Chapter Four #2
‘You can let go now.’
She nearly jumped out of her skin as Antaeus’s hand closed over hers, the one that was still gripping his thigh. His eyes were searching her face. ‘Are you okay?’
For a moment she couldn’t speak. And not simply because seconds earlier, she had thought she was going to die. It was the fact that she reached for him. She hated that she had done that, and she wanted to tell him that it meant nothing, but she also didn’t want to draw any more attention to it.
‘Cassie? Just take a breath.’ His voice was harsher, more imperative now, and she frowned.
‘I’m fine. No thanks to you.’ She flinched as lightning cracked overhead, and in the flickering light she saw that they had landed on a flat plateau of rock, edged with some sodden-looking bushes.
Then the world was plunged back into a rain-saturated twilight. But there was enough light for her to see his face harden.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just that I thought you wanted to upend my life, not end it.’
‘You really think I would do that?’
She remembered his hand reaching to check her belt. His blue eyes searched her face. No, she didn’t think that. But right now, for understandable reasons, she wasn’t thinking beyond the rain pounding in her left ear and the pulse hammering in her right.
Outside, the world was a blur of water and twitching light and a wind that was making the helicopter shudder violently.
But beyond the beams of the headlights, the darkness felt enormous as if there was an abyss on the other side.
Her breath was thin and hard to catch.
Theoretically they were safe now, but her mind kept replaying that moment when the storm had felt like an angry god.
As they hung suspended between the sky and the mountain all her fears—of losing her business, the indignity of being Antaeus’s plaything and now prisoner—all had been replaced with a single all-consuming terror.
In that moment, she and Antaeus had seemed utterly, terrifyingly insignificant. Powerless.
Or rather, she was powerless. Antaeus had stayed calm, focused, seemingly unmoved by the tumult.
She shivered as if her body was trying to shift that feeling of dread, but it had settled in her marrow.
Now every muscle was trembling in an echo of that all-consuming panic and bone-deep realisation of their fragility.
‘You’re taking over my business against my will, and you basically kidnapped me, so forgive me if I don’t know where you draw the line. Could you turn off those headlight things?’ she added quickly. The sight of the wind tearing horizontally down the slope was giving her vertigo.
‘Kidnappers typically ask for a ransom.’ Antaeus leaned forward and flicked a switch, then another, and she blinked into a different kind of light, low, warm, soft, controlled.
‘I’m paying to take over your business.’ He had turned to look at her, and his mouth tightened. ‘You’re shaking.’
His simple observation caught her off guard.
She had been so consumed by her own internal chaos that she hadn’t realized her trembling was visible.
But why did he care? He didn’t like her.
He was a ruthless businessman, a kidnapper, a man who saw her as a pawn in his game.
Yet the concern in his eyes was undeniable.
‘It’s completely normal,’ he said then, but beneath the firmness of his voice, she could hear a different note. ‘Your body is trying to reset itself.’
‘Why aren’t you shaking?’
‘I understand the physics involved.’
His warm hand rested momentarily on her shoulder as if to check what he was seeing, and she had to stifle an urge to lean into it.
She should hate him. He was the reason she was here.
He was stealing not just her business but her security, her pride and now her freedom.
Yet as her body shook, the anger and resentment that should have been at the forefront of her mind were drowned out by a primal, overwhelming need for comfort.
She wanted to press her face against his chest, let his steady heartbeat still her frantic one.
‘You need to warm up. I’ll get something.’
His hand lifted. The air on her skin felt cold and invasive and several kinds of wrong, but he was already unbuckling his seat belt and moving to the passenger cabin behind them.
Leaning back limply in her seat, Cassie let out a shaky breath. She understood the science of how a body responded to a near death experience, but hearing him say it out loud had been reassuring in a way that it wasn’t inside her head.
In the moments when the helicopter was plummeting apparently to its doom, her heart had hammered, her breath accelerated, and every muscle had tensed, poised for an action that was impossible in the confines of the cabin.
Her body had done its job, but it had required a massive burst of energy, and now she had crashed.
Better her than the helicopter, she thought weakly.
