CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

E VERYTHING CHANGED .

Again.

This time, the world ending and yet beginning again felt to Jolie as if she was trapped inside some kind of dream. Long, golden days, impossibly blue skies, and these hot, impossible nights that seemed to last whole lifetimes.

She had thought she understood sex. What it was, anyway. And she’d imagined how it would feel.

What she discovered was that while she understood the performance of it, the suggestion of it, she knew nothing about the reality of sex. Because real sexual intimacy was almost shocking in its intensity. It created vulnerability. Impossible need. It was raw, unpredictable, and had far-reaching ramifications that she wasn’t certain she’d even fully discovered yet.

She felt as if she could feel them, rumbling along beneath her like new fault lines she’d never understood were there before, lurking. Waiting for the opportunity to shake apart everything she thought she was. Everything she wanted to be.

On the one hand, life at the Andromeda went on the way it always had.

Jolie performed her typical duties. She was the same smiling, endlessly accommodating hostess, going out of her way to appear to do very little while making certain that everything was in its place. That all the details were just so . Out of sight of the guests, she and Apostolis would sit down together in the office and talk about numbers, accounts both payable and receivable, staff and vendor issues, and all the rest of the things that fell to both of them to handle now.

Whenever they were in public—or anywhere that they could not be completely certain of their privacy—they would play their happy, newlywed games for the benefit of their guests and the hotel’s enduring legacy.

Only now, when they went back to the carriage house, they imploded.

It was like fireworks.

They rarely made it three steps into the house before they were tearing off each other’s clothes. Before they were climbing on each other, licking and biting and digging their fingers into each other’s flesh, as if they weren’t quite certain if they wanted to feast on each other or simply ride out the sensation.

It was always impossibly perfect, the glory and raw intensity of the things they did to each other.

She learned that despite what she’d imagined all this time thanks to images she’d seen or things she’d read, she actually loved kneeling down before him. She loved taking him in her mouth, and listening to the noises that she could make him let out.

As if she was not the only one who could be torn into pieces in this fire of theirs.

She found that she loved the taste of him, the salt of his skin, the richness that was all man and entirely Apostolis.

There was nothing she did not allow him. There in the dark of the carriage house, it was as if the pair of them were made of nothing but flesh and need.

And if it was harder, every morning, to pull herself together and back into one piece again, she supposed she should have expected that. For surely there could not be such exquisite pleasure, and so much of it, without a price.

“It’s called hate sex,” he told her one night as he moved deep inside her body from behind, his hands gripping her hips as he plunged again and again. “And just think, my darling wife—we have years of this ahead of us.”

The very idea had made her shatter into pieces, there and then.

Afterward, she lay awake in the bed they now shared, tangled up in him in more ways than one. And she wondered how it was possible to survive like this. If she would make it—because it seemed impossible to her that these were the kind of storms that anyone could actually live through.

But then again, she had to. She had no choice. There was someone else to consider beyond these wild passions and besides, she had already come so far. There could be no going back.

Yet as time went on, funnily enough, it wasn’t the long, explosive nights that she feared might break her.

It was the performance of a very different relationship than the once they actually had that they put on, night after night.

It was the way he gazed at her across the table filled with their guests. It was the way he put his arm on the back of her chair and let his thumb gently stroke the bare flesh of her shoulder.

It was the way they danced, now and again, as if the whole of the starry sky above them was nothing next to the flame that moved between them.

She found herself making up stories about the two different lives they led, all wrapped up and tangled into this one.

Maybe he was as astonished by it as she was. Maybe he had not expected this kind of connection either.

She told herself that it was more than likely that they were both as shocked by this as she was. That they were both humbled and exalted and made new, one day at a time.

But she didn’t dare ask him, no matter what she told herself.

“I keep expecting to hear that the Andromeda has been reduced to rubble,” Dioni said on one of their infrequent phone calls. “Or that you’ve both incinerated each other into a crisp or something equally dramatic, and there’s nothing but a crater left behind.”

Her friend didn’t sound like herself. And Jolie didn’t want to ask, because surely Dioni would tell her if she wanted to. She had to pick her way through these fraught and strained conversations, but that was better than not talking to Dioni at all.

