Chapter Fourteen #3
“Is something wrong?” she asked. She never could quite ignore the underlying emotion in a room, even when perhaps it would serve her well.
There was a pregnant pause. He tapped his fingers on his desk, then slowly rose. But he stayed locked behind his large desk. “Your Mr. Demo came to see me today.”
Lefteris… “He did what?” Her own anger swelled quickly. After she’d told him no. After he’d pretended to understand her stance on integrity. He’d gone to Zervou behind her back. Because asking for him to sponsor a fight for her was the only reason he could have come here.
The bastard.
“He should not have done that, Zervou. I apologize. I asked him not to.”
Zervou did not immediately soften or accept her apology. His demeanor remained exactly the same. “And why did you ask him not to?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean? It was not appropriate for him to use my connection to you assume kind of…greased wheel toward using you.”
“That is business, Ariadne. Greased wheels and using.”
A frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but it didn’t matter. “But this isn’t business. It is my career.”
“And that is where you draw the line at my help?”
“Yes,” she said simply, because it was that simple.
She saw this was the wrong answer as the fury in his eyes leapt, as his hands clenched into fists. But she did not understand. “What do you have to be angry about? He went around me. I told him no when he asked. He never should have—”
“I have no right to be angered by this no you gave him, without discussing it with me?”
“Angered?” She shook her head, trying to understand him. “Absolutely not. Boxing is mine. This was my choice, and he did not respect it. Why should you be angry at me?”
“Because I would give you this. It would be nothing for me to fund all these things. And you refuse?”
“I didn’t refuse. I did not think it appropriate to ask. You have already given me too much. Our goals may be the same, but I will not ask for more when you have already given me so much.”
He made a dismissive kind of noise and turned away from her, both things that stoked her anger hotter.
“I have integrity,” she told him, fisting a hand to her heart. “I have pride. You will not dismiss these things.”
“Pride,” he spat, whirling to face her. “You have stubbornness.”
“There are some things in life that…it matters to earn them. Not just have them handed to you. Just because you could do something doesn’t mean I want you to. You have no right to be angry about this.”
“No, of course not.” Each word was an icy dagger.
She did not understand his extreme reaction to this.
Or she wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t heard him speak of his mother last night. His frustration and disgust over her refusal of his help. She blinked at her own realization. Was it so simple? Such an easy corollary? Maybe, maybe not. But it was the defense she needed.
“I am not your mother,” she told him very softly, with clear, precise control.
His head snapped back like she’d punched him. The fury turned into something else. Something that had her own ebbing away, because…
“No, but you women are all the same, are you not?” he said, vicious and cold.
“You women,” she repeated, shock and fury twining in her system a dangerous concoction. “Here are your true colors then. Lumping women together because they do not ask how high when you demand they jump.”
“Ah, so here it is. What you really think of me.”
“What I really think of you?” She furiously blinked back the tears in her eyes. “I thought you understood. I thought…” I thought you loved me. Foolish girl that she was. No matter how she’d tried to talk herself out of it, she’d really thought there was something real here. Or could be.
Instead, she was just another possession in a powerful man’s quest for more. And when she didn’t shine in the precise right way, she was relegated to…something else. Something subhuman. A pawn.
“I will be gone the next two days,” he said, his anger and fury tamped down into something icy and sharp. “You should be gone when I return.”
Gone. It ripped through her, the implications of that. Gone. He wanted her gone.
She would not cry, because she’d known, hadn’t she? No amount of soft feelings or talk of enjoyment or marriage or giving her the world could change the very simple fact that this was the basic truth of life.
Love was not real. Pain, suffering and selfishness were real. This was never meant to be real, and it was her fault for mixing it up enough to be hurt by that.
“What of my father?” She tried to keep the squeak out of her voice, but her throat seemed to be closing up. That was why she was even here in the first place.
“I have the necessary leads. I’ll snuff him out. He’ll pay. You have no need for me, Ariadne. You have made this clear. So I have no need for you.”
Which wasn’t fair. “No, I have not. You have decided that not wanting you to warp this one thing that is mine, that I have built myself, that is who I am, is some kind of refusal. You have decided that it means all women are your mother. That is your choice, not anything I made clear.”
She could see she wasn’t getting through to him.
He was angry and stubborn and…wrong. Just wrong.
And she could not fix that for him. She felt weak for letting a tear fall, but she couldn’t seem to help it.
Still, when she delivered her parting shot, she was proud of how icy and distanced her tone felt.
She took the ring off her finger, placed it firmly on the desk between them and met his gaze. “Seek therapy, Zervou,” she said, then whirled on her heel and stalked out of the room.
She didn’t fully cry until she left the premises.
And then she was afraid she might never stop.