Chapter Six #3
‘I grew up down the coast. When I was a teenager, I used to work here in the summer at one of the restaurants. I camped on the mountain rather than going home every night, and I saw this house and liked it.’ He liked it aesthetically, but what he liked most was how protected it was.
It didn’t have a drawbridge like those English castles, but its rocky location offered a reassuring impregnability.
No one could enter without warning and take what was his.
They had reached the terrace. There were shadows across the pool, and a lizard was basking in the remaining sun.
It was the same colour as Cassie’s eyes.
As they walked towards the tiny creature, it froze.
He had a sudden vivid flashback to that moment in her office when he had told her that he was going to shut her business down.
‘Didn’t you get into trouble?’
‘With who?’ He spoke without thinking, and he saw a flicker of curiosity and confusion in her eyes. And something else, something almost like concern.
‘Your grandfather,’ she said simply.
Of course it would be simple for Cassie.
His breath pooled in his throat. She was loved, indulged.
She hadn’t been picked up and dumped on a reluctant relative like those branches deposited on the mountain in the storm.
His grandfather had been as reluctant to take him as he was insistent that Antaeus step up and avenge his father.
It was the first time he had admitted that to himself, and he felt almost dizzy with the shock that it should be with Cassie as his witness.
To cover his confusion, he scuffed some stray petals to the gully at the edge of the terrace.
‘He found it hard. Having me there. He was used to being on his own, and then suddenly he had this teenager he hardly knew living with him. He found it difficult to adapt.’ Truthfully, he’d been disappointed in his grandson. By his resemblance to his mother. By the dilution of his Greek ancestry.
‘You were a child. You were twelve years old.’
‘Nearly thirteen.’ A man almost, in his grandfather’s eyes. ‘He was my age when the civil war broke out. He was given a gun when he was fifteen. He grew up on a battlefield. To him, childhood was a luxury.’
In the chaotic, brutal upheaval of war, the journey to manhood had been abrupt, less a process than a shove.
‘You’d just lost your mother. Your dad was in prison,’ Cassie said gently.
He had been so lonely, felt so alone. Bad things happened. That’s what his grandfather had said when he met him at the airport. ‘What matters is what you do next. You have to fight. You have to survive. You have to win, whatever it takes.’
And what it took was devoting his life to avenging his father. As for his mother, his grandfather had been brusquely, almost brutally matter-of-fact. Yes, she was dead. But death was unfortunately an inevitable albeit painful fact of life.
‘He was from a different time. For him, life was harsh. He wasn’t one for abstract laws or social niceties.’
Cassie was biting her lip. ‘Is that why your father was like he was?’ It was just a question.
But she was peeling back the layers, and if she went far enough, she might see the pain and the loneliness at the heart of him.
The thought was appalling. It made him want to rage at the unfairness of it all. To punch a hole in the sky.
‘You never met my father,’ he said.
‘And you never met mine.’
‘Oh, I met him. Numerous times. I even met you once. As a baby. He brought you into the office when I was there too.’
They were still walking, but now Cassie stopped.
She looked stunned, more than stunned. She looked shaken to the core by his admission.
Antaeus didn’t like the way her hands were trembling in the fading sunshine.
Or the tightness in his chest as he remembered Henry ruffling his hair as he leaned down to show him Cassie as a baby.
‘My father was obsessed with building a legacy business. He wanted me to be a part of that. He was very single-minded.’ It had been claustrophobic sometimes. His dad had been so blinkered. So lost in his own ambition.
‘He used to take me into work with him, and Henry would be there.’
There was a long, twisting silence. ‘Then you never met him at all,’ she said finally.
He stared at her in confusion. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and her eyes were very green. Her voice was fierce with something he didn’t understand. And he didn’t like that she could do that. That she could keep herself opaque to him.
Cassie felt weak and singed by the sudden laser focus of Antaeus’s gaze. To distract him, to distract herself from the out-of-control merry-go-round of panic swirling inside her chest, she held out her phone.
‘What does matter is that I can’t get any signal.’
‘You won’t. There’s no connection to the outside world here. No TV or radio. No email. No phone. I have the satellite phone for emergencies, but I come here to relax. To think.’
She took a breath. ‘This is an emergency. I need to get in touch with my mom. Let her know I’m okay. She’ll worry about me if I don’t call.’
‘She isn’t worried,’ he said calmly. ‘I had my PA talk to your PA—Daniel, is it? Anyway, she explained to him that you were staying out here for a little longer. Enjoying a digital detox. Your mother was delighted. You work too hard, apparently.’
‘I want to speak to her.’
‘We can’t always get what we want, can we, Cassie? I mean, my father had five hours of phone calls a month when he was first locked up.’
She felt the same mix of exhaustion and frustration that she’d felt in New York. In other words, he wasn’t going to let her use the satellite phone.
Blood burned beneath the skin of her cheeks. She felt trapped again, more so even than she had in the helicopter. Every time it felt like they were breaking free of the past, it tightened its grip.
‘And I’m sorry about that, but it has nothing to do with me, and it certainly has nothing to do with my mother, so don’t make her a part of this.’ She started to walk towards the house again.
‘She is a part of it. She was married to your father when he took thirty pieces of silver to save his own neck. Or are you trying to tell me that she didn’t know what he did to my dad?’
Cassie felt her stomach lurch. Could she say that for sure?
Something of what she was thinking must have shown on her face, because Antaeus was shaking his head, his eyes dark with derision.
‘You’re all the same, aren’t you? Birds of a feather.’
Yes, they were. But not in the way that he meant, she thought, and the injustice of that made her temper snap. She came to an abrupt halt beside the doors to the sitting room. One was closed, and the other was open. It felt like a metaphor for every interaction they’d ever had.
Except one.
Pushing aside the memory of his body surging inside hers, she turned to face him.
‘I could say the same about you and your father. Although you’ve branched out from fraud and money laundering to blackmail and abduction. He would be so proud.’
‘If I were you, I would be very careful how far you push me, Princess,’ he said then, and there was a hoarse kind of softness to his voice that made her shiver inside.
‘But you’re not me, are you? Because if our situations were reversed, I wouldn’t be enacting some archaic revenge on you.’
He scoffed. ‘Because you’re so sweet and innocent.’