CHAPTER THREE
DIONYSUSLIVEDHIS life in such a way that very few things had the power to shock him. But this succeeded.
Ariadne succeeded.
Wasn’t that the story of his existence? Ariadne got beneath his skin where no one else ever could.
“And how exactly would that be accomplished?”
He had an idea. One that was vivid, and blasphemous given the circumstances. Given that his brother had only been dead in the ground for two weeks.
Given that she was his sister-in-law.
That she was as forbidden to him now as she had ever been.
Given that she was now frail and recovering from what had just happened.
“Insemination,” she said.
His lip curled. “You expect that I will... Go into a clinical bathroom and take myself in hand.”
“Of course not, you idiot. You’re a billionaire. Use your imagination. You will go into your luxury bedroom and take yourself in hand.”
She made eye contact with him, her expression bold, her cheeks bright red, indicating that she was not quite so unbothered by the image as she was pretending to be.
That was Ariadne.
It had always shocked him that she had been quite so infatuated with Theseus.
Dionysus loved his brother, but there was so much seriousness in him. He never had the fight that Dionysus did. He didn’t carry the rage.
In the end, Dionysus often felt that it was the rage which kept him going. The rage which compelled him on when it sometimes felt as if things were hopeless.
It was also likely what had kept him and Ariadne apart. There was an intensity there that vibrated with far too much energy.
Theseus had been easy for her to get close to because of his stillness.
Though then, Ariadne had been bold.
He could remember her well as a young girl running feral about the island. When they first met, he would never have known that she was the daughter of a wealthy family who had their house built across the sandy expanse of shore. He would have imagined that she was the daughter of a cook, or perhaps a stable hand.
Their father took far too much of an interest in everything they did. He ruled them with an iron fist. Ariadne’s father, by contrast, barely seemed to remember that he had a daughter. She had been raised by a series of nannies, and as she had gotten older, by no one at all.
A girl isolated and lonely in a palatial estate. Theseus and Dionysus had adopted her with vigor.
She had climbed rocks barefoot, leapt from waterfalls into deep clear pools below. Her dark hair had always been a mass of tangles.
After she had married Theseus, she had changed. They didn’t have the closeness they’d had as boys, but he and Theseus had still spent holidays together, and of course both were members of the Diamond Club, as the richest pair of twins in the world.
And two of the richest men on earth in their own right.
They also often attended many of the same charity events. Where Ariadne tamed all her wildness and presented herself as a sleek socialite.
But this, this right here was the fire that he expected to see in her eyes. This was the intensity that he counted on from Ariadne. At least the Ariadne of old. Problem solving, never letting go. Clinging to something with all tenacity.
He had seen glimpses of this woman over the years. Flashes of the wild thing she’d been once and he’d always wanted to draw her all the way to the surface.
He could remember baiting her at the last gala they’d both been at.
The girl I knew once would have dared me to steal a bottle of champagne and swim in the fountain.
The girl you knew once didn’t have responsibilities.
A shame then, that we’ve both had to grow up.
We don’t live in Neverland.
A painful thought since he could have easily seen the two of them as Wendy and Peter. Perhaps he was more Captain Hook.
But now the girl with fire in her eyes was back.
He should hate that it was due to her loss. He found it hard to hate anything about the sparks in her eyes.
Her request was as a predator, tearing through his chest.
“You would have me be... A favorite uncle? To my own child?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her tone placid. “You don’t want children, do you?”
“No,” he said. Simply.
If there had been a notion in him to carry on his bloodline, if he had even for a second of time entertained that he might marry, find a wife, produce children, he had given it up long ago. And he would not allow it to be revived now.
Not during this discussion. This discussion of him providing his brother with the heir he could no longer have.
With the woman who had been haunting his dreams since he was a boy.
“Then why should it be a problem?” she asked. “Many people donate their genetic material toward the creation of a child, it does not make them that child’s mother or father. My mother, for instance, was certainly never around.”
“No indeed,” he said. “But a noted difference is that I would be in the child’s life. Presumably. And that might complicate things.”
