CHAPTER SEVEN
SHEPRAYEDFORFORGIVENESS. Wherever Theseus was, she could only pray that he could forgive her. And she prayed for forgiveness from her own self, because even as the words hung there in the air between them, her lips cold, she felt anger at her own weakness.
She hoped James would forgive her. For saying this now when it was never out in the open while Theseus was with him.
She felt like a failure for saying it out loud when Theseus hadn’t been able to.
For telling Dionysus when she knew full well Theseus had hoped to tell his brother himself one day.
But she couldn’t stand it anymore. She couldn’t stand walking on eggshells. She couldn’t stand making the wrong apologies for her husband. For herself. She couldn’t stand his idea that Theseus had an easy, perfect life without pain, when she knew that he had suffered.
And in that moment, one thing was clear enough. Theseus’s pain deserved to be acknowledged. Not erased.
So did his love. The love he’d shown her as a friend. The love he’d found with James. A testament to his resilience and strength and to the enduring power of hope that could live inside a person.
Theseus wasn’t his suffering. He was more than that. But she also couldn’t stand Dionysus writing his life off as easy.
He had no idea.
“That is impossible,” he said, his expression one of utter shock.
“It isn’t only possible, it’s true.”
He said nothing for a long moment. “You’ve known, all this time?”
She exhaled slowly. “I was his wife. Of course I knew.”
“For how long?”
“Always,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “How?”
“He told me,” she whispered. “When we were teenagers. You have no idea... He was so ashamed of it. He wasn’t... You. He wanted to be you, Dionysus. You were more what your father wanted.”
It was Dionysus’s turn to laugh, though it was humorless. “I was not what my father wanted. I never have been. My father hated us both. Perhaps for different reasons, but... I will always believe what he hated was that he could not inject himself into us and live life over again. What he hates is his own mortality. Watching us walk around, young, with our lives ahead, and his mostly behind him. And so he set out to try and mold us exactly how he wanted. I refused. But it had the side effect of drawing fire away from Theseus.”
“Theseus saw you as the masculine ideal. He wanted to be like you. Everything would’ve been easier for him if he could have been. He was quieter, and he was... He lived so much inside of himself, and I don’t know if that was because of his secret, or if it was because it was simply who he was. It took a toll on him. Of course it did. He didn’t want to live in secret, he wanted to be like anyone else. He wanted a partner and a family. And I know that I don’t have to explain to you why he had to keep it a secret.”
“Why did he keep it a secret from me?” Dionysus asked, his eyes blazing.
“He...”
“He didn’t trust me,” said Dionysus.
She was silent for a moment. “Do you blame him?”
“Because of your birthday party,” he asked.
“Yes.”
“If he wasn’t in love with you, why was it such a betrayal?”
She looked at him, his dark eyes piercing her. And it forced her memory back.
She remembered Dionysus sweeping across the expanse and taking her in his arms. She hadn’t thought. She couldn’t remember actually applying a name to that lean, hungry face. The expression in his eyes nothing like Theseus’s. They weren’t identical. They never had been.
It was only after Theseus had come out and seen them. And she had... She had panicked. She had pushed him away. She’d sworn to Theseus she’d been disoriented and had been convinced it was him.
She had wanted so badly to forget it, to forget the way that it had lit her skin on fire. Her first kiss. Her first kiss had been from her brother-in-law, and it had been the passion she had dreamed of finding with Theseus. It had been confusing. And she had been trapped anyway.
“You knew we were together. That we intended to marry and you kissed me anyway. I was his life raft.”
“What a flattering designation.”
She ignored that. “It was more complicated than that...we were best friends. He was like a brother to me in so many ways.”
“I actually was his brother. His twin.”
“Yes. And he didn’t want you to...see him as less.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Dionysus said.
“I know. I do know that but you have to understand he hated himself so much, for so many years, and I was the only person he trusted. In many ways we were more than friends because for years I was the only one who really got to know him. I was the only one he let know him.” She paused. “It changed. He met someone and it changed. He started to be himself with a growing group of people.”
