Chapter Eleven
C HRISTOS COULDN ’ T STOP THINKING about the conversation he’d had with Sylvie last night. And he was trying to focus on a new acquisition. Which he could have done from anywhere in the world, but he was doing it from London.
Coward.
He saw it in his head like a text bubble from Sylvie.
He growled. She didn’t know anything.
Because you won’t tell me.
Another text bubble in his mind.
He loosened his tie as he walked into his London penthouse. And was shocked to see Sylvie standing at the center of the room, her hand resting on her stomach. It took him thirty seconds to notice that the doctor and the nurse were present as well.
“I brought the ultrasound to you,” she said.
“I told you—”
“You tell me a lot of things. You told me that we were getting married. You told me that I had to get a DNA test for the baby. You told me that I had to get an ultrasound to determine whether or not the pregnancy was viable. And now I’m telling you that I want you at this ultrasound to see our child.
I don’t want to report back to you. I don’t want you to distance yourself. ”
“I’m not distancing myself,” he said. That would imply that he had any hope of being close even if he wanted to be.
Sylvie made direct eye contact with him and lay down on the table, lifting up her top and rolling down her pants.
“What happened to not wanting me to see?”
“That ship has sailed. Even if it’s been a while.”
It had been a while. He did his best not to let his eyes wander over her curves. Over all the changes that had taken place in her body. Her fuller breasts, her rounded stomach. He did his best not to stare at her. But it was nearly impossible. She was so beautiful. Had she always been?
She reminded him of a forest nymph. Her hair was wild, and she looked almost sinfully beautiful with her rounded pregnancy curves.
Or maybe it was the defiance. Maybe that was the biggest thing that grabbed hold of him and held him steady. That kept him in thrall.
She had shown up here when he had refused to come to her.
When had something like that ever happened? The only time a person had ever come to find him it had been to beg for something from him. But she wasn’t doing that. She was making him bear witness. To this. To this thing that they were in together. The thing that he had been trying to deny.
The ultrasound tech squirted gel onto her stomach and began the process. The heartbeat was strong in the room. And he felt it echoing inside of him. Beating almost in rhythm with his own.
His child. A son or a daughter that had been created in the center of his passion with Sylvie.
He felt like he couldn’t breathe.
And yet that heart beat on. Like it was his own.
He looked at Sylvie, trying to determine if she felt the same thing. He saw tears shimmering in her eyes.
And then she smiled. “This is what I was waiting for. This is what I was waiting to feel. I’m so… I’m so happy.”
A tear spilled down her cheek, and right then he felt like a boy with his nose pressed up against the glass window, something uncompromising separating him from being entirely in this moment.
What exactly did she feel? How did he find a way to feel it too?
And at the same time, he wanted to turn and run away from it. He wanted to get on his plane again and fly somewhere else. He didn’t want to stand there witnessing it, watching it. He would’ve preferred that she texted to him.
He would’ve preferred that he could have some distance. Distance.
That word again.
His whole life was distance.
But Sylvie wasn’t allowing him to maintain it.
“What has kept you from feeling it?” he asked, his throat so tight the words were nearly strangled.
“It’s been overwhelming. I was grappling with the idea that the person that I thought you were didn’t exist. He does, though.”
He had no idea what that meant. He had no idea what it meant, and he felt as if he had been stabbed clean through the chest.
But he wasn’t going to ask. Not there in front of the doctor. Not there in front of that nurse that hated him. Openly. She was glaring at him even now.
“It’s a boy,” the doctor said.
A son. He was having a son.
And he had an instant, visceral image of himself as a small boy. Looking up at his father. And his father staring back down at him with eyes black as coal. Nothing behind them.
And then he saw himself again, sitting in his office chair, and staring down at his father, now a withered old man. Prostrate on his knees begging for the kind of mercy that had never been shown to Christos.
“And now you know how it feels to be powerless.”
Panic raged through him. Like all the years of fear he hadn’t allowed himself to feel had suddenly come to rest on his shoulders.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know how to be a father.
He didn’t even know how to be a son. He knew how to cause pain. He knew how to win.
He knew how to destroy.
How was he supposed to raise a child? How was he supposed to find tenderness in his hands? In his heart.
He couldn’t breathe.
The room was tilting sideways, and he had no idea what was happening to him. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said.
Sylvie pushed herself up off the bed. The doctor looked over at him. But it was the nurse who crossed the room and put a stethoscope on his chest.
“You’re having a panic attack,” she said.
