CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT

W E DIDN ’ T SPEAK to each other in the car. I was entirely too frayed around the edges to form an intelligent sentence, so I didn’t bother.

Instead, I stared out the window, up at the towering buildings.

“No questions, agape ?”

You’ve won.

What had I won? I had just been forced down the aisle and now I was following him wherever it was he had decided to take me.

“What did you mean I won?”

He looked at me, and for a moment I saw a crack. “You didn’t want me to marry her,” he said.

Rage spiked in my blood. “No, Hades. I don’t care what you do or who you marry. What I care about is that you didn’t tell me. What I care about is that you thought I was the type of woman who wouldn’t care that you’d married someone else. What I care about is that I treated you like an equal, a rival. You treated me like a whore.”

He growled, the feral sound shocking me. “I did not treat you that way. You assume I could stop this, Florence. And that is what you don’t understand. You have won because in the end my well-ordered plans are for nothing. Because of you.”

His words left my stomach churning, rage rolling through me. Unease.

I wasn’t surprised when we ended up at the airport.

I just needed a moment. To simply move. To react. Not fight against him, not try to plan the next move. But to breathe.

It wasn’t until we were on the plane—a plane we had made love on before—that I decided it was time to figure out what the plan was.

“Where are we going?”

“We have at least six hours until we land in Switzerland.”

“Hoping the famously neutral country will help in our communication?”

“No. I have a chalet there. Perfectly out-of-the-way and impossible to access if one does not have a helicopter. Well stocked. It will see us through this initial storm, and the holidays. Isn’t that romantic. Off on a secluded Christmas honeymoon.”

It made my stomach churn. Because I had been thinking about how lovely it was that he and I would have a month together in New York, just a while ago. It hadn’t gone that way.

And now we would be shut in a house together. Albeit, a house that I assumed was large enough we could also never run into each other if we wanted. It didn’t fill me with the same sort of uncomplicated thrill that it had two months ago.

Though it did still thrill me. Even if it was a dark, twisted sort of feeling.

“We have six hours,” he repeated. “Plenty of time to cover whatever ground you need.”

“I haven’t slept.” And I didn’t think that I could sleep even if I wanted to. Not after all of that. I was utterly and completely undone by the events of the day, but it had left me supercharged.

“Sleep if you wish,” he said.

I wouldn’t let him tell me what to do on top of everything else, even though I was so tired I was in danger of losing consciousness in my seat. “I don’t. What is the plan? Do you honestly expect us to be married forever?”

“I don’t see why not. This makes sense. We can make it work. Why be competitors? What would be the end result of our continuing on the way we have been anyway? We would destroy one another eventually, I assume. I don’t actually want to destroy you, Florence.”

I looked at him, my stomach sour. “Then what is it you want?”

He lifted a dark brow. “I want to navigate this without our empires crumbling. It would be best if you were a help and not a hindrance.”

“Hades, I am carrying your baby. I never had to tell you. I chose to come and speak to you. I chose to handle this with as much integrity as I could. I chose to keep the pregnancy. I chose to walk down that aisle toward you. I had ample opportunity to escape. Do you not think my brother was standing by with the means to spirit me out of the city if I wanted him to? I chose to marry you. You might ask yourself why.”

“Because I threatened you.”

“Because it is useful to me. You underestimate me. At every turn. I have the control here. I could have denied you access to this child, and you know it. The whole world was ignorant to the fact that we were together. I could have let you marry her. I could have let you have your children with her.”

“But you couldn’t,” he said, his eyes dark, burning into mine. “Or you would have. You wouldn’t let her have me.”

“You bastard. You let me find out about your engagement in the press. You were as cruel as you could have been, and that was a choice. You...” I stood up. “Let’s talk about it then, Hades. Let’s talk about the ways in which you are the actual devil .”

“You and I had a sexual relationship,” he said. His gaze was dispassionate then. A stranger’s. “I never promised you fidelity of any kind. Likewise, I never promised Jessica fidelity. When I told you my engagement changed nothing, I was being honest with you.”

“But you didn’t explain it to me.”