“Is that a bad thing? Fatherhood, in a sense, without the real responsibility of it?”
She believed what the press said about him. That much was clear. She no longer saw him as the boy she’d known when they’d spent their days running free in the forest. She thought he’d become the kind of man who could father a child and pretend it hadn’t happened.
The media painted his portrait in that shape. He had never minded it.
He minded it now.
“And what will you tell the child?” he asked.
She looked stunned by that. “The child has yet to come into existence, so I think I have time to figure that out.”
“And what will your story be? Because you have lost this baby, which I assume must have been nearly a month along.” His words sounded flat and calloused even to his own ears.
“Timing?” She blinked. “That’s what you’re concerned about?”
“It is not wrong to concern myself with the credibility of this.”
“I will tell your father that Theseus banked his sperm. In case there were issues.”
“All right.” He had to admit that was possible. A man in Theseus’s position would likely have put something like that in place. In fact, he was surprised his brother hadn’t.
“So you’ll admit that you lost a pregnancy, but claim you had artificial insemination done afterward.”
“If questions of timing arise. And if they do, undoubtedly at that point your father will demand a DNA test. Which I will give. And it will be impossible to tell whether or not the child was fathered by you or by Theseus. And in fact, doing so would demand... I believe it’s extensive genetic sequencing, which can no longer be done on your brother, since he is deceased.” She swallowed hard. “I know. This is all extremely hard and mercenary. When Theseus is dead, and my baby is lost. I don’t feel mercenary about it. I don’t feel hard. But I cannot allow this to break me. And I cannot allow your father to win. One thing I need you to understand, is that Theseus hated your father.”
That shocked him. To his core. Because as far as Dionysus was concerned, Theseus was their father’s puppet. It was nearly impossible to imagine that his brother who had behaved as a performing monkey for their father all this time hated the man.
He knew they’d both...had complicated relationships with him but Theseus’s willingness to please him had convinced Dionysus it was a Stockholm Syndrome situation.
He wasn’t a psychologist but he knew well enough just how complicated things were with abusive parents.
“He never indicated as much to me.”
“He wouldn’t have. It was important that he kept that secret. Under control. Because he never wanted to lose his power over the shipping company. He worked to change things. You have no idea the state it was in when he took over.”
“Why didn’t he publicize that it was in poor condition?”
“It wasn’t the company. It was the treatment of its employees. It was workplace safety. Wages. There were so many illegal things happening, and he restructured it all. He changed people’s lives. Your brother was a very good man. And you might be angry at him for leaving. I know that I am sometimes. But he was a man who cared very deeply about all of these things, and it was a weight that he carried that grew heavier and heavier as time went on. One thing I know for sure is that I cannot allow your father to put his hand back into this company. I have to preserve it. I have to save it. And I want Theseus to have a legacy. That legacy will be a child that grows up to be nothing like your father. That legacy will be a child who has a father that he can be proud of, even if he isn’t here.”
“And for yourself?”
“Of course I’m...” She suddenly looked very small and lost. “I can’t think about myself right now. Because I’ve lost too much. Because if I start to ponder the intensity of everything that is now gone for me I’m afraid that I’m going to collapse. I won’t be able to stand back up. I can’t afford it. Not right now. All I can do is keep moving forward. So will you do this for me or not?”
That actually was no choice to be made. He hated it. The very idea of it all. But...
Hearing what his brother had been carrying, work that he had done, and feeling the extreme guilt he did over not being closer to his brother these past years when their time had been limited, what else could he do?
He owed his brother. It was as simple as that. Though he would not give her confirmation just yet.
“We will need to come to an agreement on details.”
“Good. I’ll talk to the doctor about...” Her eyes filled with tears. “When will be best to proceed.” She was so strong, even as she sat there looking devastated. Her dark hair reminded him more now of the girl she had been. No longer captured in a smooth bun, but wild curls framing her face, falling down her back.
She was pale. Strong.
She had always been slender, and petite. And always containing an immense amount of strength. Much more than you would have ever imagined a girl her size could carry. Now a woman with slender shoulders carrying the weight of his brother’s legacy.
