CHAPTER THREE

SEBASTIANHADASSUMED he was prepared—mentally and emotionally—by the time the chauffeur-driven car pulled into the courtyard, as close as it could get to the wide steps, where he and Laila were waiting. But his heart—lodged in his throat—made it impossible to lie to himself.

He was excited and terrified in equal measures. For a man who'd fought so hard to not be molded into a template of his perfect twin, he found himself wishing Ani and Alexandros hadn't given him privacy to face his sons for the first time.

As some sort of buffer to guard them from him—what if he reacted wrong? What if, like all the times Konstantin had mocked and torn into him, something was wrong with him? What if he felt nothing for these two innocent children that were his responsibility?

The what-ifs were endless, but fear was not new to him, and Sebastian refused to let it cow him now when he hadn't let it when he had been a powerless, innocent child.

He wrapped his hand around Laila's wrist, right at the moment when she'd have flown off the steps to meet them, to anchor himself rather than to stop her. An instinctive weakness he couldn't hide.

Her entire body stilled, and her head tilted down to look at his fingers. Then, as if they'd done this very ritual countless times, she laced her fingers around his. Her fingers were soft against his but there was also strength in them.

Without turning to look at him, she said, "For almost a month, after they were born, I was terrified every time I had to hold them. It's normal."

He simply nodded, unable to parse his feelings, wondering at how easily she offered reassurance when she had had none for the very same situation. Or rather, she'd had support, in the form of the very old man he'd been intent on destroying.

A woman, in her sixties, was the first one to step out of the car. She bent and time seemed to move inexorably slow as she plucked out a boy from the car and set him on his feet.

Smiling and stooped, she held his shoulders as his fat legs in shorts stumbled for a second like a newborn calf. Then, with a sudden whoop at the sight of his mother, he shrugged the nanny's hands off and ran full steam toward Laila.

From the wide smile and eager, inane chatter he kept spewing, Sebastian realized this was Nikos. His firstborn. His easy, affectionate, well-adjusted son.

Laila had been right about their physical resemblance, too—his son had the jet-black hair and the sharp nose of the Skalas family. But his eyes were like his mother's—a warm amber that practically glowed and changed the very landscape of the toddler's face, as if in defiance of the mighty Skalas genes that his father had been so proud of.

When Laila folded her legs to sit on the lowest step so that she was face-to-face with Nikos, Sebastian followed suit gladly, his legs nearly folding under him like they were made of matchsticks. He felt hollowed out with fear and something more, as if his insides were held together by strings outside his own body, as if this little boy or his brother could pull them as if he were a puppet and Sebastian would move and act as they bid him to.

Nikos reached them with eager cheer and easy smiles and wrapped his arms around his Mama's knees. For all his exuberant personality, it was his tiny size that struck Sebastian like a fist to his chest.

"Mama, Mama...on the way, I see horsey. Can I pet? Can I ride? Please, Mama. I be good boy for Granny."

Laila pressed her mouth to his temple and laughed, her hands moving over his tiny frame. The sound was full of such pure, incandescent love that it sounded alien to his ears. Sebastian had to swallow so that the strange, husky cadence of it didn't cling to his throat.

"Hmm... We'll have to make sure it's safe first, yeah, baby?" Laila said, running her fingers through his wind-ruffled hair. "Because horses are big and wild."

Dutifully, Nikos nodded. "Safe, yeah." Then he pinned those amber eyes on Sebastian, quite like how his mother had done that very morning, and Sebastian thought something he hadn't known inside him had been cracked open, never to be patched up or closed again. Like a vast abyss full of prickly things like vulnerability and joy and love and pain. An abyss that seemed to spring out of himself, one he'd avoided looking into for so long.

A gap-toothed grin appeared as Nikos said, "Hi."

Sebastian croaked out a "Hello, Nikos," as if he was the one who didn't know how to form words yet.

"You know horsey?"

Sebastian laughed. The sound seemed to come thrashing out from below his chest, through his diaphragm in an action his body was unaware it could perform until now. "Yes, Nikos. I might know horsey."

His good cheer growing, Nikos turned to his mother. "Friend, Mama? Not stranger?"

Hands squeezing Nikos's shoulders compulsively enough that the little boy bristled against his mother's hold, Laila trembled. But she met Sebastian's gaze over his head, ever the brave one. Then she gathered Nikos closer to her chest, kissed his temple again, before she said, "Nikos, this is your papa."

"Papa? My papa?"

Laila nodded, tears spilling out from her eyes.

"Hi, Papa," Nikos said, as if this was as easy and understandable as the sky was blue and the horse was big and then he made a jump from his mother's lap toward Sebastian that probably took a decade off Sebastian's life span.

