Chapter 4
Four
T heo
“Are you in position?”
“Yes, asshole. I know my job,” I responded to Xander through my earpiece.
“This is your first surveillance assignment stateside in three years. So I have to make sure you can handle being around this type of snobbery.”
“I’m ten times better at this than you are. Hence the reason you’re sitting up there on a perch.”
“No, I’m up here because my tolerance for the dick down there is at an all-time low.”
I could almost visualize the rage still boiling in Xander’s dark eyes. He’d impressed me with the length of time he’d managed to keep his cool during the meeting with Andraius. The asshole had tapped out my reserves of calm, so I knew Xander’s bordered on desert dry.
Thank God Theios Alex possessed this ability to focus Xander and give him purpose to channel his rage into a mission. Because the moment we’d entered Theios Alex’s office, he’d seen the turmoil boiling inside his son.
First, Theios Alex sent Xander to work his magic in the Caves with some less-than-forthcoming snitches, and then he’d worked with us on a plan to handle the next few weeks.
“Did I touch a nerve?” I asked.
“Fuck off. Some of us don’t have ice pumping in our veins instead of blood.”
We both knew this wasn’t true, considering my reaction to his question about us from earlier in the day.
“Are you jealous that it makes me better at work in the Caves than you?”
“You’re one sick motherfucker.”
“As Theia Brenna would say, pot meet kettle,” I said. “Besides, for me, it’s a means to an end. Not something I enjoy.”
“I swear, my mother likes you more than me.”
“You say to-may-to. I say to-mah-to.”
“Will you shut the fuck up and let me do my job?” Xander muttered.
“Our job just walked in.” I focused on the dining room entrance, where Simon Drakos, his wife Nyx, Andraius, and Nerine walked in.
The couples were deep in discussion. Well, all except the Angel. She observed and listened.
The glow of youth and mischief no longer lit up her features as they had five years ago. Instead, she carried herself with control, caution, and watchfulness.
She probably meant to carry off an understated look tonight with her simple silver gown and minimal jewelry, but nothing could hide her striking beauty.
She’d inherited her mother’s model features and height, making her as tall as Andraius at just shy of six feet in her three-inch heels. And then there was her body, curves in all the right places, perfect in every way.
She was a woman born for people to notice.
Although she’d lost weight in the last few years, something I’d seen from afar and couldn’t do anything about.
If what Xander and I had with her had become public knowledge back in the day, it would have caused problems with our families, but eventually they would have gotten over it.
Having our past come out now would get all of us killed.
As if sensing me watching her, Nerine’s cobalt blue gaze lifted to my corner of the room and homed in on me. Her lips parted for the briefest of moments as that familiar surge charged between us.
Memories of our past filled my mind, her nails scoring my skin, her mouth swollen from kisses, her body writhing between Xander and me, and her throaty moans and sighs. But, most of all, it reminded me of the long nights of talks, secrets, friendship, love, and laughter.
The next second, she looked away, breaking the connection and leaving the longing and pain behind.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered, not intending for Xander to hear.
But of course, he had.
“We’re playing the long game, Theo.” Xander meant his words to bring me back from the pit, but seeing her only emphasized the chasm separating us.
This was why I stayed in the shadows whenever I returned to Boston. I never wanted to chance running into her, especially knowing I’d failed her and was part of why she lived with the man who’d destroyed her family.
Since I had no doubt Xander had secured the line and we were the only ones on com-link, I said, “She’s not ours anymore. How am I supposed to get over that?”
She slept in another man’s bed. He touched her, took pleasure in her. A fucking bastard thirty years older than her, who’d thought he’d gained a prize to use. He possessed not a single fiber of understanding of how to cherish the incredible woman he’d married.
One day, I’d make him pay for all he’d done.
“She’ll always be ours.” Xander’s words snapped me back to the present.
“Fuck that shit. Until Nerine is aware of this, none of it counts. Or do I need to remind you of when you said without her, there is no us?”
Xander muttered something.
“What was that? I couldn’t hear you with all the teeth grinding.”
“I fucked up. I said it. Losing her broke something in me, and I took it out on all of us.”
I understood regret. I felt it every damn day. But what Xander had done had made an already bleeding wound start to hemorrhage.
“It’s too late to change the past. We have to accept this is the road we are on.”
“What happened to you spouting that she loved us?” Xander asked.
Resignation filled me. “Maybe you were right.”
