Chapter Fifteen
He had seethed. He had instructed his staff what to do. Eradicate any and all evidence Ariadne Malis had ever been in his estate. In his life. His security detail would still watch after her, from afar, until her father was behind bars, but he would have nothing to do with her.
Nothing.
He’d considered rescinding funding for her mother’s stay in Mykonos, but it felt a step too far. He’d have a discussion with Maria’s case manager regarding her current status and go from there. He hoped Ari choked on the help she was forced to take.
But he could not worry about that now. He had his own demons to fight.
The plane could not touch down near enough to Anovol to suit Zervou. He would have to drive nearly an hour to reach his mother. An hour of time spent thinking, stewing and dreading what his future looked like now that Ari would not be in it.
He supposed the one positive there was that it kept him from thinking about his mother.
Until his car pulled up to the tiny house—a cottage really.
It was well-kept. He’d made certain of that whether she’d liked it or not.
The nurse was paid by him, after all, so if she noted a leak in the roof or issues with the plumbing, she informed him.
And he sent someone along to fix it, with instructions to ignore whatever protests his mother put up.
If she got too insistent, he worked with the nurse to ensure Mother was in the village shopping when the repairs needed to be done.
Otherwise she would live in a hovel. Even with his grandmother, she would suffer. Just to fucking suffer.
He pounded on the door and waited for an answer. When the door creaked open, it was not a nurse, but his mother who answered.
Of course, she must do everything herself.
Lines sat heavy on her face. She was too thin.
Always too thin. But her dark eyes registered something akin to relief to mix with the surprise.
“Zervou,” she greeted. Her mouth curved—it was not a smile.
He’d long since believed the gravity of his father’s death did not allow his mother to smile.
But it was some expression of happiness. “You have come.”
“Not to hold anyone’s hand. To handle the arrangements,” he told her tersely. “Is the head nurse available? I’d like to speak with her.” He moved past his mother into the tiny, cramped kitchen. Everything neat as a pin.
His mother would have it no other way. She would have scrubbed that floor on her hands and knees after every draining day.
“I told you that I did not require your assistance. I simply thought—”
“You thought I might like to scrape myself over the coals with you. I do not. What is the nurse’s name again? Penelope, wasn’t it?” He would move through the small amount of rooms until he found her. “Probably deserves a raise,” he muttered to himself.
“Yes, throw money at it. That is always your answer, is it not?”
He stopped on a dime. Turned to face his mother. She had always been so disdainful of the thing he had worked so hard to do. She had never once taken it as it was intended. To help. To ease. He had built his wealth himself, and she had no use for it. No one does.
“The money you resent so much has eased your life, your burdens,” he told her coldly.
“It could do more, help more, if you would let it.” This was always the conversation, the argument.
It never changed. No matter how old he got, how much he had, how hard he tried, they always ended up right back here.
He should never have come. Why had he let his anger eradicate that clear truth?
“Yes, it is my fault for wanting more from you.”
He snorted his derision. Childish, perhaps, but it was all he had in the moment. “You want nothing from me.”
He had never said that. Never truly let himself think it, but it was true. Starker in this moment because he was forced to realize… Ari was not like his mother. She had taken help, comfort. Offered the same right back. Not in everything, no, but in some things. In the emotional things.
He shook that thought away. This wasn’t about Ariadne. It was about his mother. But in the contrast, he saw things clearer. “You want nothing from anyone. You want to be alone in your misery and martyrdom.”
Mother gathered herself, straightened shoulders and lifted chin. She looked up at him with that icy glare he recognized so well from a childhood spent begging her to let someone, anyone, help.
Except then he’d been shorter than her, weaker than her. Desperate for her love, her comfort, when his entire world had been upended.
But she’d only seen her world. Then. Now. Amazing that even being a grown man could not fix this.
“I did not choose misery. Misery was done to me. I suppose you could never love so deeply that such a loss would leave a mark,” Mother said with such icy disdain.