“Given the nature of our relationship I didn’t think it mattered.”

That made me even angrier. “You treated it like a business matter. You were the CEO of the sex so it didn’t matter what I thought because I’m just beneath you. Because you never saw me as a human being, did you?”

He looked past me. “As you said yourself. I’m the very god of hell. And think about that, Florence. That is what my father chose to name me. Whether that speaks to his view on me, or what he hoped I would become, is nearly irrelevant. I was never shaped in the mold of a good man. And I never pretended to be. You... You came to me. Far too innocent, and far too young. I should’ve turned you away.”

“But you didn’t. Not once. Not once over the last decade,” I said.

“Guilty.” His dark eyes gleamed. “And you kept coming back.”

That was the truth. The ugly, awful truth of it. There was no innocent party here. We’d used each other. He’d never gotten to know me, but I’d never gotten to know him either. I’d put the company, my reputation above any potential relationship with him.

I had thought I might be as cold as he was at one time.

I didn’t feel cold now.

I felt raw. Bruised.

“This is our consequence, I suppose,” I said, quietly.

He reached over and poured himself a glass of whiskey, settled deep into the couch and stared across the expanse of space between us. “Quite the consequence. You might as well vent your rage at me. Get it over with.”

He said it so casually. So dry. So...controlled. As if none of this touched him. As if he could be here with me or with Jessica and it would make no difference to him. As if my feelings were an inconvenience he would allow just for the moment.

“Is that what you think this is? That I’m... Angry and need to vent?” It wasn’t untrue. But there was so much more to it. Of course, I hadn’t even begun to work out what all my feelings were, so I felt like I was treading on dangerous ground.

“It seems as if that’s the case.”

“What did you feel?” I was so angry at him. He was such an impenetrable wall. I knew him in business. And I knew him in bed. And in the time in between he had gotten so much more of me. Because I had shown my hand, hadn’t I? I had shown my hurt over his engagement. I had gone to him and given him that loss of control. Even if I had scraped some power back by reminding him that I’d chosen to tell him about the baby, I was the one who’d given more of my...heart. And what had he given me?

Nothing.

An orgasm.

A child.

Our consequence.

And yet I was no closer to having any idea of what he felt for anyone or anything. Perhaps he really did feel nothing. I’d known a moment of true relief followed by true panic listening to him and Jessica worked out the story for the dissolution of their engagement. Because both of them had been so utterly dispassionate. So cold. As if they were made of stone.

Meanwhile I was not made of anything of the kind. I knew that now.

I was entirely made of the sorts of feelings I didn’t want at all.

“When?”

“When I denied you. When I told you that I wouldn’t be with you anymore after you were married. Did you feel anything?”

He leaned back, a shadow concealing part of his face. He was starkly beautiful. High cheekbones, a square jaw, that mouth that had done so many wicked things to me. I could barely catch my breath when I looked at him.

“I knew you would never be able to manage it.” He took a sip of his whiskey, all arrogance. “If you had been able to control yourself with me, agape , you would have done so years ago.”

“You’re wrong.” At least I was confident that I was telling the truth. “I wouldn’t have shared you. Do you have any idea how angry I was, knowing that you had slept with me while you were planning to marry somebody else?”

“It angered you that I was having sex with another woman during our time together?”

“Of course it did. But I never thought that I had an exclusive claim to your body, Hades. I did not think that you would get engaged without at least speaking to me.”

He frowned. “So it is the perceived emotional betrayal that bothers you? Even though you and I have never had anything like a relationship?”

“Yes.”

It all bothered me. In truth.

“Put your mind at ease, Florence. I did not love her. Neither was I sleeping with her.”

I let that truth settle over me. I had figured at that point that he didn’t love her, but the idea that he hadn’t slept with the woman—who had been exceedingly beautiful—had not occurred to me.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

Yet again, it was like the mask slipped. Giving me a view of something more feral. An intensity normally reserved for sex.

