eyes said he did.
Suddenly the intensity of his gaze wavered, as the certainty there shook. “They may have tricked you into inadvertently revealing that privileged info.” Then fractured. “Or they may actually be so good that they worked it out on their own.”
“So what will it be?” she rasped. “Which version will you sanction?”
He stared at her for one more moment, then he squeezed his eyes shut, his face clenching as if with severe pain. He opened his eyes again, bruised and defeated now that the anger and outrage was drained from their depths. “You had nothing to do with it.”
“Why, thank you! So good to be exonerated with a word from you. Just like I was accused, tried and sentenced without a word.”
“I didn’t want to believe it. Even when all evidence supported it. Then Alex was injured. It almost shattered me when I thought I’d lose him, and you. I might have looked strong as I took care of the crisis, but inside I was pulverized. I realized then that I’ve come to depend on you, on both of you, for my very breath. Then you suddenly wanted to go back, and it shook me further. I was at my weakest when your brothers confronted me with their victory and insinuations and demands and their every word seemed to validate my fears. I admit I let my worst suspicions take control of me for a while.”
“For a while? They were in control till moments ago!”
“But it took only the proof of looking into your eyes for me to know I was wrong. But even when I thought I was right, thought you never really loved me, I still didn’t care. I still wanted you.”
“I’m supposed to be happy about this, that you’d take me warts and all? You believed the worst about me, passed judgment without giving me a moment’s benefit of the doubt. Then you turned and committed the same crime you thought me guilty of! You took the privileged info I so trustingly—so stupidly—shared with you and snatched control of the contracts from my family.”
“I didn’t.”
His roar speared through her with its passion. And she had to believe he hadn’t. That soothed a measure of her heartache, but that he’d mistrusted her so totally… The scope and implications of that knowledge expanded inside her like the shock waves of a nuclear explosion, razing everything in its path.
He watched her with what looked like dread taking a firmer grip of his features by the second. Then he groaned, “I am the best at what I do—I can work my way around anything, in business. But in personal relationships it seems I’m almost clueless.” He clutched his hair as if he’d start tearing it out any second. “I took control of the contract only to show you that I can have my so-called victory if I want it, but that nothing means anything to me if I don’t have you and Alex, too.”
“You don’t deserve us,” she cried. “I hope absolute power will be as cold and cruel a companion to you as you are, for the rest of your isolated life. Yes, Aris, I will fight you to my last breath for Alex. I won’t let someone as paranoid and self-serving as you are be his father. I’m only thankful he’s too young to remember you and won’t grow up knowing he has such a monster for a father.”
He held out hands as if begging, Stop, enough.
Then he motioned toward the dossier he’d dropped on her desk. “This is what I came to give you—my proof that even when I thought you chose your family over me, I never chose anything over you. This contains all the documents giving control of the contract back to your brothers.”
She stared from him to the dossier, her thoughts burning up.
Then she heard her ragged taunt. “This could be your newest ploy to have your cake and eat it, too. Being the best at what you do, you calculated that you might have won the battle with Louvardis, but that the war, now that it’s really personal, would escalate to levels even you might not withstand. So you decided it’s wiser to throw the contract back as a goodwill gesture, and to keep me and Alex as your permanent insurance.”
“Selene, I beg you…don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t give you a taste of your own paranoia? Don’t tell you what you did to me, to Alex, when you walked out on us, thinking only of yourself? Alex cried himself to sleep every night since—he expected you to be there, and you weren’t, and I couldn’t tell him why you weren’t, couldn’t assure him you’d ever be back, or if you were, that it wouldn’t be even worse for both of us. You are your father’s son, after all.”
“No. Selene, no. I am nothing like my father.”
“But that’s what you always believed. Turns out, you were right.” She needed to expend that last surge of hurt. Only feeling his would assuage hers now. Then they’d be even. They could start anew then. “Maybe your father didn’t leave his family because he didn’t care for you, but like you said, because he loved you too much and couldn’t handle ‘depending on you for his very breath.’”
“I swear this was not—”
“Don’t swear. You can always find another reason to walk away that is perfectly acceptable to you, and I can’t risk going through this again, if not for myself, then for Alex. He needs a whole and healthy mother, not a mass of anxiety and misery.”