“I thought I was the glass-is-half-empty guy?”
“Not when it came to her,” I said. “You were the fucking sunshine and roses singing at the top of his lungs.”
“I truly want to kick you in the teeth right now.”
Even with all of the unaddressed issues between us, Xander was my best friend. I wouldn’t think twice about taking a bullet for him, and I had no questions that he’d do the same for me. There was nothing he couldn’t ask me to do for him.
I focused on Nerine as she sat next to Nyx, still lost in whatever conversation they were having.
However, the moment Andraius interrupted her, she shot him a cold glare, clearly stating she wanted him to be anywhere but next to her.
The feeling is mutual, love.
“I need to ask you something serious.”
“I had a feeling you were going to get all philosophical.” Xander’s bland, know-it-all tone made me want to punch him. “This is your usual MO when doing surveillance, so I made sure to secure and encrypt the line from our crew in case they got nosy.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“What do you need to get off your chest?”
“Sooner or later, Andraius is going to find out about our relationship with Nerine.”
“If he hasn’t found out by now, how the fuck is he going to learn about it? We’ve talked about it enough times over the years to know our people are loyal. They’d rather die than betray her. Hell, Pops still hasn’t figured it out. As far as everyone knows, the reasons we and the originals stayed on are for Nerine, her sisters, and her mother. When did you become so fucking paranoid?”
“It’s not paranoia when I’m questioning what will happen when we’re around her twenty-four-seven.”
Or what it was going to be like when Xander and I were around each other nonstop. Nothing could go back to the way it was, and hoping for it was a pipedream.
Xander made it clear that without Nerine there was no future for us. I accepted his decision, and now he regrets it.
Too fucking bad.
“It’s not going to be all day and night,” he said. “We have a team with us that will take shifts.”
“Stop fucking around and answer the question.”
“We have to lock it down.”
“Is that even possible for you?” I asked. “You wear your emotions on your face when it comes to her.”
“I’ve done it for the last five years, right?”
“That’s because you rarely, if ever, occupy the same space as her.”
“I’ve spent more time in town than you have. I’m the one that needs you to answer that question. Nerine is the only woman I’ve known to get you to lose that calm, iceman demeanor. Think you’re going to be able to keep it in check?”
I had to be honest. “No. That’s the problem. I already know she will take great pleasure in pushing every button I have. That’s her way. The more I ignore her, the more she’ll get in my face.”
“Yeah, and this time, you can’t push her to her knees and shove your cock in her mouth to shut her up.”
I clenched my jaw. He brought up our past on purpose. To remind me of what we had together.
“You’re not helping the problem. We can’t touch her, period. Nerine isn’t ours.”
“One day soon, that will change.”
“We can’t claim another man’s wife.”
“We wait until Drakos, one of Andraius’s Chicago family, or one of his other enemies take him out.”
Others, meaning one of us.
We’d readied the stage for all three possibilities to come to fruition. The vengeful, sick-fuck part of me craved the pleasure of watching my hands force Andraius to gasp his last breaths.
I wanted to feel his blood on my fingers as he mewled in pain, and I couldn’t wait to revel in his death the same way he’d done when he gutted Papa for stepping between him and Nerine.
“Heads up,” Xander announced. “His royal highness is scanning the room. I believe he’s about to summon you.”
I blew out a deep exhale, simmering down the vengeance churning inside me.
I adjusted my suit and waited for Andraius to find me in the crowd. The second he saw me, he nodded, giving me his unsaid command to come to him. I moved from my position on the outskirts of the dining room in his direction.
“I fucking should have taken the perch,” I muttered.
“Don’t forget you’re the more refined and diplomatic of our duo. You have that European sensibility from all your years of dining with royals. I’m the rough meat-and-potatoes guy.”
“Meat and potatoes, my ass. I eat more meat than you do, dickhead. I can’t believe you even call yourself Greek with all the clean eating you like to do.”
“Chicken is meat, idiot.”
“You wonder why Theia Brenna loves me more. I eat everything she makes, and you don’t. Greek mamas want their sons to eat their food and not complain about it being unhealthy.”
“I could beat your ass into next week.”
“Like hell you could. Bulk means shit.”
“Shut up and go see what the fucker wants.”
I smirked and weaved my way through the multitude of tables. Even before I reached the table where Andraius and Nerine sat, I noticed Nerine’s back stiffen. Then, when I stopped behind Andraius, her attention wavered between her conversation with Nyx and me.