“The Andromeda still stands,” she said, with a laugh. “You have my word.”

“That’s a good thing,” her friend turned stepdaughter turned sister-in-law said, and there was the sound of something clanging in the background. Like a cafetière being stirred too roughly with a metal spoon. “Are you happy?”

Jolie longed to tell Dioni the truth. Or some part of the truth. She wanted nothing more than to unburden herself, to open up and lay out for her friend every single thing that had happened since she’d left the island.

But she couldn’t.

Because Dioni looked up to Apostolis. He was, in many ways, her own, personal god. He was the one who had taken care of her when she was small. He was the one she’d run to. Dioni had told Jolie all of this long before Jolie had ever met him.

And, of course, she had never actually met the Apostolis Dioni knew. That was a gift he gave only to his sister.

The Apostolis Jolie knew had always been little more than a wildfire.

How could Jolie possibly tell Dioni, who thought her brother nothing short of a hero, that he was—in fact—simply a man?

A maddening, glorious, impossible man.

How could she explain to her innocent friend what it was like between them without tarnishing him in Dioni’s eyes?

Jolie found she couldn’t do it.

It was far better for Dioni to imagine that Jolie and Apostolis had sorted things out in the wake of their contentious wedding, and were now...reasonably content.

“I am no expert on happiness,” she told her friend now. “But every day dawns no matter what went on the day before, and that feels like a gift. The sun rises and when it sets again, I have very little to complain about.”

Dioni laughed from all the way across two seas. “What an ode to joy. You should open up a business in inspirational talks. Perhaps a line of greeting cards?”

“Are you happy?” Jolie asked her in return.

She heard Dioni pulling in a breath. “I am an Adrianakis,” she said after a moment. “Happiness is in our blood. Ask anyone who’s ever visited the Andromeda. Happiness is a requirement of residence.”

And Jolie sat on the window seat in the room she now shared with Apostolis for some time after they both rang off, frowning out at the place where the blue sky met a deeper blue sea.

Because neither one of them had answered the question, had they?

Still, she resolved to take it as a challenge. What she’d said to Dioni was true enough, or not a lie, anyway. She had nothing to complain about. She had decided to sleep with her husband. She had allowed it this time when he’d had the staff move her things back into this bedroom. She did not see it as a concession, but a choice .

That being so, why shouldn’t she be happy about it?

Whether it was hate sex or not, the sex that she and Apostolis were having was extraordinary. She might not know the difference, but she had never heard stories that came close to the things they made each other feel. Every time they finished, he looked at her in the same wild astonishment. Sometimes he murmured revealing things into her ear.

You will be the death of me, he liked to say. I do not think we will survive this .

How can you be real? he had asked last night.

In Greek, which she still pretended not to understand.

Not because she wanted to deceive him—though she didn’t much mind if she did, to be clear. Not where language was concerned. But because she had discovered long ago that if she affected a charming inability to only mangle Greek, people found that delightful. It made them think she was silly. A little bit foolish. It allowed all of the guests, and even the villagers, to feel more comfortable around her.

Jolie knew that many women felt that they should not have to minimize themselves for any reason whatsoever. But she was far more sanguine. She liked any weapon she could find.

And as the days rolled on, one into the next with only the odd bit of weather to distinguish between them, the things he whispered grew more intense.

This is untenable. You are impossible.

Every night they seemed to reach a new and different kind of intensity. They did not necessarily speak to each other. They did not discuss the fire they danced in and through.

But Jolie often thought that the way they looked at each other left scars behind.

She could feel them forming all over her, both when they were in private and when they were playing their besotted roles of the newly wedded couple for the guests.

Sometimes he would take her hand and brush a kiss over her knuckles, and everything inside of her would go still, then quiver into goose bumps.

And she would feel it inside her, carving its way into her like every touch was a blade. It marked her just the same.

Those were the sorts of night when the people around the table would talk about their relationship in such disarming, magical phrases that she found herself believing the things they said. Even when she knew better. Even when she knew the truth.