Foregoing any thought to her own.
“Your safety is paramount,” he said. “I will not allow you to sacrifice yourself upon the altar of my brother’s legacy. I need to know if you’re at a greater risk of hemorrhage than another woman might be. Do you understand me?”
She looked at him. “And why exactly should you have anything to say about that?”
“Because my brother appears to have sacrificed himself upon the legacy of our company. And I think it’s quite enough martyring for one family, don’t you?”
“It isn’t martyring. It is simply doing the right thing. I know that that’s antithetical to your libertine lifestyle.”
“There is more than one way to throw yourself onto a pyre, Ariadne. Of this I am certain. But there isn’t any reason for you to continue doing it.”
“I want a child,” she said, her voice getting thin. “I was... You know about my childhood. I was very lonely. My parents barely acknowledged that I existed. They still barely acknowledge my existence. And you know that. I want to be the kind of mother that I never had. That I never saw. I don’t want to have a child simply for the legacy. I want to have a child so that I can love them. And if I can’t have this baby, not only will I lose the staff that has become so important to me, this company that has become part of my own legacy, part of something that I have built, I will lose the future that I was planning for myself. I will be left entirely alone. Theseus was my best friend. He was my confidant. He was the person I was closest to in all of this world. And he’s gone. I can’t call him and speak to him. I cannot say good morning to him. I cannot seek shelter in his arms as I try to figure out how to deal with both his loss and the loss of our child.”
“And I’m very sorry,” he said, hot emotion rising up in his chest. “But I am not the one who took anything from you.”
“I know that. But I just hope, that because of the love you have for your brother, and because of the friendship that you and I have shared for so long, that you will... Take that into account as you make your decision.”
“If you fall pregnant, you will come and stay with me. I will not allow you to be by yourself. Not after that.”
“You’re never home,” she pointed out.
“Then I will be.”
“Don’t get controlling,” she said.
“Is it controlling when you are an integral part of something?”
It was not a question. He would rearrange everything to make sure that Ariadne was safe. There were spare few people in his life that mattered to him. She was one of them. His brother had been the other.
She was right to say that it was his feelings for the both of them that compelled him now.
Her doctor came in after and told her that she was free to leave today. And he took it upon himself to make arrangements to get them both out of England as quickly and discreetly as possible. His private jet was outfitted and ready to go, and he had decided that he knew exactly what they needed.
She was correct, of course. They would not be conducting this pregnancy attempt in a standard clinic. They had the luxury of bringing the perfect team to them, and he fully expected to take advantage of that. Not that he knew anything about trying to help a woman get pregnant. His expertise lay in the prevention thereof, if anything.
But he intended to become an expert, and quickly.
“Are we headed back to my town house or...” she asked once they were on the road, being driven toward the airport, and, quite clearly not toward her town house.
“No,” he said.
“Didn’t I tell you not to get controlling?”
“You also asked for my sperm. I feel like we’re living in a strange time where our boundaries are not quite as clear as they used to be.”
“Dionysus...”
“We are going to Greece,” he said. He paused for a moment, feeling like he was about to peel back the curtains covering his deepest heart and expose things he’d rather not. “I bought the island, you know.”
She looked at him, shocked. “No. I didn’t know that. Why would I know that?”
The realization she hadn’t known hollowed out a space inside of him.
“I thought perhaps Theseus might’ve told you.”
“Theseus didn’t speak of that island.”
“A shame then. Because there were good times there too.”
“Maybe for you. Your father was hideous to him. He was—”
“Our father was with us whether we were on that island or not. Our father was with us always.” He tapped on his temple. “Our father’s greatest game was being in our minds. Don’t you think that is true? Our father’s words were the poison in his veins then. Telling him that he had no value. Telling him that he would never be good enough. Don’t you agree?”
He watched as she swallowed hard. “I suppose so.”
“You know it to be true. Perhaps he felt a certain measure of trauma tied to the island, but I don’t. I consider it taking control back. Anyway, if I was happy anywhere, it was there.”
