CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER TWELVE

H E SAID NOTHING . Instead, he moved away from me and withdrew. I listened as his footsteps took him away from me. This was different. Different than any other time he had ever walked away from me. And he had done it countless times before. When the evening had to end, and we had to go back to being rivals. When the necessary separation came, taking us back to our real lives.

But this was supposed to be our real life now. He wasn’t supposed to leave me.

He might not have left the hotel, but the way that he had pulled away was profound. I pressed my hand against my chest. Felt my beating heart. Didn’t feel pieces of it fracture and launch themselves through the front of my breastbone, as it felt like they might. As I feared they must be.

Because it hurt so bad.

So very badly.

I took a breath, and then I stood. Naked. I found that I wasn’t ashamed. Or afraid.

I was too strong for that.

We were too strong for that. Ten years, and nothing had broken us. Not really.

We had ample opportunity to find other people. To want other people, and we hadn’t. We had promised our bodies to one another all those years ago, without even being conscious of it. We had promised our souls to each other. And I was willing to fight for it now. I would be damned if I let this be the end. I would be damned if I let those footsteps down the hall be the last word on my love for him.

I kept my own footsteps soft as I walked toward him. As I reached the sanctuary that he had ensconced himself in.

“Hades...”

“It is the one thing,” he said, his voice dark. “The one thing I did not want between us. And I never imagined... I did not think there was a danger of it.”

“Love?”

“I already told you. Sometimes things are simply too broken. People are simply too broken.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. How could... How could we ever be too broken? We are just the right kind of broken for each other. Or have you not been paying attention all this time. We are maybe the only people who could ever understand each other. Really.”

“You don’t know.”

“Are you going to tell me that you’re afraid you’re like your father? Because I’ve known you for far too long to believe that.”

“You didn’t know my father was abusive. And yet you think you have great insight into me?” he asked, his voice fierce.

He was a wall still. No matter how I’d tried to break it open for him. I felt like I was tearing strips off myself. Leaving myself raw.

But I kept going.

I kept doing it.

“You are my lover. That’s what you are. You’re not a dirty secret. You were not some clandestine affair. You have been my lover for ten years. I have let you hold me. I have let you kiss me. Taste me. Touch me. You are the father of my baby. I know you. I have seen you win battles and lose them. Only to me. I have seen the way that you handle setbacks. I have seen who you are when things don’t go your way. You are not an abusive man.”

I could feel him resisting my words. Resisting me.

“But I am as easily corrupted by love as he ever was.”

“I don’t understand what that means.” I pushed. And pushed.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“No. Because you don’t tell me anything. Because you are... An impenetrable wall, Hades, and you have been from the beginning. You didn’t tell me that I was the only woman that you were with.”

My own voice fractured. I could feel myself breaking. I wouldn’t let this break me.

His face was hard. Stoic. “You didn’t tell me that I was the only man.”

“But I was the virgin. When we came together. I was the one that... You never gave me a hint of vulnerability. Not to the degree that I gave it to you.”

“I’m sorry—did I never soften enough for you? You didn’t act as if that was distasteful to you, given that you flung yourself at my hardness every chance you got.”

“Hades... Don’t. Don’t be hateful now because this is too much for you. Just tell me why.”

“It is not too much for me. It is sadly ground that I have gone over already. Over and over again, Florence. Why do you think you weren’t the woman that I asked to marry me?”

“The business.”

“Little idiot. Do you think I care even one bit about this empire? In light of... You’re a fool,” he said. “I would let it all burn. Why do you think I made an attempt to set out rules for how we should let this marriage be?”

“Because you’re a control freak.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“ Stop it !” I shouted. “Stop making me work for every damn thing. Give something to me. I deserve it. I am the one who has given everything. I came to you. I had to tell you that I was having your baby. I had to stop your wedding. I was the one... I was the one who had to find out you were marrying somebody else. Give me something without making me debase myself, damn you.”

“My father found my mother.”

I was shocked. Immobilized. The look on his face was raw, tormented. Tortured.

“He found her house in Greece. Her husband, her children. Because of me. I went to visit her, and he had a tracking device on my phone. He had been lying to me all those years, saying he hadn’t known where she was. He was using that to keep me in line. He found her and followed her there. When I saw him in the villa, his eyes were like a wild man. He was beyond himself. He rushed her, holding a knife. I grabbed hold of them, and I disarmed him.”