Shaken to his core, he caught the little body. The scent of baby powder and dust and bananas hit Sebastian as he gathered his son to himself, his hands shaking, his breath a hurried whistle, terrified that he might do something that would spook the small boy.

But Nikos was as courageous as Sebastian himself had been once. Utterly unabashed, he threw his arms around Sebastian's neck and said, "Hi, Papa." His heart thundered like a drumbeat as he took in the stubby nose with crust under it and the wide amber eyes and the thick lashes. Now his heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vise, and that, too, was an ache he hadn't known in such a long time that it was now unfamiliar.

Nikos looked up into Sebastian's face, one grubby finger tracing his cheekbone, and said, "You take me to horsey?"

And Sebastian was laughing again, but there were tears in his eyes, too, and it was another thing he didn't know he was capable of—to laugh and cry at the same time—and he didn't care if Laila saw them. He sniffed like a baby, pressed a kiss to his son's head and said, "Yes, Nikos. Papa take you to horsey."

In response to Nikos's loud cheers, Laila groaned and laughed and told Sebastian in quite the stern voice that their sons would never learn to speak properly if she and Sebastian didn't speak in complete sentences to them, and Sebastian told her his son spoke perfectly enough for him and to hell with the entire damned world. And in the secret chamber of his heart that had frozen to ice a long time ago, he felt a crack. It felt good to belong to something bigger than himself, something purer than what the Skalas name and family had stood for, something that had this woman looking at him with a strange mixture of reluctant trust and utter openness.

His meeting with his second son was as much an emotional roller coaster as meeting Nikos but more...heart-wrenching, as if he'd been suspended at the scariest part of the ride, to hang upside down, his heart threatening to beat out of his chest.

And that's how it would be from now on, Sebastian realized. The stupid organ that he had no use for until now was to be wrenched and shaken and played around this way and that by these two little boys.

A few minutes later, Laila had spread a thick blanket right on the acres of perfectly manicured lawn for an impromptu picnic, claiming she wanted to give the boys time to run around after their nap and before bringing them inside to new surroundings. Nikos was drinking water from his bottle, eating crackers she handed him and casting glances at and asking numerous questions of Sebastian—mostly about what the horsey ate and did and played with—when the old nanny brought Zayn, who'd been napping longer, out of the car.

He didn't run toward Laila like Nikos did. In fact, he seemed to be against the very idea of coming close to his mama, as long as she was sitting near Sebastian.

With a softly murmured, "Please give him space," and a tremor she couldn't hide, Laila got up from the blanket and started chasing Nikos across the green lawn, all the while keeping an eye on Zayn and chatting to him about the car ride and his nap.

Sebastian, feeling as if he'd been ordered to sit out his favorite game—which had been an actual punishment Konstantin had meted out to him more than once—took himself off the blanket, hoping Zayn would understand that he posed no threat.

Finally, after a few minutes of watching his mother and twin, a tiny notepad and pencil clutched in his tiny hands as if they were his precious possessions, Zayn approached his mother and hugged her legs. Immediately, Nikos grabbed his hand and dragged his younger brother forward. "Zayn, this Papa. He show horsey to us. You wanna come?"

While his twin's reassurance was enough to join in on the play and to hug his mother in this new, strange location, it didn't seem to hit the mark for Zayn when it came to trusting Sebastian. He took a step back to hide behind his twin's body, his amber eyes far too intensely focused on Sebastian's face for a two-year-old boy.

"Papa, Mama?" he said, after a long while, having heard his twin bandy about the word with a ferocious sort of pleasure.

Laila nodded, opened her mouth—no doubt to urge him to greet Sebastian—and then decided against it.

Zayn gave a grave nod in return, as if agreeing to process this new material, but promising no more, and then completely avoided Sebastian.

Like a laser pointer creating heat on his skin, he could feel Zayn's gaze on him from time to time, but the moment he tried to make eye contact, the little boy looked away. Which meant Nikos stayed away, too, because clearly, his first loyalty was to his twin.

Just as Alexandros's loyalty had been to Sebastian, all those years ago, enough to take on the impossibly powerful Konstantin, even as he threatened Xander's ruin for that loyalty. Sebastian looked away, the past and the future blurring in front of his eyes and in his head. He pressed his fingers into his temples, feeling the shadow of an ache there.

That won't be necessary with his boys, he vowed to himself. Nikos wouldn't have to shield Zayn from anything, much less their own father, because Sebastian would do it for both of them.

