by Cat Porter
“This is sudden,” said Liana.
“When you know, my love, you know, isn’t that right? That’s how it was with us. And I’ve never seen our daughter happier, more confident and relaxed. Have you?” He kissed Adri on the cheek.
“I am happy, Babá. Very happy.”
Liana released a breath and a smile curved her lips.
“Look, Mamá—” Adri extended her hand to Liana, showing her the ring. “Isn’t it fantastic? It’s for Papoú’s dagger. Turo designed it, had it made just for me.”
“It’s quite beautiful,” said Liana.
Petros took Adri’s hand in his and studied the ring. “How remarkable. Well done.” He raised his chin at me.
“A remarkable ring for a remarkable woman,” I said.
Petros clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Congratulations to the both of you.”
Liana kissed her daughter and came over to me and kissed me on both cheeks. “Do you have a date in mind?”
“No, we haven’t really decided on that yet, but we will. We have some new business plans too, but we can discuss that later,” Adri said.
Yes, later. We would tell them about our special events company providing exclusive entertainment in the Mediterranean, but not share the sex club aspect.
Marko got out of the pool and we all sat down at the dining table which was beautifully decorated with small vases of white flowers and laden with amazing dishes. Garlicky eggplant carpaccio, muscles in a white wine broth with plenty of parsley, zucchini flowers stuffed with minted rice and pine nuts, succulent large shrimp, langoustines, octopus tentacles, and calamari all charred on the grill and doused in lemon and olive oil. Salads of every color along with a selection of cheeses in boldly colored plates. Chunks of freshly baked crusty bread. Then there was the tiramisu birthday cake specially made by Adri’s favorite local pastry shop.
Petros brought over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot from the wine refrigerator and opened it. Magda scurried to the table with a tray of champagne flutes, and he filled them. We raised our glasses.
“To our Adriana. Happy birthday my darling. Xrónia sou pollá. And congratulations on your new life together.”
We drank.
Petros insisted on buying us a house in Athens as a gift. “You don’t have to to do that,” murmured Adriana.
“What? Have to? I want to,” Petros said. “As the father of the bride, I can give whatever gift I like!”
“Babá!” Adri laughed, sliding an arm around Petros’s shoulder, burying her face in his shoulder. “There is one thing I want. One perfect thing.”
“What is it, Adri?” asked Liana.
“The house in Andros,” she replied.
I held my lover’s beautiful eyes and my heart swelled in my chest with her beaming smile.
Adri said, “That’s what I’d like. The house in Andros.”
Andros
61
Turo
Three Months Later
I didn’t understand what the priest was saying, what the Byzantine hymns he chanted meant, but it didn’t matter really. I could feel their ancient power thrumming in my chest as Adri and I listened, standing together, hand in hand, the incense floating around us, filling the church with its smoky sweetness. Our wedding was in full gear at the tiny church in Chóra down the stone path from our house in Andros.
The club’s first event was in six months, and we were determined to get married before then. Adri insisted she didn’t want a huge planned out extravaganza. Liana wasn’t thrilled but she gave in. Liana was all for Mykonos, but Adri was adamant on Andros.
A few days before my mother had flown in to Athens. She met Adri and the family and we showed her the town. Then we all came to Andros together.
Now the priest blessed a small silver cup and held it up to me. I drank. Sweet wine. He gave it to Adri and she drank and smiled at me, squeezing my hand. We shared the wine like we would share our joys and sorrows, our successes and failures, hopes and fears in our new life together.
Marko, our best man, stood behind us holding the two gold wreaths of bay leaves entwined with small pearls attached together with a thick satin ribbon. On the priest’s nod he placed them on our heads, crowning us. Adri and I were the King and Queen of our new household, of our own family, and three times the priest repeated his chanted prayer, three times Marko switched the crowns on our heads. We held hands, locked gazes. Adri and I were joined, united, connected.
With the Gospel book in one hand, the priest grabbed my and Adri’s clasped hands and led us in a procession around a small table set with candles before the altar, two little cousins of Adriana and Marko’s in puffy white dresses held lit candles leading the way. This was the “Dance of Isaiah” Adri had told me about. Our literal first steps together as husband and wife. I gave in to the urge and my gaze went down to our feet. My polished black shoes, Adri’s delicate white heels peeking from the hem of her flowing white gown. Together, stepping together, moving forward.
Rice and flowers flew through the air, raining over us, our guests hurling handfuls from the little satin pouches the tiny bridesmaids had passed out when they’d entered the church. I knew this moment was different, this climax of the service, this ritual within the ritual, because when he led us forward, the priest’s voice rang out louder than before in a powerful and upbeat tone and everyone’s voices joined his in singing the Byzantine hymn. Three times we circled the table together. A celebration.
My mother’s face flashed by me, her eyes wet, her smile wide. She stood with Liana and Petros, all of them throwing rice and flowers at us. Alessio next to them. Adri’s cousin Silia who’d designed her beautiful wedding dress with her husband and a handful of other relatives.