I watched his face as it contorted, as all the defenses fell away, and I saw, not a monster, but a man so filled with grief, self-loathing and fear that I almost couldn’t bear it.

“You saved her life,” I said.

“Yes. And then I hit him. I didn’t need to. Then I hit him again. I also didn’t need to do that. He went down, hitting his head on the edge of the stone steps of the villa. It triggered a seizure. He died. It was easy to change the story around just a little bit. Easy to say that he had hit his head and it caused the seizure. There was no bruising. He died too quickly.”

“The media said your father died on holiday,” I said, aware that it was a foolish thing to say because the media didn’t know more than Hades himself.

“We made a story. One that would protect me. Protect the legacy of the company. What was any of it for if we destroyed the thing I was...created for. It was my chance to have control.”

My heart felt bruised. Bloody. “Hades...”

“So you see. I am as dangerous as my father ever was.”

“You did it for your mother. You did it for love. I don’t care if you killed your father. I don’t care if you shot him in cold blood. He threatened you. He held your mother’s safety over your head for years and allowed it to become a method to manipulate you by. His death is something that no one is sorry for. He was useless. He was evil.”

“It is not danger in the way you’re thinking. Look at how love betrayed my mother. My version of it. It made me careless. Selfish. It led my father to her.”

I shook my head. “Hades, your love isn’t selfish...”

“It is. It has been. It has been all about keeping what I want near me when I want it. And never about giving.”

“Hades,” I said. “I love you. And I know you. I’m not afraid of you. I have loved you. From the beginning. Don’t you understand that? If there was one thing I didn’t know about myself it was that. And it was because I was terrified. I was terrified of what loving you would mean. Of what I would be willing to give up. Because the answer is simply everything. I don’t care about the company either. Not if I had to choose between it and you. So I never wanted to put myself in that position. I forced myself to deny those feelings. To keep them locked away.”

“I wish that was why I kept myself controlled. I will never hurt you. I will never...”

“No. You won’t.”

“You should be disgusted with me,” he said. “You should be horrified. By the manner of man I am. By my capacity for violence.”

He just looked broken. Stripped apart by the admission. He had held all of this in for so long.

But I’d seen him look this way before. In that moment I’d first seen him after his father’s death and he’d devoured me.

This was the truth of him.

“But I’m not. So, where does that leave us? Because I don’t see a violent man when I look at you. I see a man who was abused by his father. A man who was very nearly destroyed, but wasn’t. A man who fought for his mother when he needed to. Don’t you understand? Your father fought to make you afraid. But he didn’t succeed. Instead, you were stronger than he was. You were as brave as he feared you were. He had to keep you in line because he knew that he couldn’t crush you.”

“He was poison,” he said. “If he would have ever known what I felt for you, he would have...”

I saw it then. Real, deep fear. Deep and dark. And I had to wonder what he was really afraid of. He was a man who had started out as a boy. A boy who had been scared that the thing he loved most would be taken from him. Because his father had used that, manipulated that. His mother had left him to protect herself. Left him with a monster. And even if I could be sympathetic to what she had lost, I felt for him.

He was lost in a maze of feelings. A maze of fear. Where he didn’t even know who the enemy was anymore. He had decided it must be him.

But I knew that wasn’t true.

“Hades,” I said softly. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“I know it isn’t. Because we never could be. We have always been more. Bigger. We have always been...”

“No. We haven’t. We were lust, pure and simple. And it is all we can ever be.”

I felt like he had stabbed me. What he didn’t understand was that for me, his words were violence. What he didn’t understand was that for me, this was death. I had tried so hard not to love him. And now... He was going to stop us. From having everything. From having all that we could be.

And if this was true, if I had cut myself open, and he had arrived back at the very place we’d started, then there was no winning.

I had no more left to give.

I had jumped off the cliff.

Bared my entire soul.

“What are you so afraid of?” I asked, exhaustion, anger, overtaking me.

“We cannot live together,” he said. “We will raise the child, but we will not live together. We will not be as man and wife.”

“You don’t get to decide that,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Or what? You’ll ruin me? That is where you’re like your father, Hades.” It was a cruel thing to say, but I didn’t care. Because he had to realize. “It’s this... This ridiculous need to control everything, that’s where it comes into play. You would never hurt me, not physically, but this is a threat. Because you don’t know how else to make me do what you want. Because you don’t know how else to control me.”