Love. What was love but a disease? The loss of it—always inevitable—had turned his mother into this. And him into an aching wound he couldn’t seem to stop. Because here he was dealing with his mother and thinking of Ari.
But he refused to think of Ari here. He refused to think of love, because it had been enjoyment. It had been simple. It had been give and receive.
Is that not what you want from love?
Didn’t matter. He hadn’t come here for any give or take. He’d come to ensure his grandmother’s move into the palliative care center some fifty kilometers away.
“I will move her,” his mother said, hurrying in front of him, like she would block his way. “I will handle this. You need do nothing except say your goodbyes.”
“Explain to me, Mother, why I should say goodbye to a woman who means nothing to me?” He looked down at his mother then and saw that she really couldn’t understand his position.
“Explain to me why she should mean anything to you when she turned her back on you. When you would not accept her help when she turned back to you after Father died.”
“Your father was murdered. He did not die. He was killed.”
“Yes, I was there, too, if you recall.”
She turned away from him then. As she had after that day. Always turning away from what she had left, so dedicated to that which was gone. His father. Her mother—because even if she was alive, her mind and memories had long since gone.
And Zervou had to admit that he’d come here for this. To see her turn away. To throw himself into this continued rejection. Because it was familiar. Because he wanted to prove to himself that Ari had done the same and she had deserved being cast out.
Instead, he saw his mother casting out that which she should have loved, cared for, cherished, and he felt shamed.
Ari hadn’t wanted nothing from him. After all, she had comforted him. She had dined with him, spent time in his bed. She had taken his ring and agreed to marry him.
The one thing she’d denied him had been a hand in her boxing. And while it still felt like betrayal, with some distance, with this stark difference between the two women shoved in his face, he realized that…she wasn’t wrong.
She had wanted one thing to be her own. She had needed to trust her own pride and integrity. For her work, for herself. It wasn’t about him.
It was a strange realization. Because his mother’s issues weren’t about him, either, no matter how they hurt him.
The similarity in these women was only the similarity in the fact they’d made choices for themselves.
But his mother had never thought of him—or if she had once, it had been lost with his father. Ari had accepted his help. No, not all of it. But she had not refused him wholesale. She had, as she said, made her choices. She had taken what she felt she could live with. For her pride. Her integrity.
Things he had esteemed her for. Things he had himself and understood, but only when it came to himself. He had not extended that understanding to her, because…
Refusal triggered some primal, childish anger in him. It shamed him, here in the aftermath of that same primal, childish anger. Or maybe it wasn’t so much childish as a result of being a helpless child, traumatized by the violent loss of his father. And never helped. Only told to suffer.
Ari had suffered, too. At her father’s hand. At her mother’s. But she was not married to her misery as his mother was. No, Ari was not miserable. She did not blame the world around her for everything. She did not blame those who could not measure up to her sainthood for her pain.
She had not spent her life building an empire meant only to take down her enemy.
Erjon had done terrible things to her and the mother she loved, but Ari had built herself something not just to protect her mother or herself, but because she had a passion for it.
Yes, most of her life had been centered on survival, on taking care of her mother, but boxing was the thing she’d carved out as hers.
Zervou came to the realization he had nothing like that.
Not until Ari had come into his life and opened up some new part of him.
He had lived his life with a dogged commitment to ruining Erjon.
No relationships except working ones or superficial ones.
Always just out of reach. Never giving. Never taking.
Just like his mother.
Until Ari.
Perhaps he could not understand why her integrity meant he could not fund her dreams, but…she had been right to call him out for lumping her in with his mother.
Mother wasn’t refusing his help. She was choosing her misery. He had always linked them, but Ari had shown him a different way. Something…more balanced, he supposed.
She had told him, outright, hadn’t she? Support and help were not the same. He wanted them to be. But he could not make that the case for anyone. Not his mother. Not Ari. And he had to admit, in this moment, that it was fair.