“I am not,” he said, wrenching his tie free, and tearing the top two buttons off his shirt. “I’ve never panicked in my life.”
“You’re panicking now,” she said.
Sylvie sat up, pushing her shirt down in place and swinging her legs off of the table. “Christos, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he growled. “Except maybe I can get an EKG, since I might be dying.”
Sylvie looked at the nurse. “He’s not dying, is he?”
“We can always double-check. But in my experience men like him live regrettably long lives.”
Sylvie ignored the poisonous words, but they hit Christos squarely as intended. Men like him.
She knew that he was a bad man. That was why she hated him.
She had seen the way that he had treated Sylvie. And for that reason, she held him in disdain.
Perhaps he should have disdain for himself.
And he was going to be a father.
“You’re not the first man to have a total and complete freak-out because you’re having a son,” she said. “But it’s preferable to the men who break things because they’re having a daughter and they’re just angry that it isn’t a son to carry on their family name.”
Family name.
He didn’t even have a family name. He had a name he had chosen for himself. A name that had come to mean… What? It was synonymous now with the ruthless way that he conducted business.
With his media empire. But what did it really mean? Would his son want to burn his name to the ground too? Just as Christos had done?
“Thank you,” she said. “You can take the private plane back whenever you want. And in the meantime, you can enjoy the city.”
His breathing seemed to be calming down, and he was outraged because it meant that perhaps the angry nurse was correct.
He had panicked.
An overflow of an emotion he had never allowed himself to feel. He didn’t know what to make of that. He didn’t understand it.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” he said to Sylvie.
“I understand that,” she said. “Is that why… Is that why this is so…”
“Nothing is too much for me,” he said. “I have seen terrible things, Sylvie, and I have never once felt anything like that. If I die in my sleep it is on your head.”
He walked away from her, moving into the kitchen so that he could pour himself some whiskey. He knew that she couldn’t have a drink. He didn’t care.
He braced his hands on the counter and looked down. He held himself there like that, trying to find himself. His breath.
Who he was.
“Christos, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, then I can’t help you.”
“What makes you think you can help me? You weren’t there. Not for any other part of my life before this. You never have been. What makes you think that you could do something for me? We are having a son.”
“Yes. We are. Does that make you happy?”
“I don’t know how to be a father. How will I…”
And he realized exactly the abyss he was staring into. The horrible realization that the last thing he wanted was to raise a child who might turn out like him.
He was his own nightmare.
He was the monster in the shadows. Not his father. Not any of the men who had abused and mistreated him during his years as a trafficked laborer.
He had become the darkness.
And he couldn’t bear the idea of a boy modeling himself after him. Of him becoming the man that a woman like that nurse would look at with disdain.
The world could not contain more men like him. Because he was…
“I’m not a good man, Sylvie.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Would you want our child to be like me?”
She looked at him for a long moment, and then she stepped forward, put her hand on his face. “I don’t want our child to be traumatized. And I have a very strong feeling that whatever this is, whatever you are, it’s connected to something that happened to you.”
“How do I raise him? I need you,” he said. “You were right. I am the dysfunctional parent. I-I can offer him nothing but money. Nothing.”
“You can love him, Christos. I went and saw my mother. And she said that she was proud of me for getting pregnant with your baby. She thinks that I trapped you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know. But it hit me then that my mother just doesn’t understand me.
She will never be proud of me. Not of who I am.
Because nothing that I am means anything to her.
She doesn’t care about the same things I care about.
She doesn’t want the same things that I want.
I’m not good enough for her because we just…
we exist in two totally different spheres.
And she doesn’t know how to care about someone who doesn’t reinforce her own values.
If she could have just loved me, that would’ve changed a lot of things for me.
I didn’t need her to be a perfect example. I just needed her to…care.”
“What if I don’t even know how to do that?”
“If you didn’t care you wouldn’t have reacted that way.”
“I still think it might’ve been a medical event.”
“I don’t think it was.”
“You don’t know that.”
She looked around, her expression tacitly unconcerned. As if she didn’t believe at all he was on the verge of death. “I hope you have a place for me to sleep here.”
He frowned. “Are you staying?”
“Well, I’m certainly not flying back to New York tonight.”
She stared up at him, and she had that look on her face. She was being particularly stubborn. He found himself wanting to lean toward her. He found himself wanting to get closer.
And so he took a step away.
“It’s okay. I’ll manage to find a room myself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. But he didn’t move.
So she leaned in. She closed the distance between them. And she kissed him on the mouth.