“My wife is a beautiful woman,” Apostolis told a group of riveted guests one night. “This goes without saying. But she was married to my father for many years and my appreciation of her beauty was akin to that I have for the hotel itself.” He waved a hand at the Andromeda, bearing her graceful witness all around them. “And we take pleasure in that, Jolie and I.” The look he gave her was so warm. So bright with love and passion that it made reality seem to slip for her, or perhaps the trouble was, she wished it would slip and then stay. “Because if we had ever seen each other truly before, we could not trust each other now. We would always wonder.”

“There is nothing more important than trust,” one of the guest sighed happily.

“Sometimes,” Apostolis said quietly, “the most marvelous things are hiding in plain sight.”

Jolie had always prided herself on the armor she’d learned to wear over the years. But it was her heart that was betraying her now. The poor heart she’d thought was too broken to function after her grandfather died was still there, it seemed.

And it wasn’t tough enough for whatever game this was.

Despite her best efforts, it kept on hoping.

She found herself sitting on the terrace of the Andromeda, night after night, laughing with this or that collection of shining, resplendent people who loved to come here and gleam out into the Mediterranean. Every night was another bit of brightness, making her feel lit up as if the stars themselves had found their way inside her—even though she knew that they would turn those stars inside out later.

Every sweet moment, every loving gesture, every hint that there were all these beautiful emotions between them had a price.

And Apostolis was a master at exacting those prices, each and every night.

She would forget, all the same. Or she would wrap it all up in the same big bow. Or her foolish heart would beat too hard, because all she could think, more and more with each passing day, was... what if?

What if they really could love each other the way they pretended they did?

What if the truth of them was somewhere between the romantic stories they told the enraptured guests about a couple who was not quite them and what he called hate sex, which she had never found hateful at all?

What if all his talk of trust was an olive branch? She, after all, had been the one married to his father. Maybe it was up to her to extend one herself.

Once she started thinking that way, it was the only thing she could think, as if every shuddering beat of her hopeless heart was forcing her to hold nothing else in her head.

It might have scared her if it didn’t feel so good.

“You seem distracted today,” he said one morning as they waited for the staff to gather for the usual new guest rundown. He eyed her with a certain knowing heat. “Perhaps it is because you screamed yourself hoarse last night, poor thing.”

He did not sound the least bit apologetic.

Jolie could feel her cheeks flush as the memories of last night’s intensity swept through her, though by now she should have been free of any maidenly blushes. The way he took her apart was so comprehensive that it was a wonder she had any modesty left in her at all.

Then again, it was possible that the way she flushed had nothing to do with shame and everything to do with anticipation. Because every night was only a day away.

Her heart thumped at her, urging her on. “I was just thinking...” she began.

But all her years of necessary and prudent self-preservation kicked in then, hard.

It was as effective as a hand over her mouth. Her pulse sped up. Her whole body tensed.

Was she really ready to risk everything? On a man who had risked nothing at all?

“I prefer it when you are incapable of thought, my darling wife,” Apostolis murmured in that dark way that never failed to shower her in sparks, and she wasn’t sure if she was grateful or despairing when the staff began to assemble to help create the service profile that would help their new guests imagine that the Andromeda anticipated and exceeded their every need and fancy.

But the urge to tell him things she shouldn’t didn’t go anywhere.

What she couldn’t decide was whether she wanted to tell him for the right reasons. Did she truly believe that she could trust him? Or was she trying to get ahead of the other shoe that she knew he was holding in reserve, so that he could drop it on her when she least expected it?

After all, he was the one who’d brought up the money she paid her aunt and uncle that first night they’d slept together. He hadn’t brought it up again since. She would have been very grateful indeed if she’d thought that he’d forgotten it.

She tried to remind herself that he hadn’t. That of course he hadn’t. And more, he had never given her the slightest reason to imagine he might let anything go.

But her heart kept thumping at her all the same.

That night Apostolis got caught up talking to one of the guests as the night was drawing to a close, so Jolie walked over to the carriage house on her own. As that hadn’t happened in a while, she indulged herself. She tipped her head back to let the stars shine all over her. She breathed in the sea air. The she let herself into the hall, switched on the lights, and found herself examining the photographs once more. The wall that was a march of time and lives, or whatever it was that such captured moments were so many years and lives later. Unknowable without context. Changeable according to memory or the stories told about them.