As we danced this ancient dance, I held on tight to my wife’s hand and she to mine, our simple gold bands shining in the candlelight. We were now one. Forever one.
After the wedding ceremony, we’d had an amazing evening of endless food, drink, dance, and bouzouki music in town. Our parents spent the night at a beautiful hotel in Chóra while we spent our first night as husband and wife in our house.
The moment Adri had told her parents she’d wanted the house in Andros, her mother made calls and set the wheels of renovation in motion. Over the course of three months, new furniture, repaired roof, upgraded kitchen and bathrooms, painted inside and out, new appliances. Even the small jacuzzi in the garden was in the throes of getting itself a long lap pool to keep it company. Our island home was our private paradise.
It was almost six in the morning by the time we got home from the wedding party. “Let’s go up to the castle,” she said. “I want us to see this sunrise together.”
I could tell it was more than simply watching a sunrise by the set of her jaw, the press of her lips together. “Okay, sure. Let’s do it.” We changed into shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. Adri grabbed a straw tote bag and we were off.
Pink washed over the slate blue sea, filling the sky with gentle light. The precious hush over the town made every brush of our feet over the rock loud to our ears. As we climbed, slowly, slowly. Almost imperceptibly, that light changed color as the pink orange ball of the sun emerged, rising to prominence in the sky. We finally got to our spot by the hole in the stone wall overlooking the sea.
My eyes caught a haze of movement on the edge of the rocks, the very edge, where no sane person would stand, only a very brave one. A chill crept over my flesh and I blinked. He was there. It was him. I recognized Stefanos from that portrait in the living room. The legend, the hero, the rebel stood at the edge of the cliff facing the sea that hundreds of years ago had claimed him body and soul. The sea upon which he had built an empire.
The rebel hero turned, large blue gray eyes meeting mine. My breath crushed in my lungs, a burning fullness surged inside me, and I knew.
I knew.
After the cannons fired, after the smoke cleared, love is what we had left, love remained; love was the great inheritance. To choose to fi
ght for that love was the good fight; to choose to nurture that love so it takes root and thrives in this stone-littered earth the greatest victory.
Tears and regrets and vendettas had been tossed from this cliff—Stefanos’s, ours—and buried forever in these waters. Stefanos had triumphed in so many battles, but he had lost his true love.
But I got my woman.
And his great-great granddaughter got her man.
Adri took out her wedding bouquet from the straw tote bag. A thick cluster of luscious, pale pink peonies wrapped in a wide satin ribbon at the stems.
“Baby, what are you doing?” I said.
She smiled. “When a ship sinks and souls are lost, sailors toss wreaths of flowers into the sea at the spot. I want to do that now to honor Stefanos and Natalia. To honor their dagger. To relieve them, give their souls the peace they so deserve. To appease the bloody fates because only we can. Our blessing is theirs too.”
“Do it.”
Taking in a breath, she turned and threw her beautiful flowers, and they soared, a riot of pink against the pale sky, down to the sea below. Turning to me, she held out her hand, her aqua ring and wedding band gleaming in the day’s first light, and I took her hand.
We held each other on that cliff in that castle as the sun grew stronger and bolder reaching its full height in the sky. Gold fire blazed over the infinite swathe of sea. The water transformed before us. Luminous mauves and lilacs and cobalts swelled and churned into one blue. Vivid. Redefined.
We kissed.
The blue-eyed specter turned toward his Aegean once more. He fragmented in the sunlight, vanishing from sight.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed Turo and Adriana’s story. Would you like to read more of my books? You can read Fury, Finger’s epic story, or start with Lock & Key, book 1 of the Lock & Key series, where it all began.
Turn the page for Finger’s Prologue from Fury and the Prologue & Chapter 1 of Lock & Key included here just for you…
Fury
Prologue
Finger
I was born, but not raised.
I erupted.
I am the weed that grew in the distance fed by rainwater whenever the skies deigned to yield it, sharpened by brisk winds, hardened and spiked by icy cold. Hued by occasional kindnesses, the heat of the sun’s glare.
No, I was forged the day I met Serena. A blade sharpened, a gun barrel loaded, a fuse lit.
My track was laid over her rocky earth, and it only made my soul darker, my heart denser, my blood fiercer, my purpose raw.
With her I was everything I’d never known before. Not helpless, not exposed. Not powerless.
And even through all these years without her and all that I’ve achieved in the world, I’ve been nothing but an open hand grenade, idling, ready to detonate.
Now, having broken into her house, standing here in her bedroom, selfishly stealing the air she breathes as she sleeps, that idling is over.
Her sleep is fitful. She murmurs words, she scowls and twists the sheets in a fist the same way I do.
I still have the dreams, too, baby.
“Touch me. I need you to—” I’d once pleaded with her in the dark.
In my dreams I plead and I wait for that touch to come, like it once had. But it never does. I strain against the iron, but she’s not there. I’m alone. That dream used to come more frequently, regularly. Each nightmare was a visitation reinforcing my passion for her, my passion to love her, to hate her. Each morning, my resolve would be screwed on tight once more, an unyielding cap on an ancient bottle.