“Because. Because it would’ve been better if you would’ve stayed away. Don’t you think? It would have been better if I could have married her and kept you away from me.” It was an intensity that I was only used to when we were engaged in work battles and bedroom games. It was not something I was used to in conversation with him. But then, we didn’t do conversation. We didn’t talk. We didn’t share pieces of ourselves. Only our bodies.

“If you think that, then why did you marry me at all? Why did you... In your office that day, why have me then. If you were getting married to get rid of me, then why? Because if you hadn’t, and if you would have remembered the condom, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

He was across the space, and over to me before I could draw my next breath. His large hand resting against the base of my throat. “Because if I could, I would have. As it is for you, it is for me. You know that.”

The words were like a balm to all those wounds in my spirit. It was easy to believe that it wasn’t as enthralling for him as it was for me. Easy to believe he had other lovers, that this was just one flavor of sex he enjoyed.

But his face now told me otherwise.

I really was his shame.

If he wasn’t a slave to it, the same as I was, he would never touch me.

But he had touched me. Over and over again for years.

I had power here. I needed to remember that.

“I do,” I said. “So why sit there and hurl those things at me like accusations, when you know you are no better.”

His lips curved, his body relaxed and he moved back to the couch across from me. My heart was pounding hard. Not with fear.

With desire.

Because it was always like this. It didn’t matter if it should be. It didn’t matter if it was wrong, toxic, obsessive.

It was always this.

If we could have stopped, we would have stopped.

“I act with control at all times, Florence.” He took another sip of his scotch. “I understand that you may not know that. Because the one exception to that in all of my life has been you. I knew that I shouldn’t touch you. That first time you came to me, I knew. Do you have any idea... If my father had found out, let’s just say the punishment likely would not have been worth the reward I found in your arms. And yet. I made the same mistake with you. Over and over again. I let myself have you, even knowing that I should not. When I saw the terms of my father’s will, I saw a means of escaping it. When the time ran out, I knew that I had to choose a wife, and when I found Jessica, I knew that I had found someone with goals that were the same as my own. She did not want love. She needed to marry to help inject something new into her image. I needed to fulfill the terms of the will. Both of us needed to fulfill external obligations.”

I watched him, the way that he moved, the way that he spoke. I was fascinated by him. Because this was not the kind of thing we ever engaged in. This was more conversation than we ever had.

I felt desperate then. To close this gap between us. And yet, I knew that it would be foolish. Dangerous. Already...

I had said that he felt the same way I did, but I feared it wasn’t true.

Already, I feared that my feelings ran far deeper than his.

I refused, utterly refused, to name them.

Anyway, if I thought that I felt something... Anything like love for him, I was simply delusional. A woman looking to explain away her behavior as something other than pure unadulterated lust. We didn’t know each other. And what I did know about him did not make him the sort of man I ought to have feelings for.

Sex wasn’t love.

I knew that.

Respect in business was not love.

But right then, my mind clicked back to the first thing he had said.

“What do you mean your father would’ve punished you?”

“I mean exactly that. My father ran his company with an iron fist. And he ran his home the same way. My mother was not like your mother, Florence. She did not run away seeking adventure. She sought safety. Peace. But had she taken my father’s heir with her, my father would’ve never stopped looking for her. She had to find safety, and to do that she had to leave me. Without his preferred target for his rages, my father had to adjust his focus on to me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Because of all the things that I had thought about his father, and the relationship Hades might’ve had with him, I hadn’t ever considered that he was physically abusive.

There were no rumors about it in the media. Nothing.

He was such a strong man, and proud. Hard. Things that made him impenetrable at times, but the idea of him being...harmed by his own father. Broken. I hated that. Whatever anger I felt for him was replaced by shock. By the unending sadness that I felt thinking about how he’d been hurt...and I hadn’t known.

His father’s death had been a shock. He’d been healthy, and while her own father hadn’t liked him at all, he’d been strangely upset about the death of his rival. Or perhaps it was death in general. He’d died two years later of a heart attack. I supposed there was a lesson there about overworking yourself.

I didn’t know how to learn it.

“Hades...”

“It is nothing. Do not waste your tears for me, a child who grew up with access to the greatest education, the best means of travel in the world. There are many in life who have struggles, and I would not consider myself one of them.”