“Still not me.”
“He needed it to be...a new life. A new thing. It was too hard for him to try and revisit old wounds.”
“Why was I a wound?”
“Because he associated you too much with your father. With his own...failures, I think. But isn’t that the real tragedy of your father? He chose Theseus as his favored son, which put him under a pressure he could never live up to and you, you who would have been much more able to be the alpha heir he wanted, were his chosen second.”
“Are you saying I’m more like my father?”
She shook her head. “No. But he would see himself more in you. What man wouldn’t? Adventurous. Successful with women.”
“So flattering, Ariadne.”
“I’m not trying to flatter you. I’m trying to make you see. Your father styled you both as players in a game neither of you could win, partly because of the roles he cast you in. It was easier for Theseus when he was removed from the game. When we had the power to make Katrakis what we saw it could be. When he met James. Who is just...the most wonderful man, he truly is. He helped Theseus find himself.” She blinked back tears. “I’ll love him for that forever.”
Dionysus looked pained, but it passed quickly. “And where is James now?”
“He’s the CFO of Katrakis, he’s covering for me in my absence and in general keeping all of my secrets, still. I had to tell him about the baby. He...” She blinked.
“He wanted the child too.”
She nodded, grateful that at least Dionysus could understand that. “Theseus and I were going to divorce. Once all of the inheritance was set in stone for us and our baby we were going to divorce and he was going to marry James. With my blessing.”
“You didn’t love him?”
“I did. Desperately. I will mourn Theseus for the rest of my life. But I didn’t love him as a wife. He was a kind of soulmate, but it wasn’t a romance. Not ever.”
“The child...”
“I was artificially inseminated. I never slept with your brother.”
There were so many bombs now laying on the table between them. So many twisted, tangled truths.
Because if you pulled that one thread in the tapestry it threatened to unravel them all.
It frightened her, because these were all things she had never voiced before.
“You have to walk me through everything. From the beginning. From the day that he told you, to your eighteenth birthday.” He let out a hard breath. “To now.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding slowly. “I always felt protective of him. It felt like falling in love. I wanted to keep him safe. You and I could run across the island together, we were fools together. Theseus...”
“He was more reserved,” he said.
“Yes. But then I discovered that it was more than that. He wasn’t just reserved. He was frightened. He was angry.”
“He never seemed angry.”
“He was. At himself. For so many years, Dionysus.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? When you asked to have a baby with me?”
“An element of it is the inheritance, I won’t lie. Because of course your father could still take that away.”
“And you don’t trust me either.”
“No. That isn’t it. I just think the less said out loud the better. But also...it is his story. And I wanted to honor that this story, his story, was very personal and painful for him. And then he found James, and that means there is another person involved who is still very much alive. Who is...grieving and who loved him and who can’t acknowledge that love right now and when the truth comes out—because he wanted it to—James has to be part of that decision.”
She couldn’t read his face. She wished, not for the first time, that they’d stayed as close as they had when they were younger. But it had been impossible. She was keeping secrets—some Theseus’s and some her own.
She wanted to comfort him. She wanted, right then, for things to be different, but the distance between them hadn’t been down to Theseus entirely. It had been her.
The memory of the kiss, and the knowing the kiss had brought.
Because after that she could never pretend to be ignorant of why she felt a pull toward him that was so very different than the one she felt for Theseus.
She had wanted to get rid of the imprint of his lips on hers, the heat of it all.
When she thought of it, she did her best only ever to think of her upset. How angry she had been.
How betrayed.
Because thinking about anything else was... Even now, as he looked at her, her skin burned.
And it wasn’t shame that she felt.
Regrettably.
How could she? Talking about Theseus’s pain at the same time she was looking at Dionysus and remembering what it had been like when he had claimed her mouth with his?
How dare she, when she had just lost Theseus’s baby?
Maybe she was like her father after all. Perhaps she would have found it easy to find new lovers and then discard them.
Except, you never touched Theseus. And Dionysus has always been a problem.
Even worse. She would be the discarded.