She looked at each of them, wondering what was performance and what was real, and carried on down the hall until one caught at her.

It was a picture of Apostolis down on the beach at the foot of the cliff where the hotel stood, holding tight to the hand of a little girl. Dioni.

He could not have been more than twelve in the picture. Dioni was still a toddler. He was looking down at her with so much obvious affection that it never failed to make Jolie’s treacherous heart beat a little faster. Years ago, when she’d first seen it, she’d assumed her reaction was because she’d always wanted the kind of older brother Dioni said that Apostolis was to her.

She’d always wanted someone . Anyone.

Instead, she supposed, she’d found a way to be that person for Mathilde. As best she could from so far away.

But this picture hit her differently, now. She had heard a great deal about Apostolis before she ever met him. He had been one of Dioni’s favorite topics of conversation in school. Years before she’d met Spyros, Jolie had heard all about this big brother of Dioni’s who was her champion in all things—notably unlike her disinterested father.

Apostolis is my hero, Dioni had said, time and again.

When she heard the door to the carriage house open behind her she turned and tried to look at him as if he was that Apostolis.

Not the bane of her existence.

Not her enemy.

Not the man she’d married despite the fact he had always been both of those things to her. The man who treated her like someone incalculably precious to him in public and told her he hated her in private, all the while making certain that they were more intimate with each other than she’d had any idea two people could be.

Those were all contradictions.

But then, what in life was not? All she had, all anyone ever had, was faith—however misguided—that if they picked one of the many paths available before them, they would be heading in the right direction.

Her heart was a catapult against her ribs.

“I want to talk to you,” she said, as he started toward her.

He didn’t stop moving, though she thought that the expression on his face grew...more forbidding, perhaps.

Jolie took one last look at that picture of Dioni and him on the beach. Then she moved ahead of him, flicking on every light she passed, perhaps because she wished to signal to him that this was different from their normal late-evening activities.

She moved through the flowing spaces, one into the next in a tumble of bright colors, and found her way to one of the comfortable chairs. And was aware as she sat down that she was choosing it precisely because it did not invite him to sit down with her.

Jolie had no doubt whatsoever that he was receiving all of these messages loud and clear. She could see it in the slight narrowing of his dark, brooding eyes.

“I don’t know what you imagine we could have to talk about,” he said.

She watched as he prowled around the room, fixing himself a drink at the bar, though he didn’t taste it. He only rattled the ice cubes around in his glass tumbler and then lifted a brow in her direction. She shook her head, declining the offer of a drink for herself.

As if she needed to make herself feel even more precarious than she already did, after all the lovely wine she’d sipped at dinner.

“You can’t imagine anything at all we might discuss?” she asked, almost idly. Almost in the way she asked questions of all their guests. “How curious. I can think of a number of subjects without even trying.”

“I thought we agreed that time is behind us.” He roamed closer, then sat in the chair opposite her. Only he sprawled out in such a way that he seemed to take up the entire flowing ground floor that easily. “We have different weapons now. Different battles entirely.”

“This has nothing to do with your war,” Jolie said, feeling something like exhausted, suddenly. That had to be why emotion seemed to be poking at the back of her eyes. Moving all through her and making her chest feel tight. She pressed her palm against her heart as of that might keep it from beating so hard.

He stared at that hand a long while. Then lifted his brooding gaze to her face. “Nothing that occurs between us is about anything else.”

Jolie sighed. “Then you can view this as another attack, if you wish. I’ve decided to try a radical approach, Apostolis.” And it wasn’t that her self-preservation instincts had deserted her. She could feel them, kicking at her, as hard as ever. It was that on the other side of that were the things that he whispered to her in the dark. All those gruff, Greek words he thought she couldn’t understand. And it was all these bright, golden nights of maybes . All these intoxicating what ifs . “After all, one of us has to be brave.”

He swirled his drink around in its glass. “You think that bravery is involved in these games we play?”