While every inch of him urged him to gather Zayn in his arms and cocoon his sensitive son from the very world Itself, Sebastian fought the overpowering instinct. They were both here now, and he felt as if he had been swimming under water for too long, and he would not do a single thing that would upset his sons. He would not be his father, turning everything into ego, twisting what it meant to be a man, claiming they had to act a certain way to be worthy of the Skalas name.

He would not let his sons down. He would not let Laila down.

Suddenly, all the distrust he'd thrown in her face seemed like dust motes amid gratitude for how bravely she'd brought them into his life.

For years after she'd abandoned them to Konstantin's mercy, Sebastian had wondered where his mother had disappeared to, how she had fared, wondered if she'd thought of him and Xander, wondered if she was well. All he had known was that Guido, who'd worked as their chauffeur for one summer, had helped her escape, had been the only man who had known her whereabouts.

It had taken him years to track down the old chauffeur, a little more to understand his weakness for gambling, then he'd taken his house from him, knowing that shame, if nothing else, would persuade the old man to spill Sebastian's mother's whereabouts. He'd been desperate to find his mother as a young teen, but as a grown man, it had become an obsession, in the absence of any real purpose.

In pursuit of that piece of truth from his past, he'd threatened ruin for Guido, the very man who had helped Laila take care of his sons. Until now, that man had been only a step in his pursuit, an obstacle in his goal. But now, thanks to Laila, he couldn't unsee Guido as a kind old man who had once cradled his sons in his arms with tender care.

Guilt gnawed at Sebastian's insides. Having heard the affection in her voice when she spoke of Guido now, he understood that she'd done whatever needed to protect a loved one. Just as he or Alexandros would have done.

And she also had every reason to think the worst of him and to stay away.

She loved his sons like no one else would—not even himself maybe—and she'd tangled with him to protect a man who had been kind to her. Now, she'd taken a chance on Sebastian, despite what she called calculating the odds.

It was his turn to show her that trust, to win her over, to give her everything she'd ever wanted in life for the gift she'd given him. To prove to her that she and the boys belonged with him.

Any momentary hesitation he'd felt about having two little boys to care for, to nurture and protect, dissipated, leaving behind a crystal-clear clarity he had never known in his life.

He had already fallen in love with his sons. It was a deluge, this sudden gripping, intense need to protect them, and hold them close and to have them near for every sweet and hard moment, a primal urge to walk into the now quiet bedroom where they were resting and watch over them for the rest of the dark nights and sunny days, a profound, gut-wrenching kind of relief to know he could feel so much for them, that Konstantin hadn't beaten that particular ability out of him.

Sebastian rubbed a hand over his face, shaking and shivering under the onslaught of emotions.

This was what he'd needed in his life, even if he hadn't known it until now. For the first time in his adult life, he wasn't simply meandering through it, trying his best to detach from the Skalas name and empire, burying himself in his art, wasting himself away on shallow experiences that drained his mind and body.

Now, he wanted his life to take a certain shape and he would actively pursue it.

Whatever instinct had propelled him to demand Laila marry him... It carried the weight of his deepest, most secret desire within it.

For his sons to be happy and well-adjusted and thriving, they needed their mother and he needed them in his life. Ergo, his primary goal now was to do anything to keep Laila in his life.

And while he'd have never admitted openly to his brute of a father, Sebastian had always known he could be just as ruthless as Alexandros, for all that he wore different masks for the world. He simply hadn't cared about anything enough, except finding his mother.

While his twin had devoted his ruthless will to ousting their father and rebuilding what it meant to be a Skalas man running the prestigious bank, Sebastian's own willpower had never been interested in anything. Until now.

He was keeping his sons and he was keeping their mother in his life, even if it meant he had to seduce every inch of logic and rationale out of Dr. Jaafri. And he would make sure she not only enjoyed the seduction but that she had everything she'd ever wanted in her life. He would make all her wishes and dreams come true. It was only a matter of getting her to admit them.

For himself, there was nothing he enjoyed more than a challenge with high stakes. Despite her lies and her one attempt at blackmailing him—all to protect Guido—he hadn't stopped thinking of her for a single day since she'd disappeared. So, it wasn't as if it was a hardship to seduce her.

As it was usually with him, she'd become an obsession, not just because she'd left him wanting more, but also because she'd gotten the closest to the one thing he held sacred in his life—his art. Now to know that she'd done it all to save a man he'd been bent on ruining...just for a piece of information that would unlock his own past. To reach a woman who'd abandoned him and Xander years ago.

Cristos, even for him, it was twisted.

But now that she was back in his life, with a gift unlike he'd ever received and not even known he needed, he would fix it all.