It was perhaps a little bit more revealing than he had intended it to be. He hadn’t realized until he had said the words just how true they were. He had loved his time on the island, because it was where they had met Ariadne. Because it was the only place they ever had any freedom. When they were in England they were locked away in a manor house with teachers dictating their every movement. When they were in Athens it was the same. Their father’s corporation had always maintained offices in both countries, and that meant they spent a significant amount of time in both. Their father was Greek in heritage, but often more English in nationality. Their mother had been English.
Still, it had been essential that they spoke Greek. Spanish. Japanese. Chinese. Part of their rigorous education to make them superhuman. Men without flaws.
Of course, it had been an asset to Dionysus in business. And also in pleasure. Though he found words were often unnecessary when he seduced a woman, it was nice to be able to communicate at least on a rudimentary level. And the removal of language barriers certainly made things more interesting.
Dionysus wasn’t certain if his father really cared about his sons being a glorious reflection of him, or if he simply liked to flex control when and as he could. And having control over their education down to the very last detail was having control over them.
Having control over their minds, as he had just said.
“I was happy on the island,” Ariadne said softly.
He was surprised to hear her say that, if only because the weight of his transgression loomed large between them without Theseus here. He felt no guilt over it. He had wanted her and it had been his one chance to taste her.
He regretted that he’d damaged his closeness with his brother.
But he never regretted that he’d kissed her.
“I won’t mind going there,” she continued.
But she hadn’t, he realized. Because Theseus hadn’t wanted to. Theseus had known Dionysus had bought the island. He’d known about his plans for it. They had spoken about it over drinks at the Diamond Club only last year.
He had invited them to come, and Theseus had not said anything half so bold as I hate it there. He had been as he ever was. Diplomatic. Easy.
He had said that of course when they were able to clear their schedules both he and Ariadne would be delighted to come to the island.
But they never had. And he had decided for some reason that Ariadne was the one who did not wish to go. Perhaps because he often tied pain in his chest to Ariadne. If he tied it to his brother, if he blamed Theseus, well, that would have been a loss he couldn’t afford. He had never wanted to cut ties with his twin.
And now his twin was gone.
They pulled into the section of the airport which housed private aircraft. They were taken right to his jet. They got out of the car and he braced her.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“I don’t wish for you to fall. You still seem fragile.”
She looked up at him, green eyes sparkling. “Does anything about me seem fragile?”
No. In spite of her frame, she had never seemed fragile. That was why it had been so terrifying to watch her fold like that in the club. To glimpse her mortality.
It all felt too raw. Too frightening. He trusted nothing. The world was cruel. It always had been. But it seemed eager to flex that cruelty now in a way that it had not for the past several decades.
“Is my father’s house still there?” she asked as they boarded the plane.
“No,” he said. “Both homes were leveled. I cleared them out. Built one new residence for myself. There is nothing and no one else on the island.”
She looked shocked. “Really?”
“I always thought the perfect paradise would have been one without our families there. One where we were allowed to roam free and wild. I suppose I made that for myself.”
“And you have massive parties there every weekend?”
“No,” he said gravely. “I don’t.”
She looked baffled by that.
“But I would have thought...”
Anger rose up inside him, and he did not bother to hold it back.
“Do you know me, Ariadne, or do you only know now what the papers print about me?”
He didn’t know why it irritated him, that she had reduced him to the headlines, the same as everybody else.
It wasn’t that they weren’t true, they were. He was an incorrigible libertine. All the better to numb life’s pain. All the better to manage his rage.
Rage that had knit his bones together in the womb, a legacy from his father. Twisted by his upbringing.
Cemented when he’d lost the one woman he’d ever cared about.
He had changed.
But he was also still himself. He was still the boy that she had known. He still found solace in remote and wild places. In swimming beneath natural waterfalls and lying in the sand. He still found sanity in olive groves and solitude. He was not only the voracious monster that devoured everything in his path. Turning it all to hedonistic pleasure.
It was not all he was.