Because she knew how that kind of thing works. One thing that he had said to her when they had sat down to dinner stuck with her. Her life did not have to be about Theseus anymore.
She needed space. Time. That didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to make the decision about the baby, she knew that was the right thing to do. But thinking about anything physical with anyone, let alone Dionysus was... Absolutely not.
She had been bound by vows since she was fifteen years old.
The last thing she would ever do is jump into something so complicated. As if having a baby with him, no matter the method wouldn’t be complicated.
She had told herself that it could be the same, but when had Dionysus and Theseus ever been the same?
She had told herself she could ignore Dionysus, but when had she ever been able to do that?
For one fleeting moment she imagined running away. Leaving behind the company. Leaving behind everything. And for a moment, it felt freeing. For a moment, it felt exhilarating. But then she imagined herself, alone, falling through space.
With nothing and nobody. Without the found family she had made at the shipping company. Without any lingering connection even to Dionysus.
She couldn’t bear it.
She couldn’t bear it.
“Even if you can’t understand,” she said, reinforcing all of it within herself as much as she was doing anything else, “it’s what I have worked for. I care about Katrakis Shipping. I have put my heart and soul into it. As much as I put my heart and soul into trying to make Theseus happy. Again, you might not understand. But he was my best friend. We might not have been in love, not romantically, but I did love him. Were your parents happy?”
“Of course not,” the Dionysus. “Nobody could ever have been happy with my father.”
“And you know all about my parents. My father traded in wives like they were cars. Every couple of years he wanted a new model with better features.
“That is my expectation of romance. That it’s fleeting. At best. The friendship that I had with Theseus, that wasn’t fleeting. It was real. A real commitment to being a family.”
“And that’s all you think you want?”
“That’s all I really want to invest in. Even if you can’t understand it, you must... You must be able to get it. I want to build something that lasts. Something where...”
“Where people need you?”
His words might as well have been a blade.
“What’s wrong with that? At least people can depend on me. You’re out there alone, caring for nothing and no one.”
“I also run a company that benefits thousands of employees worldwide, do you not think in that sense I take care of people in the same way you do?”
“It’s different.”
“Why? You fancy that it’s different because you know their names? Because you have taken something that was bad and made it better? I am not denigrating the achievement, but it seems rather hypocritical that it matters when you do it, but doesn’t matter when I do.”
“It’s only that... I gave you the opportunity to tell me about your life. You make it sound like you don’t have any connections.”
“I don’t. You’re correct about that. But I suppose my conclusion has been the opposite to yours. There are no connections in life that last. Look at you and Theseus. Theseus is gone. And while you might want to honor him with this... Commitment, that’s about you. He isn’t here. And my relationship with him fractured years before his death. Nothing lasts forever, Ariadne.”
“So what? I should just accept the inherent loneliness of the human condition and wallow in misery? Sounds like fun.”
“No. Just accept that it’s all an illusion.”
“Then what are we doing here? If all of this, if connection, if care of any kind is an illusion, then why are you here with me?”
He went remote then, his eyes going hard, shutting her out completely. Then he laughed. “I don’t know. Perhaps there is something in me that doesn’t fully believe my own creed. Or perhaps I’m just like so many other devotees of a religion who follow it imperfectly. I believe in making your own way. But apparently I can’t entirely let go of the past.”
Her breath left her body, her heart pounding hard. He was admitting to something. To that connection between them, and to the fact that it had never truly been broken, not by years. Not by that one, heated moment.
She felt undone with it.
She wanted to deny it. Wanted to turn away from it.
But if it was so easy to turn away from Dionysus, she wouldn’t have held the memory of the kiss so close. But maybe that was part of her problem. Maybe part of the problem was that no matter how much she might want it to, her passion couldn’t entirely be extinguished. When she had been younger, it had been expressed in the way she had loved to explore the island. And she had connected with Dionysus that way. Then when she’d been sixteen in the water, she had felt it change to something different. Growth. And that frightened her. Because she had already made her bargain. Before she had understood what desire was. And once she did understand, she feared it. Then when she’d been eighteen, he had turned the key that he’d put in the lock two years earlier. He had showed her exactly what she could want. Exactly what she could feel.