“Your father physically abused you, and you don’t consider that a struggle,” I asked, feeling incredulous.

“No. If I did, perhaps I would speak of it with a therapist. As it stands, I’m fine.”

I looked at the strong, remote man sitting across from me, and I had to ask myself how he thought he was fine. How I had ever thought he was fine.

What I knew about him for certain was that he was a wall. Until the wall came down, and then he was passion personified. And then he was fire.

Are you any different?

Maybe not. Maybe I compartmentalized things just the same as he did.

Maybe I had to keep myself protected too. But it didn’t come from a place of having been... Abused.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I would have known. All that time we knew each other... You were twenty-one the first time we were together.”

“If my father had access to me, then he would hit me. And I allowed it, because... He told me that if I ever displeased him, he would find my mother. And he would kill her. I had no reason to disbelieve him.”

“Why are you only now telling me this?”

“Because we have only now just decided to have a conversation. You are marrying me, and you need to know the manner of man you’ve married. My father wasn’t a safe man. I never had any desire for a passionate marriage. Things... They will not be the same between us now.”

I tried to process that. Tried to understand what he was saying. “You think that we are suddenly going to not have passion between us?”

“We have to figure out how to arrange our lives so that we can work together. Things have changed. Where once we could fight one another, act as opponents, we cannot now. We are having a child.”

“I understand that.”

“I don’t know how to be a good father,” he said.

It felt like a warning. Combined with what he’d just shared with me about his father but... I was angry with Hades. Hurt. But I wasn’t hurt enough to allow myself to believe he was the sort of monster his father had been.

Yes, he’d hurt me.

He would never hurt me physically.

I had been with him for ten years. Even if it wasn’t a relationship. He had been my lover.

He was difficult. He wasn’t evil.

“I don’t know how to be a good mother. And I realized as I walked toward you down that aisle that we are both ill-suited to this, but it is what’s happened. We will make it work.”

“We must make it work,” he said. “Sometimes I think my father simply wanted me to have a child because what he really wanted was for me to pass down the pain he meted out on to me. He said that once. That when I had children I would understand. What a trial they are. How difficult it is to try and shape one in the way that you need them shaped. He said one day I would understand.”

“Your father was weak,” I said. I had many opinions about his father, mostly given to me by my own father, but none of them had been about his actions as a man. They had simply been about the way he ran his business. My father had known. But I knew now. “A weak man has to rule with tyranny. That isn’t you. It never has been. You might not have always been my favorite person, Hades, but I have always respected you. I have always respected the brilliance that you brought into our competitiveness. I have always preferred going up against you than anyone that I could beat easily. And you have enjoyed the fight as well. The truth is, you’ve never tried to crush me. Not even once. Because that doesn’t bring you joy. You like a fight. But you’re not a bully. They are two different things.”

“I will never touch our child in anger,” he said. “You have my vow.”

I believed him. Because hadn’t he experienced enough uncertainty? A mother who had left him for her own safety. A father who had used his fists on him.

I felt despairing.

For him. The child he’d been. The man that he was.

The man I had known all this time, who perhaps could’ve at least been my friend, whose pain I might have known, and yet I didn’t, because I had been so focused on him as an object of desire.

And then later as my competition.

“We will merge the companies. There is no other option. We simply will not be able to conduct them as two separate entities. Nobody would believe it was possible, first of all.”

“I don’t like that,” I said.

“Think about it,” he said. “The heir to your throne is now the heir to mine. And so what difference does it make if we keep them separate for the next thirty years? Eventually, the company will belong to our child. And so, we might as well make them into one.”

I couldn’t deny that he had a point. I also felt like he was doing his level best to try and push the conversation away from personal things.

“What about fidelity?” I asked.

“That has nothing to do with our companies.”

“It is the holiday season and we have gone away for a honeymoon. I say we wait to speak about the logistics of the companies.”

“Not something I would have expected to hear from you.”

“Well, I didn’t expect to be married and having a child either. I find the topic more concerning than I did only twenty-four hours ago.”