He looked stricken.

“You have to... Let go. I am my own person, and I will feel for you what I feel. You can’t force me to feel any different. You cannot make me into what you think I should be.”

“Florence...”

This was the end. It had to be.

Because if there was one thing I’d learned from my mother, it was that you couldn’t let a man take it all.

You had to save some spark for yourself.

For your child.

“I’m leaving you. If you don’t want to be married to me, then you won’t be married. Technically you will fulfill the terms of your father’s will. He won’t have won. But I don’t have to stay married to somebody who doesn’t love me. Because I have done enough contorting to last me a lifetime. I will not tone myself down for you. I won’t hide myself, not now that I have just found who I really am. I love you. Desperately. But if I can’t have you in the way that I need you, then this really is the end.”

Forever. We were supposed to have forever. I hated him as much as I loved him then. Because he had made me hope. And now he was taking it from me. Because of fear. Because he couldn’t see past the things he had done, because he...

No. I didn’t believe him. Not for a moment. I didn’t believe that he truly regretted the death of his father enough that it was what kept him from love now.

“You’re just scared. All these years you’ve been able to keep me with you without having to risk yourself. And that was the thing you really didn’t want. You know you’re not a monster. You play the part of one well. It suits you. It makes you feel comfortable. You want people afraid of you. You wish that you were like your father, Hades, because that would allow you to hold everybody at a distance. You want the evidence of your violence to scare me so you can care for no one but yourself. But it isn’t you. Your father acted out of hate. You did it out of love. And you’ve allowed yourself to change the definition of love so that you can deny it. I won’t let you. I won’t give you any place to hide.”

“Florence.”

I stared him down, my fury a living thing between us.

He released his hold on me. I walked out of the bedroom and collected my clothes. I could get my own damned private jet and fly out of here. And so I did, with my heart absolutely breaking. So I did, hating myself, even as I made the call.

I didn’t want to leave him. But I knew that I had to.

I cried the whole way back to New York. And I questioned myself. I had taken what I could get of him for so many years, I questioned my own sanity, drawing a line under this the way that I had. Now that we were having a baby. Maybe I should’ve been more flexible. Maybe I should have given more.

But I wanted to be loved. Most of all, I wanted him to open himself up to me. To be able to love me. I couldn’t be with him as long as he was a wall. In quite that way.

I needed him to be honest with me.

I needed to know him.

For ten years, he had been a locked box. And I needed the key. I needed it.

I called Sarah as soon as I was back at my apartment.

She came right away.

“What happened?”

“I love him. And he won’t love me back.”

“He’s a jerk,” she said.

“He’s afraid,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. I know that you care about him. I know...”

“I have loved him from the first moment I saw him,” I said. “I think deep down I always hoped he felt the same.”

“It’s not your fault that he didn’t.”

But it felt like it. It was worse than the NASA contract. Worse than anything. Because I’d had everything in the palm of my hand. And now it was all gone.

My hope, that beautiful future I had wanted so desperately.

I put my hand on my stomach. I was having a baby.

So much of my impending motherhood had been swallowed up by my feelings for Hades.

By the shift in our relationship.

I wouldn’t crumble. My parents had lost themselves in their hatred of each other. They had hurt me, even when they hadn’t meant to. I wouldn’t do that to my child. I refused. I would be stronger than that. For their sake.

“I might not be able to have everything,” I said softly. “But I will have better. Because I’m strong enough.”

I’d never managed this before. For myself.

I’d gone back to him every time. An addict who needed my fix.

But not now. Because these weeks of vulnerability had made me new. Here I was, a butterfly fresh from the cocoon, with wet bedraggled wings.

But I had changed.

I needed him to do the same.

I could imagine the headlines now.

Clare Heir Single Mother After Marital Implosion.

Every Other Weekend for Achelleos and Clare: Though now it’s Custody! Not Wild Hookups!

It made me want to vomit. But I knew that I could survive it.

Because I didn’t care what anybody said. I only cared that for my part, my child would never have to defend themself this way and that to please me or their father. They would be enough for me. I wouldn’t need them to hate Hades just to make me feel better. I wouldn’t feel compelled to be derisive of him to try and shake my child’s opinion.

I was heartbroken.

But I was determined to give my child a life that was anything but shattered.

I had a core of steel. And I would be using it indefinitely.