And it had changed her. Utterly and completely.
And terrified her. She had doubled down on the decision that she had made.
Because the idea of wanting somebody that way, of trying to build stability that way, was foolish. And she well knew it. Because she had seen the way that her father...
To try and make herself matter to a man by using her body was to make herself disposable.
That brought her back to the moment. To reality.
It underlined the importance of staying on the path. Because as long as she had the company, if she was going to be a mother, then there was security coming from many places.
She was... Useful. She mattered.
And when she looked at Dionysus everything zeroed in on him. Only him. She couldn’t allow that.
“I don’t know how to look at you now,” he said. His words were rough, and she didn’t quite understand the note in his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“When I kissed you on the balcony, I thought that I was fighting against the passion you felt for my brother. When you acted shock, as if I might’ve been Theseus, I assumed that the two of you must have an incendiary connection, and that is how I have always looked at you. I wanted you, Ariadne. But I thought you were giving your body to my brother. With the enthusiasm that you returned my kiss, but you weren’t. You felt something for him, but not what I imagine, and now you’re telling me... Are you a virgin, Ariadne?”
She felt pinned to the spot. Because exposing Theseus’s secrets had meant exposing her own. And perhaps the impossibility of tearing apart Theseus and his secrets was simply too much for Dionysus to bear, and that brought the spotlight straight back to her. She hadn’t fully considered that. She felt foolish for that.
And now he was asking...
What did it matter? She had chosen to make sex a non-event in her life. She had chosen to make herself more than desire. So what did it matter?
“Yes,” she said.
“God in heaven. That is a travesty.”
“It’s my choice. If I had wanted to find lovers and make them sign nondisclosure agreements I could’ve done so. I chose to live my life the way that I have. I have other things that matter more.”
“Because you never wanted him,” said Dionysus. “Clearly.”
“When I thought that I was in love with your brother, I was too young to know what desire felt like. And yes, as I got older, and... No. I didn’t want him. Not really.”
“Did you want me?”
“I cannot have this conversation with you, Dionysus. I can’t. I closed the door on that years ago. And I did it on purpose. I chose a life of stability. A life of safety.” And suddenly she felt the dam inside of her beginning to crack, beginning to break. Because she had chosen that life of safety and now it was gone. She had chosen him because it was love in a way she could manage. Could contain it all within her and never wonder if it would betray her.
She had suppressed all of her passion, because she had chosen safety over it. She had... She had allowed herself to feel nothing but shame because of that kiss she had shared with Dionysus, because of what it had made her feel.
She had allowed herself to feel crushed by it.
Because she had wanted that emotional safety he represented above all else.
Now it was gone.
It was gone and she was left with this, this raw, unfiltered emotion. This temptation that had never truly gone away.
What a fool she had been.
The world wasn’t safe. Her choices hadn’t kept her safe because how could they? Her friendship, her marriage had insulated her but now that it was gone everything she’d never dealt with had been dragged out into the light. Exposed.
It was all still there, unhealed and unmanaged. And she was angry. At herself most of all for not seeing that someday a reckoning would come. Even if Theseus had lived it would have come. They would have divorced and she would no longer have had their marriage to shield her from the choices she’d tried to stop herself from ever having to make.
They were still there.
And so was Dionysus.
She stood then, and so did he.
“I didn’t want to be disposable. I don’t want to be...out here unsafe and unprotected in the world without...him.” She finished that on a fierce whisper. She looked at him, and suddenly, it was like the veil had been ripped away. Like that crumbling dam had let forth not just the grief, but the need that she had been suppressing every time she looked at him, not just these past weeks, but every time she had looked at him since she was sixteen years old.
That gala where he’d goaded her about stealing champagne and swimming in fountains.
Christmas, three years ago, when they’d found themselves alone at the bar adjacent to the dining room at her and Theseus’s stately London home.
I won’t ask if you’re getting champagne.
He was teasing her and it was welcome. It had been a long time. She tried to ignore the tangle of feelings in her heart.