This morning, before the dawn had even broken on this brand new day, that resolve was stronger than ever, but my purpose has changed.
I want her back.
I hope she dreams of me. I hope her dreams are as tangled and snarled as mine. The cut of the blade, the sting of her mouth remain fresh. They’ve inspired me, demented me.
All the jagged pieces of our hearts, be they sharp, be they blunt, red or black or gray, are indiscernible now. Me and her, we’re in pieces, shards, but we aren’t broken. She had given up, let go, and so had I. But standing here, inches away from her, I know deep, deep inside I hadn’t, not ever.
Not essentially.
I run a thumb over her full, soft lips, and they part under my touch. A slight intake of breath passes between them, warming my skin. Beautiful lips that were once mine. Lips that once shared words and thoughts and hopes with me, the good kind. Lips that shared fears and horrors. Lips that offered a violent heaven.
I want to take those lips now, possess them, but I stop myself. I need her to give them to me willingly.
And she will.
My finger grazes the tip of her nose. Her eyes dance under her lids, blinking open.
Blue green glory.
My heart settles in my chest and kicks to life all at once, and I know nothing has changed.
Soul dark,
Heart dense,
Blood fierce,
Purpose raw.
I’m a quiet man, observant, introverted, not given to dramatic declarations. But here I stand, feeling that agony, that swell of emotion that only she invokes in me, all of it wiping away the ugly I’ve been clinging to all this time; the remote wilderness where I dwell.
Those eyes hang on mine, and I see her reflection in all the shards of me. She is at the crux. She is the flame. My fever, my fury.
Let it roar.
Start reading FURY
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The startling epic standalone spinoff novel of the Lock & Key series that follows the turbulent, violent life and love of Finger
1 kidnapped girl, 1 defiant biker
Together they survive a dark outlaw underworld.
What could keep them apart?
Start listening to FURY on Audiobook
Narrated by Aiden Snow & Noelle Bridges
Read on for a taste of Lock & Key, book 1, the series that started it all…
Lock & Key
Prologue
Grace
Once upon a time I lost everything.
Then I ran away.
But I returned because I had to, and I stood on the edge and looked over.
Truth is a painful sword. It cuts deep and stings, but the pain evaporates, the blood dries, and in the place of such savagery is a gleaming absolution and an absolute purity.
It’s blinding.
It hurts.
And it is utterly beautiful.
You can’t escape it. Truth demanded a leap, I took it.
This is a story of my love for two men at two different moments of truth in my life. One man is gone forever; the other is very much alive.
Love not only stings when you lose it, when it’s ripped away. When it first bites, it can sting just as deeply.
This is also a story about the love between my sister and me, and our redemption through two families—one bonded by blood, the other by brotherhood—that tore us apart yet bound us together forever.
Real life is messy and strange, and our ride through it left plenty of bruises, slashed hearts, a few lifeless bodies, and blood and smoke in its wake.
But it’s our story, this rather mangled tale.
Chapter 1
Grace
I should have left when I had polished off that first drink.
That had been my initial plan, but the Doobie Brothers “Eyes of Silver” was playing on the jukebox, and that really deserved another drink for old time’s sake. Not for the sake of the future, though. Isn’t that why I’d stopped here in the first place? I was just over an hour outside of Rapid City, but I wanted to put off harsh reality a little while longer.
Just one more drink.
I gestured at the bartender with my empty glass. He winked at me.
My motel room across the highway was most certainly not a fabulous destination, and I just couldn’t face another night watching bad reality TV or the usual sitcoms as I had done the night before at the mot
el in Montana. Tonight was different. No, I couldn’t sit still tonight. The walls of the room seemed to stretch to hold me in. Dead Ringer’s Roadhouse was a much, much better alternative.
It hadn’t changed much in the sixteen years I’d been away. License plates from all over the fifty states still covered the walls, but that original poster for a Doors concert in California was thankfully now secured in a thick brass frame. A dramatic spotlight glowed over it for all those who came regularly to pay their respects. I suppose the owners finally realized its worth. A vintage photograph, it too now solidly framed, of an old locomotive stuck in over twelve feet of snow during the infamous blizzard of 1949, took pride in its place on the opposite wall. Gentrification had arrived in this little corner of South Dakota. The same beer-soaked smell filled my nostrils, though.
Three pool tables stood on a raised section of the room where several older pot-bellied bikers played a game. The dart boards still dotted one wall as did the myriad of hunting trophies peering down at us from overhead—an eccentric variety of antlers, furry, glassy-eyed heads, and even a few stuffed fish, all mute, somber witnesses to the whirligig of flesh and alcohol below.
Hey up there, remember me?
I took in a deep breath and leaned back against the extremely long bar. In the center of the spacious Roadhouse was a sunken dance area, its long stretch of wooden floor polished and worn from years of use. Glass mason jars glowing with the light of votive candles spotlit each of the crowded tables surrounding the dance floor. I lowered myself back on my barstool and waited for my refill. The lights lowered a notch as the couple to my right laughed uproariously at a joke the waitress had told them.