He was confident that he wouldn’t have to learn the hard way, already learning from the mistakes that his father and Antonis had made.
“Now, what do you want?”
“What do I want?” Nikos repeated, stupidly.
“Ava called me and had…quite a few scathing words for me for pushing you into this,” Giannis admitted, smiling fondly in a way that Nikos knew his father would never do if his mother had ‘scathing’ words for him. “And your brother tells me that you have a family now. I would love to meet them.”
Nikos stood without words, not knowing what to say because never in a million years would he have ever expected to have a conversation with his father like this. He had imagined it in his dreams, but whenever he returned to reality, he realized that the freedom that other sons had, he would never have because he was Giannis Drakos’s son, and now that very same man was asking him what he wanted, even though he had spent his whole life telling him that what he wanted didn’t matter.
It was comical.
“I want to give you the choice that my father didn’t give me. I see now that I was wrong for that.”
“You must really love her,” Nikos said in disbelief, thinking of all the years he had spent trying to get his father to change hismind, but one phone call was enough for him to finally allow him to choose his path in life. That was how much Ava meant to him.
“Your mother never asked me to keep you out of this because she understood the duty of being a part of this family.”
“Even if she did ask, would you have listened?”
His father didn’t respond, and that was all the answer Nikos needed as his jaw clenched with anger.
“I still think it’s shit that you did that to mom. She didn’t deserve that from you. You left us and went and had another family, and she just had to deal with that. She just had to accept that you went off to America and fell in love with another woman. It’s bullshit,” Nikos ranted, feeling the same overwhelming rage he had felt that night at the dinner table when he learned about it.
“You’re right,” his father said, and Nikos sighed, knowing that was as much of an apology as he would ever get from his father. That was just the kind of man he was. Nikos knew he could spend all day going over how much his father had wronged his mother, but he knew it wouldn’t change anything. He knew it would only leave him angry and breathless, and his father more pitiful than he already was.
He took a deep breath.
“There are certain things I’ll do for the family and certain things I won’t do,” Nikos said. “But ultimately, my place is in the sky. But I will always be here to help my family. Always.”
His father nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Nikos agreed. “For now, I’ll continue to run this place with Christos.”
His father arched a brow, looking surprised.
“I have to make sure the girls are okay,” he said, thinking about all of the women at the Gentlemen’s Club. “And we also need to do some cleaning up to keep everything in order after what happened with Antonis. There will be some bitterness and resentment, but I can fix that.”
His father gave him a knowing look, and begrudgingly, Nikos admitted, “the power is kind of addictive.”
“It is,” his father said. “But I have a feeling you’ll handle it better than Pierce.”
“Of course, I will. I’ve always been better than him,” Nikos bragged, jokingly, and his father smiled before pulling him into a hug, one that Nikos returned. As the sun went down, Nikos soaked in the moment, glad that he had come to New York because it had finally led him to peace.
C H A P T E R
54
BLIND TO THE WORLD, HONEY WALKED TIMIDLY WITH A BLINDFOLD COVERING HER EYES, trying to keep her nerves calm and her heart from racing as Nikos guided her.
“Keep walking, keep walking,” Nikos instructed, and she did as told until she accidentally bumped into Kai, who also wore a blindfold.
“You bumped me again, Mom,” Kai said, amused.
“Sorry, honey. I can’t see,” she said, mildly peeved by her current impairment. If she could see Nikos right now, she would glare at him, and apparently, that showed as she heard him chuckle.
“I can practically feel you glaring at me through the blindfold.”
She was surprised he saw that because she couldn’t see anything, and because she couldn’t see anything, it was making her nervous and jittery.