“The truth is, we have to come to a consensus on what we’re going to do with the company and release a joint statement by tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because it matters,” he said. “Because we cannot afford to have any speculation or accusation that we do not have total control over what’s happening. Do you not understand that? I have taken a contract with the government, and nothing can appear untoward.”

There was a level of intensity to him that I had experienced in business meetings, but there was something different as well. I wondered if it had to do with what he just told me about his father.

There had been punishments. When he had made mistakes, he had been hurt.

That was what he was acting like now. As if a mistake was going to come with a heavy price.

“Then we can merge,” I said.

I felt myself give. But it did not feel weak. I didn’t feel like I was letting him win. I felt like I was finding a path to peace in my own life. Like I was taking this moment and turning it into something better. I’d had the epiphany standing there at the altar that there was something powerful in this loss of control. I experienced it again just now.

I had always imagined that my spine was a core of steel. Because when it came to dealing with my parents, I felt like I had to bend too often. But this was not a reshaping of myself. It was a strength. He was being rigid, and he couldn’t find his way around it.

But I could.

“I will—”

“We must maintain equal power in the company,” I said.

He looked at me. “My company is worth more.”

“I don’t care.”

“That simply isn’t how these things work.”

On this, I would not bend. “I’ve worked far too hard to surrender everything to you now.”

“Perhaps you should’ve thought of that before you surrendered to me the way you did in my office.”

“Which of us surrendered truly, Hades? Can you answer that question?”

His lip curled. “We will have equal positions,” he said.

“Good. Come now, you would not wish to elevate yourself above me using blackmail. I don’t even believe you would ruin me if you had the chance. Because again, you’re not a bully. You don’t want uncontested power. You want a fight, because it makes you better, and you know it. We have always made each other better. Iron sharpening iron.”

He chuckled. “Perhaps. Though in my experience when a person with a hard head goes up against another it is usually bone bruising flesh.”

I let the silence lapse between us, and I tried to imagine the treatment he had received from his father. Let it reshape the things I’d assumed about him all that time ago.

I had thought that he had been his father’s pride.

I would never have assumed that Hades was being physically harmed by his father.

Not ever.

“You can tell me,” I said.

“Do you really want to hear this? I will say the worst of it is always what ends up in the mind. With the body...you can learn to shut yourself down. But when you are locked away for days at a time. When your father buys you things only to destroy them...” His throat worked. “That was the only reason he ever gave me anything. To make me care for it, so that it could be used against me.” His smile then was like a dagger. “He loved Christmas. He would make an elaborate setup and throw a huge party for his clients. He would wrap presents and put them beneath the tree. Sometimes none would be for me. Other times there would be. One year he burned them all, wrapped, in the yard.” He frowned. “The worst, I think, was never getting to know what they were.”

“That’s horrible. Despicable. You don’t have to have had a good father to know that’s wrong and you would never do it.”

He shook his head. “No. I never would.”

Silence between us was dangerous, because the minute we stopped speaking, there was only tension to fill the space between us.

“The matter of our marriage,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to share you.”

He looked at me, as though he pitied me. “You will regret that, later. When you are tired of our fighting. When you are weary of having to deal with my moods.”

I didn’t understand why he couldn’t simply tell me what he wanted rather than speaking in riddles. But then I supposed this highlighted the true problem. I had known him for all of these years and never really known him.

“What is it you wanted from a wife?”

“I told you. Children, and no demand on me. I did not wish to get married to make my life more complicated. I wanted to get married to solve a problem. That’s all.”

I felt like my chest had been punctured. “And I’ve never been much of a solution, have I?”

“No,” he bit out. “If you think this is a convenience to me, you would be incorrect.”

I still felt...sorry for him. But that gave him no excuse for trying to hurt me. Simply because he was trying to force distance back between us.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.” I stood up. “I already know where the bedroom is.”

And then I left him there, and some part of myself.

Things were already too complicated without splintering my feelings for him even more.

I was angry at him. For being...

Human.

I preferred him to be the devil.

Because at least then I could fight against him with no pity whatsoever.