“I think that bravery is required to make certain that we are not playing games any longer,” she said quietly. “Aren’t you tired of them? I know I am. So I’ve decided to tell you where that money goes.”

She didn’t know what she expected. For him to go still, perhaps. To take on that watchful look he sometimes did.

But instead, he seemed to go... incandescent instead.

It wasn’t that he moved. It wasn’t that he roared up out of his chair, like some kind of Roman candle.

But she watched him implode all the same.

“Have you now.”

It was all he said, but Jolie could almost taste the bitterness. It seemed a decent match for the color of his gaze as he stared her down.

And it wasn’t brave if she quailed at the first hurdle, was it? She forced herself to go on. “A few years after I married your father, the relatives who helped themselves to the estate that my grandfather left me got in touch. They were looking for a handout, naturally. Philosophically, I will say that I find it interesting that the people who steal things can never seem to hold onto them. It’s almost as if they know that it was never theirs to begin with.”

“Philosophically,” he replied in a low, dark tone of voice, “that is a remarkably interesting position for you, of all people, to take.”

Jolie chose not to take the bait.

“I wanted very much to encourage them to go to hell,” she told him. “But I couldn’t. I don’t care what happens to the pair of them. When I look back, it isn’t even the money that upsets me. It’s the fact that they destroyed all the memories I had of my parents. And my grandparents.”

She thought of the pictures in the hall. Moments that could change for her depending on who she was when she looked at them again. Moments that could have different meanings over time. That was what her aunt and uncle had stolen from her—that ongoing conversation with still images. That ongoing communion with those stories over time.

But Apostolis’s gaze was getting darker by the moment so she kept going. “They sold it all or they threw it out, and the only thing that’s left of the people I loved the most in this world is me.” She shook her head. “That’s the part I find unforgivable.”

“You forgive theft, however.” His tone was scathing. “What a fascinating morality.”

“It’s not that I forgive it. It’s that, in the fullness of time, what haunts me about that situation isn’t what I had to do to survive it, but what I must grieve because of their carelessness. Their greed. There is a distinction.”

“If you say so.”

But if anything, he looked...thunderous.

“The trouble is that they have a daughter,” she said, and she could feel everything inside her revolt. As if her own body would fight her to keep this in, but she was resolved. “Her name is Mathilde. I’ve only met her once in person, but we have kept in contact ever since.” She blew out a breath, because this was more difficult than she’d anticipated and she had expected it to be an uphill climb. “She texts me. That’s how I know she’s okay. Our deal has always been simple. I pay them off. And they...treat her well.”

“You doubt this.”

“I think they wouldn’t know how to treat a piece of garbage well,” Jolie said, more sharply than she’d meant to. “Much less a girl. But I have insisted that they educate her as I was educated. I have insisted that they do not treat her the way they treated me. Or worse.” She searched his face, wanting to implore him, but somehow sensing that he would not be open to it. “Do you understand? I had to keep her safe. That’s what I’ve been doing. And I need to continue to do it for the next few years, until I am free and can help her myself. In person.”

And for an eternity, or possibly more, they only sat there like this.

His gaze on hers like a hammer.

“So let me make certain that I’m understanding this story,” he said at the dawn of what must have been the tenth eternity. “It is richly detailed, and yet, somehow, it is missing some critical information.”

Her chest hurt. “I don’t think that it is.”

“You met this girl once, but she has somehow become the center of your life.”

Jolie eyed him. “Not everyone is like you, Apostolis. Some of us do not treat every interaction like a transaction, with prices to be paid at a time of your choosing. It’s hard to imagine, I know.”

“This is the daughter of two villains, according to your telling, yet you have somehow assumed responsibility for her. In a way that many parents do not assume responsibility for their own children.”

“It’s called empathy,” she said quietly. Because it was that or shout. Or scream. Or worst of all, sob. “I can’t say that I expect you to know the feeling, but I would have thought that you’d heard of it.”

“But why?” He asked the question too softly. It made a kind of warning shoot along her spine. “There are so many lost girls in the world. Why this one?”

“Why...?” That warning shot through her again, but she had started down this path. She had to keep going. She had to see it to the end—and she wasn’t sure why she felt that so keenly. As if this was a do or die situation. “I suppose she reminds me a little bit too much of me.”