She wasn’t supposed to have feelings for him at all.
That kiss wasn’t supposed to be the first thing she thought of when she saw his face.
It had been years.
They had never spoken of it again.
They didn’t have to.
I like champagne,she said.
These days I prefer something harder, but perhaps you can toast to our youth.
Or four years ago, when they’d both gone to a political event in London and had been forced to sit through droning speeches. Their eyes had caught across the room and held.
He didn’t smile, but the light in his eyes reminded her of when he was younger. And by the time it was over her guard was down and she found herself standing in a corridor with him, hiding from everyone else as they talked about nothing as substantial even as the weather, but she felt consumed by it. Cocooned.
She forgot she was married until she saw her ring flashing in the light.
Then she’d had to leave. She’d barely said goodbye. She’d needed space. To think. To breathe.
Then she thought back to six years ago at Easter Brunch when he’d wound up all the small children with sweets and had turned them feral before the egg hunt had begun.
She’d admonished him—but none of the children were hers so it had been amusing more than anything.
Don’t you wish we’d had that sort of fun as kids?
We did.
Her breath froze in her chest. She thought he might be remembering the kiss.
Not when we were this small.
Or at her wedding, when she’d avoided him entirely. He’d been the best man, but the tension had been thick. She’d blamed the anger between him and Theseus over the kiss. And not her own feelings.
Then there was ten years ago...
He’d been coming right to her. And she’d let him.
He wrapped his arms around her, his hold strong. And when he lowered his head and claimed her mouth, it was like she had been dipped in the living flame.
She wanted to be burned.
She wanted to forget.
It was like jumping from high rocks into the sea. It was like climbing to the top of a mountain.
It was like running, barefoot and without a care across the sand.
It was the full expression of all the wildness that lived in her soul. And for a brief, shining moment she embraced it as she let him embrace her. As she felt the slide of his tongue against hers. And then echo of salvation rang throughout her body.
What the hell is going on?
And then she was back. Back in the moment. Looking at the man seated before her. And she wanted... She wanted to go back. She wanted to have that kiss. She wanted to feel passion. Because turning away from it hadn’t protected her.
She had devoted herself to someone else’s life.
She had promised her body to that marriage, like a nun to the church, as she’d often thought.
Even though she hadn’t ever had sex. She had traded that part of herself away, and she had done it for a reason, but that reason had turned out to mean nothing.
Nothing. She had been left anyway.
She hadn’t been enough anyway.
And there she was, staring at the man that she had wanted. Oh, he would’ve broken her several times over by now.
He would never love her. He didn’t believe in that sort of love, and neither did she. Why should they? Why should they? They had never been shown an ounce of it in their own lives.
But she wanted him.
She wanted him, and the real reason that she had to keep her distance from him was that it had never gone away.
She wanted to weep. But she wasn’t going to. Because she wasn’t going to collapse.
“Yes,” she said again, stronger this time. “I am a virgin.”
“A shame,” he said.
His words were casual, but his tone wasn’t. He sounded harsh. Hoarse. As if speaking them had been a struggle.
And suddenly, she felt like she was being weighed down by the burden of her virginity. And she had kept it all these years and for what?
She had turned off that part of herself for what?
Dionysus had wanted her once. And rather than diving into it headfirst, she had turned away from it. She had never spoken of it, she hadn’t even allowed herself to think of it. Not honestly. Yes, she had decided internally, that she had thought it was Theseus, but not to absolve herself so much as to protect herself. From the truth of it. From the deep, resonant reality of it all.
The fact that she wasn’t effortlessly free of the temptations of her father or the women who got themselves tangled up with him. The sins of her mother, no.
She was simply very, very good at hiding. Very good at being afraid. And she had still ended up alone.
So it was all for nothing.
She had stolen it from herself for nothing.
Theseus had stood between herself and Dionysus all these years. And now he was gone.
It was an entanglement she didn’t need.
It was one she didn’t want.
It was one she should turn away from.
“Dionysus,” she said. “Kiss me.”