She was the only person left on earth who ought to know that.
He wondered then, how Theseus had spoken of him, in the privacy of their home. Because he had seemed as pleasant as ever the last time they’d seen each other, but surely, Theseus’s own vision of him must have shaped hers.
“What am I supposed to think? We haven’t been close in years, and you know that. Small talk at events and holiday dinners packed full of other business associates is hardly a relationship. It isn’t as if we... Talk the way that we used to. We are not children. We have lives. You went out and started a major company, and I do applaud you for that. The success that you have, you earned yourself, and it is an amazing thing. Different, and no less amazing, was Theseus taking that empire that was rotten to the core and turning it into something that he could be proud of. But you know that there has been distance these past years. You know that. We see each other, we talk as if we are still friends. We smile. But I don’t know anything about your life beyond what I read. You banter with me, you don’t talk to me. It’s different.” She settled onto the leather sofa in the main portion of the private plane. And he took his seat in the chair across from her.
“Is that what you think? That I have become a stranger to you now?”
“Tell me about your life. Prove me wrong.”
“Perhaps you should tell me about yours too.” Because he had to question what he really knew about her life. He saw her socially, along with his brother, but right now with the loss of Theseus looming large he felt the true gap between them. The real distance.
“You first,” she said.
“I’m one of the richest men in the world.”
“I know,” she said, her tone flat. “We’re in a club dedicated to that. That is a Wikipedia entry. It isn’t you. If you want me to know more than I can read on the Internet, then give me more.”
He cycled through everything he had done in the past year. Finished the rebuilding of the island, that was the main thing. It was one thing that nobody knew about, likely because it wasn’t interesting, and didn’t further his image in the media as a break. Everybody liked to keep to their particular narratives.
It wasn’t a secret, it was only that it wasn’t interesting.
That was why there were no stories about it.
Then there was travel. Every city he was in a blur. Business meetings. What was there to say? That was what he didn’t understand.
They had once talked about dreams. But he was in the middle of living those dreams, wasn’t he? So what was there to say?
“Tell me about a typical day for you,” she said.
“And how is that not some pithy newspaper interview?”
“It isn’t,” she said. “Because I want you to give me an honest answer, not one that would make a good pull quote.”
“All right,” he said. “I wake up around noon, and begin the day.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Why don’t you believe it?”
“Because you run a successful billion-dollar business. And I find it very hard to believe that you’re accomplishing that waking up so late.”
“It is a global business. And that means that I’m working across time zones. It means I don’t have to rise early.”
That was true.
“All right. So you’re a night owl. You were always like that. I remember I used to go down to the beach late and find you there.”
He jerked away from her, the memory too sharp.
“Yes,” he said.
“Go on.”
“I have very strong coffee, ignore the hangover, begin having business meetings. I work until around nine, and then it is time to go out. Of course, going out is often tied to work. There are specific clubs and venues that I visit in order to forge relationships with investors, and partner with businesses. That shouldn’t surprise you. Now the sex, that has nothing to do with business.”
He watched her face. It went pink.
“Great. Thank you for sharing.”
“I had thought that you might want honesty,” he said.
“Of course. Nothing is more important than honesty.”
“I think that you are being sarcastic. But this is what you asked for.”
“I thought maybe you might tell me about a relationship that you had in the last year.”
“A one-night stand is not a relationship, and I realize that you may not know that, since even my brother married very young. But there is nothing to say. I don’t know their names. And if I do, I forget them soon after.”
“That’s what doesn’t seem like you.”
He lifted a brow. “How?” What he hated was that he cared about the answer. That he cared what she thought about him. That he cared whether or not she had seen this in him when he was a boy.
He shouldn’t.
Because he had refashioned himself into something new, something stronger, something insulated from all of the emotions that he’d once had, as he’d needed to do it to survive. To move beyond the abuse that he had suffered at the hands of his father. To move beyond the way that Ariadne had...
