This isn’t the man I knew. These things… this isn’t the boy with whom I shared part of my childhood. Pain detonates at my temples and the base of my neck. The hole that rips open in my chest is the size of Khione and drags everything in its path as it tears its way through me.
I blink, trying to hold back the tears, but it has the opposite effect. They slide down my cheeks without my permission—and because the world is a cruel place, I realize the worst moment of my life isn’t over yet.
“I’m managing it. By the end of the week, I expect to be rid of her and the child. Though I think this one might put up some resistance.” He exhales deeply—an exhale I’m tired of hearing—before continuing. “But it might not be entirely bad. If she doesn’t cooperate, I’ll keep the child. I’d need an heir at some point anyway. Once he’s born, I get rid of the mother. Keepingup this charade would be a sacrifice, but I suppose it would be worth it.”
“Turn it off!” I beg, utterly undone now, my face washed with tears and my mind a whirl of endless pain. “Turn it off! Please! Please! I don’t want to hear anymore! I don’t want to!” The sob that bursts from my throat carries all the pain in the world with it, and I wrap my arms around my belly, begging my child for forgiveness.
I wish I could erase every word I heard from my mind—but I never will. The emptiness consuming me piece by piece, from the inside out, would never allow it.
My baby, however, didn’t need to go through this. It’s solely my complete lack of control over my own feelings that he’s sensing now—the confusion I’ve become—and it’s enormous.
I am chaos made of doubt, fear, pain, distrust—and a sliver of faith, a remnant of hope that none of this is true. That last one is almost a necessity. Something I can reach for if I stretch out my hands.
I need—desperately—to believe there is an explanation. Somehow, somewhere, there is a rational explanation for all of this, and I’m just not seeing it.
The car stops. My hands fly to the door handle.
“I’m sorry,” Lysandra says. “I’ll wait for you to reach out once you’ve composed yourself, and then we can resolve this civilly. Don’t worry, my dear. You’ll get over it.” She declares it, and I say nothing before opening the door and throwing myself out.
I gulp in a huge breath of air that does nothing to help. My shock is so deep I don’t even know how much time passes before I realize I’m at the ferry terminal.
I look around, searching for I don’t even know what, and before I know it, I’m passing through the turnstile and entering the station. Drained of nearly all my certainties, I’m left with just one: I need air.
CHAPTER 41
NINA MARCHESI
It could be any ordinary night in the life of some tourist who stumbled upon this place by sheer chance or luck—but it isn’t.
Seated at a café at the highest point in Athens, I look down at the city beneath me without truly seeing anything at all. In my head, all that exists are endless calculations that never yield a result.
I’ve been here for hours, torturing myself with the sight of the Greek sea, which awakens the same feeling it always does: that of drowning in Nero’s eyes. I twist the ring on my finger in a nervous tic I haven’t been able to stop. The sensation of its absence against my skin is, at once, welcome and devastating.
My phone—turned off—rests on the small white wooden table in front of me, right beside the largest cup of tea they serve here. Neither of them is doing its job properly. The tea has been useless in bringing me any calm, and the phone is off because I no longer knew how to keep rejecting Nero’s calls.
Not seeing the messages come in or hearing the phone ring, however, hasn’t put an end to my torment. Nero called me for the first time early last night, after sending several messages. I didn’t open any of them; I only followed them through the notification bar.
At first, they were just idle chatter. But when the fifth message went unanswered, the tone shifted to concern. The fact that I didn’t answer any of the calls that followed turned the next messages desperate.
It all seemed so real. So genuine, that I almost gave in and answered—almost ran home, straight into his arms, forgetting everything I had heard from the passenger seat of that car.
That was when I decided to turn my phone off.
Because I may not feel certain about many things right now, but there is one thing I know: I need time. Even if time, too, is proving incompetent at doing its job. An entire day has passed since I found myself arriving in Athens, completely lost, and nothing has become more coherent or cohesive.
Nothing makes sense. And Nero’s reaction to my absence has only made everything harder to understand. The man frantically searching for me is impossible to reconcile with the image his mother’s words painted in my mind—with the image his own voice, in that recorded conversation, burned into my brain.
Those statements continue to haunt me every second I’m awake and every moment I try to sleep. That isn’t the man I know. It isn’t the man who placed this ring on my finger and made me a million promises. That isn’t the man with whom I was certain I wanted to share my life.
There is something different, though. Some of my feelings have grown stronger. Hatred, for instance.
I hate Lysandra Zanthos.
I never thought I would truly say that about someone. As a figure of speech? Always. But for real? Never. Not once. I suppose things change, because amid the chaos of doubt that I am, this is not one of them—I hate that woman.
I hate her deceptive appearance, her cruel smile, the way she positions herself above me. I hate her rotten heart, her sadistic intentions, her venomous words.
I hate that she is my child’s grandmother. I hate that she is Nero’s mother. I hate that she was capable of making me doubt Nero’s feelings and his intentions. I hate her. With every grain of who I am, I hate her.