He staggered back a step, his shoulders slumping. “I will bring you proof that this will never happen. And I will prove to you that we were both wrong about me. I’m not my father’s son, Selene. I’m not a twisted, unfeeling, selfish deserter. Don’t give up on me, agape mou. Don’t let me out of your heart yet.”
She gave him a wary nod, her heart starting to expand inside her with resurging belief.
Just when she thought he’d take her in his arms again, knew that she’d dissolve there and sob out her love and surrender in his embrace, tell him she wanted no proofs, forgave him, he gave her a solemn nod, as if he’d received a binding oath, and turned away.
She stared after him as he walked out of her office looking like a warrior demigod embarking on a mission with impossible odds and ultimate dangers, determined to not come back without his trophy.
She didn’t hear from Aris again for four days.
The doubt demons started coming back to whisper in her ear, getting louder with each passing empty, lonely, gnawing moment.
What if he’d ended up thinking she and Alex weren’t worth the price of having someone love and depend on him for the rest of his life? What if he was saving himself the endless complications of intimacy, going back to his comfortably numb life of isolation?
She couldn’t believe that. But doubt was malignant, found her weak in his absence and ate at her.
On the fifth day, she was putting Alex down for his afternoon nap when her cell phone rang.
Damon started talking without preliminaries as usual. “I’m double-parked in front of your building. Come right down.”
Before she could say anything, he hung up.
Within minutes, she’d secured the sleeping Alex in his car seat and hopped in beside Damon. She bombarded him with questions, and he said only that he didn’t know for sure what was going on. But they’d all know soon.
The next half hour was consumed in speculation and dread and heart-bursting anticipation. She had no doubt this was about Aris. But what about him? Was he waiting for them wherever Damon was taking her? With his “proof”? What could it possibly be this time?
It turned out they were heading to the Louvardis mansion where Nikolas had come back to live, if only until they decided what to do about it.
Once inside, Damon rushed her to the waiting room of their father’s old office, now Nikolas’s.
“Wait here, and don’t move under any condition, okay?” She opened her mouth and his finger on her lips silenced whatever exclamation ha
dn’t formed yet in her mind. “Just listen. Whatever this turns out to be, it should be interesting.”
She put Alex on his blanket on the floor then collapsed on the nearest couch to the door Damon had left ajar.
The next second, even though she was half expecting it, she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard Aris’s voice.
It had a world of frustration and haggardness in its beloved depths. “Am I allowed to speak now that the full tribune is assembled?”
“You may say your piece,” Damon mocked. “Make it short, though, Sarantos. We don’t have all day.”
“It won’t be short, Louvardis. So pour yourself a drink and endure it.” Aris exhaled, then began to talk.
“I was the firstborn of my parents. My mother was seventeen when she had me, hadn’t had any measure of formal education, married the man who got her pregnant. He was four years older, a charmer who never held a job for longer than a couple months. He drifted in and out of our lives, each time coming back to add another child to his brood, another burden on my mother’s shoulders, before disappearing. He always came back swearing his love, offering sob stories about how hard life was, when he had the easiest life of us all. By the time I was seven, I was doing everything for the household that he should have been doing. By twelve I had to leave school and work four jobs to barely make ends meet. My father disappeared from our lives completely before my youngest sister, Caliope, was born.
“I grew up despising the emotions that had led my mother to destroy her life, that my father claimed to have for the wife and children he blighted with his existence. I swore I’d never feel any of those emotions or inflict them on others. They were the ultimate waste of potential and life, and I didn’t have a place for them as I faced the world alone and fended for my whole family. I wouldn’t let any weakness, as I saw love and partiality induce in others, infect me, wouldn’t let any softness or irrationality get into the way of getting things done.
“Soon I believed I couldn’t feel, ended up believing that I was like my father, incapable of feeling anything for anyone. But instead of pretending otherwise and exploiting others in the name of love, I pulled away from everyone for fear of hurting those close to me. I gave them the only things I believed to be real and of importance—financial security and the support only I, with my growing power, could provide.”