“Because you used to care. You would never have treated people like they were interchangeable or disposable. Yes, you were reckless. But with yourself. Not with others. That is the part that makes you a stranger to me. It is the thing that makes me question whether or not you... I don’t know what happened to you. And this is why we don’t know each other. Because you pulled away from people. From us.”
Anger spiked in his veins. She wasn’t going to acknowledge it. And if not, then he would.
“Here’s another Wikipedia entry for you, Ariadne. Ten years ago on a balcony, on my future sister-in-law’s eighteenth birthday, I took her in my arms and kissed her. She kissed me back because she thought I was my brother, and I didn’t care.”
Her face went scarlet. “You knew that I thought you were Theseus.”
“So you said at the time. And yet you say I’ve changed? If you always believed that of me, then you never truly thought me any better than this, did you?”
“We agreed to leave that in the past,” she said. “I know Theseus forgave you. I did too. But you were never as close to us...”
Rage was his constant companion. Low level static in the background of his soul. Normally, keeping hold of it was easy.
But she was asking him to give her a baby. And at the same time scolding him for the way he’d carved out a life for himself. Especially when she’d believed the worst in him when he’d believed them to be friends. He would not mind if not for the naked hypocrisy of it.
“I wasn’t? The two of you concealed yourself in that estate of yours in London. You were completely inaccessible to the outside world. There are no photos of you that are not carefully crafted to project a certain image. You don’t simply go out, you go and perform. How dare you accuse me of changing? How dare you accuse me of performing for headlines or being somehow inauthentic when you and Theseus were strangers to me every time I ever saw a picture of you. I’m convinced it’s why my brother called me as little as possible. Because he never wanted to have a discussion about it. Because he never wished to be called out on the fact that he was... Engaging in some masquerade for all the world to see. And for some reason you were involved in that. For some reason, the most honest, feral, forthright girl I had ever known became a woman who lived behind a mask. Perhaps explain that to me.”
“Because we had a legacy. Because we were trying to repair things.”
“To protect my father?”
“No. To protect Theseus. Because you know that your father would have wrenched everything back if for one moment he had been disappointed in Theseus’s life. If he had been disappointed in the profits that the company was putting out. If he thought that Theseus was in there intentionally dismantling the system that your father had put in place. It was a tightrope walk. I know this is difficult for you to understand Dionysus, but sometimes people do things and it isn’t about you. In fact, we didn’t think of you at all.”
He was past feeling wounded by such things.
“I am well aware that you didn’t think of me, Ariadne. There is no need for you to draw a line beneath it.”
Her rage was a living thing. Palpable.
Good. She should be angry. She should think about what he had said. He could understand that his brother was living in a different reality, but...
You shut them out as well, you know that.
Of course Theseus had said the kiss was forgotten. Forgiven. But they’d never been the same after. The twin bond, strong though they were so different, had fractured that night and it had never, ever been the same.
At the time, Dionysus hadn’t even wanted it to be. He’d wanted Theseus to be scorched as he was.
“Maybe the simple truth is you don’t want to know who I am now,” she said. “And maybe I don’t want to know you.”
“Good thing then, that we don’t have to in order to have a child together. Especially one that I can never claim.”
“Of course we don’t. There is nothing intimate about artificial insemination.”
“You say that as if you know.”
Her head jerked away, and she looked out the window. Her stock response to that surprised him. And it made him wonder.
But there was no reason that she and his brother would have used insemination. Unless they had trouble getting pregnant. In which case, his comments were likely very insensitive.
But that was fine. She was so disgusted with who he was now. She could be disgusted with his lack of sensitivity too.
All fine with him.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I think I’ll go lie down before we arrive in Greece.”
“Yes. Get your rest.”
And when she abandoned him to walk into the private bedroom on the plane, he found himself letting out a breath he had not been aware he’d been keeping in. Likely since she had collapsed in the club.
Nothing with Ariadne would ever be simple.
But he was committed to behaving as if it were.
Because what was the point of a well-crafted fa?ade if it abandoned him when he needed it most?
No. He would do this for her. This favor. He would use it to wipe his conscience clean. And then...
He would forget Ariadne and the child existed.
He would have to.