Antaeus was back. He was holding a jacket.
She had expected one of those emergency blankets, the foil kind, and maybe something of her confusion showed on her face. He said quietly, ‘You’ve had a shock, but you’re not in shock. There’s a difference. Here.’
She started to protest, but he had already slipped the jacket over her shoulders.
The weight of it grounded her. ‘Put your arms in,’ he ordered.
As she pulled the edges across her stomach, she could smell the wool and something like cedar, and it was reassuring to breathe in that scent. His scent, she realised a moment later.
‘Is this something you do often?’ she asked to hide her reaction.
‘Give women my jacket?’ He sat down in the pilot’s seat, his legs loosely stretched, his eyes moving to check the instrument panel. ‘Not often. Maybe never.’ He was looking at her now, and the soft interior lights carved shadows beneath his cheekbones.
It made him look like some mythical Greek hero.
‘No, landing helicopters in emergencies. You seemed so calm.’
For a moment he didn’t reply, and then he shrugged. ‘When I was nineteen, I did a year of national service in the army. Military conscription is mandatory in Greece.’
He glanced back to the dashboard, and she studied his profile again. Why would he be conscripted? ‘Were you born here, then?’
Another pause. ‘No, I was born in New York. But I moved here when I was twelve.’
That must have been right after his dad went to prison.
But why would he have moved to Greece? She knew only the barest bones about his life.
Most of what she knew centred on his stratospheric business success, and that was only the generic kind of stuff everyone knew about someone like him.
Someone rich and successful and in the public eye.
His past, the past where their lifelines overlapped, was like another country.
She did consider finding out more. After she discovered he was behind the takeover, she had typed his name into the search engine on her laptop, but knowing more would have made him more real. Made the threat of him more real.
But how could you defeat an enemy you didn’t understand? And that’s what he was, she reminded herself quickly.
‘Was your mother Greek too?’ Helen was a Greek name, so that would make sense, but after another infinitesimal pause, Antaeus was shaking his head.
‘I wasn’t living with my mother.’ His eyes moved again to the swirling darkness beyond the window.
‘She died about nine months after my father went to prison. She was in a car accident. Both my parents were only children, and my mother’s parents were dead, so I went to live with Papou, my grandfather. He died when I was eighteen.’
Which meant that he had lost both his parents, his home and his homeland when he was twelve years old.
Lost the remaining family he had before she had even left home.
No wonder he was so furious with the world.
And with Henry specifically. Probably he would have conflated all those terrible things into one, but they would start with Andreas being sent to prison.
‘I’m sorry about your grandfather and your mother. I didn’t know that had happened.’
‘You don’t know anything about me. And even if you did, people like you see what you want to see.’
People like her.
After the gentleness of his voice earlier, the harsher note as much as that offhand comment caught her off balance, and she was suddenly close to bursting into tears.
He meant like Henry, and even though she was only here because Antaeus had judged her guilty by association, it hurt more this time.
She was not like her dad, had spent much of her life actively trying to do the opposite of what she knew he would do in any given situation.
But even now it was hard to distance herself, to stay separate. Despite it all, Henry was her father.
Surely Antaeus would understand that? Andreas’s conviction and incarceration must have cast a huge shadow over his life, and for a moment she wanted to press her hand against his shoulder, pin him to his seat and make him understand that fact.
But conceal, don’t reveal was a mantra she had learned from birth.
People in her set valued emotional restraint almost as much as they valued money.
Vulnerability was a liability. The need to keep up appearances took precedence over everything, and she was an expert at hiding her feelings.
And not just outside of the home. Cecilia didn’t need to feel more guilty than she already did.
As for Henry, she had always known that confronting him would make no difference, yet a tiny part of her wanted to pretend that he was different with her. That she meant more to him.
Abruptly, as if he had revealed more than he wanted, Antaeus straightened in his seat.
‘You should get some sleep.’
Sleep? She frowned. ‘We’re not going to stay here, are we?’ It was bad enough being in the cabin with him in daylight and with the pilot sitting just a few feet away. But being in the same restricted space with Antaeus alone and in darkness?