“Now it makes sense. Narcissism, I can believe.”

Jolie shot to her feet, surprised to find that she was shaking. “You don’t have to believe anything that I say. I don’t know what possessed me to imagine that you might. But Mathilde is all there is, Apostolis. She’s the last secret I’m holding onto.” When he only stared back at her in that same way, she shook her head. “Now you know everything. And look at you, you’re even angrier than before.”

“I’m not angry. I just don’t believe you.”

And it cost her more than she wanted to admit to keep her voice calm. “It’s almost as if you’re afraid that if you did believe me, this whole fantasy world that you’ve built up will come crumbling down.”

“Do I live in a fantasy world?” Apostolis laughed, and it was not a pleasant sound. “I rather thought that it was a prison.”

She wanted to shout at him. She wanted more than that—what she’d really like, she thought then, was to take one of his priceless sculptures and throw it at his head.

But that would be another act of war.

And she was so tired of fighting.

So instead, she rose. Jolie found her feet and felt steadier when his gaze changed into something more like...arrested. As if he was no more sure of his power here than she was, no matter what he might claim. She crossed the space between them, moving over to his chair so she could sink down on her knees before him.

And she was glad that she had spent some time in this position, because if she hadn’t, she might not have realized that it was not a surrender. She was not laying herself out before him in submission. Not when both of them knew how she could take her power here, rendering him little more than clay in her hands.

Not to mention what she could do with her mouth.

Part of the power, she understood now, was in the act of the surrender itself—not to him, but to what she believed was more important, here in this moment.

Not just Mathilde. She would always want to save her cousin, and she would make certain she did, but this wasn’t only about her.

It was about maybe. It was about what if .

It was about the versions of them she glimpsed when they were too busy taking care of their guests to snipe at each other.

It was about the stories she wanted them to tell, years later, about these moments.

She knelt there before him and she reached over to take his hand between hers. It was the hand that wore a wider version of the simple band that she wore on hers. The evidence that they really were married. That it really had happened. That this wasn’t all some fever dream of sex and laughter, golden nights and desperate, needy dawns.

There was so much tension in him. And all of that wild and unconquerable heat.

Jolie looked up at him, holding his gaze as surely as she held his hand. “I’m telling you everything because I want things to be different. I don’t want there to be secrets between us. I want to try, you and me, to make something real out of this, Apostolis.”

He stared at her, looking almost...frozen. But that was better than openly mocking. Or scathing.

So she pushed on. “What if we could start over? Without your father. Without battles and wars, weapons and forced marches and trenches neither one of us wants to be in. What if we could just...be ourselves? Not the people your father made, but whoever we want to be, you and me?”

His laugh was a thread of bitterness. “What an imagination you have.”

“I have always known how you care for your sister,” she said, with a sour hint of desperation in her mouth. “And even if I hadn’t known it, even before we met, I now know that what you do is care for people. You’ve made it a business. You save people from disaster, Apostolis. And you came back home to save this hotel, too.” She thought of all those photographs, lined up just so. “You care so much about these things that matter to you—your childhood home, your sister, the kind of good you do in the world. What if—” and she hated herself for the way her voice shook, or maybe she only wished she could hate the vulnerability that poured through her “—what if you let yourself care about us, too?”

And for a moment, all of those words seemed to dance there between them like their own kind of golden light, even though it was dark outside. It took Jolie a long moment to realize that it was one of the lights she’d switched on herself, flooding the pair of them where they sat.

That was when he leaned forward, flipping his hand so that he was the one holding her fast.

“The only time you tell the truth, my darling wife and favorite stepmother,” and his voice was hoarse and so dark it made her shiver, “is when you come.”

Something in her jolted in shock, as if her very bones were breaking.

Or maybe that was simply her heart.

“Apostolis. Please—”

“There are worse things than death, Jolie,” he told her in that same dark voice. “Remember? Like losing. I hope you enjoy it.”

And when his mouth came crashing down on hers, Jolie knew everything was lost.

But her deep tragedy was that she kissed him back.