Nearly five years since we’d been this close to each other.
God, she’d lost so much weight. By my guess, it was at least fifteen pounds, if not more. Her curves were still there but less pronounced, and she carried an air of unapproachability along with a hint of fragility I’d never seen before.
The woman before me wasn’t Peter Angelos’s Nerine—well, maybe the essence of her was under there, but she was buried deep under an aloof, hard disguise.
I longed to demand she bring back the girl who never hid that she was up to something or laughed and joked about the most mundane things. What I wouldn’t give to see the fiery temper that would punch someone in the mouth for getting in her face, instead of this very poised and controlled person she showed the world.
I couldn’t understand why she was trying so hard to hide the girl who made me and Xander do our homework and yelled at us to study?
An unleashed fury burned in her blue eyes now, telling everyone around her she wouldn’t forgive or forget easily for all that she’d suffered.
The girl with a snarky sense of humor and a heart completely open to expressing her passion and love for others had disappeared.
Andraius set his palm on Nerine’s thigh as he turned to face me, and she not-so-causally threw his hand off, whispering, “Don’t touch me, or did you forget that I hate you?”
“You’ll do as I say.”
“Or what?”
Pretending that I hadn’t witnessed the exchange between the couple, I waited for Andraius to speak.
“We need to have a quick discussion. Let’s go, Nerine.” He stood and pulled out her chair.
Frowning, she rose from her seat and followed, only glancing behind her at Nyx briefly as if passing some unsaid communication.
When we reached a quiet area in the hallway among a group of ivy-like plants, Andraius asked me, “Remember the discussion we had in my office?”
“Yes.” I resisted the urge to glance in Nerine’s direction. “We have everything arranged as you stated in our meeting.”
“We will move things up from the end of the evening to now.”
In my ear, Xander muttered, “What the hell happened to the order to search Drakos’s estate, fucker?”
“And the other duties we must complete during our time here?”
“I’m going to let you two conduct business and stand over here.” Nerine tried to move away from us, but Andraius caught her upper arm, holding her in a grip tighter than necessary.
“Stay right here. This discussion is veering into something requiring your presence.”
Nerine glanced up at me for a brief second and then asked, “Meaning?”
“Keep listening.” He set his hand on the small of her back, and she visibly arched and moved forward as if she couldn’t bear his touch.
Then, I saw something on her face that resembled a mix between sadness and shame. When she realized I caught her reaction, she shifted her attention to Andraius, who was completely unaware of anything happening around him.
“Put our previous plans on hold. There are other priorities you need to manage.”
“I’m not following.”
“Nyx is taking Nerine under her wing, as I mentioned earlier. And from their conversation before dinner, Nerine will spend considerable time at the Drakos estate training to be a proper wife, starting this week.”
“Well, well, well,” Xander hummed in my earpiece. “I believe Mrs. Drakos is jumping into the game as well. This whole thing is about to get complicated as fuck. I hope Drakos knows that his wife altered our plans and will probably do the opposite of anything and everything he tells her.”
Yeah, Nyx scheduling her one-on-one time with Nerine at the estate wasn’t part of the original strategy Xander and I’d arranged with Drakos. They were supposed to get Nerine involved in the botanical gardens project in downtown Boston. This way, she would be safely away whenever someone decided to make a move on Andraius.
This monkey wrench meant I couldn’t let Nerine out of my sight when she was with Nyx. I no longer trusted anyone but Xander with her.
Maybe I’d become a cynical bastard, but life had made me that way.
Acting as if I hadn’t heard anything Xander said, I responded to Andraius. “Understood. Should I inform the team now or after dinner?”
“As of now. I have a few people to visit, and then we will say our goodbyes to the hosts.”
“Done.”
I stepped back as if to leave, but Andraius stayed me with a lift of his hands.
Glancing at Nerine, he said, “Since you don’t like change, let me give you a heads-up.”
“What is that?”
“As of tonight, you’ll have a new security team.”
“What?” Her voice came out a bit louder than acceptable, garnering a glance or two from the people milling about around us. “That’s not a heads-up.”
The way she shifted, I had no doubt she wanted to peer in my direction. I kept my attention on the crowd through the open doors of the dining room, even though I could see everything happening between Andraius and Nerine in my periphery.
“I didn’t have to tell you at all. You could have just had a new group watching you.”
“They won’t tell you anything different than your current spies say.”
Did she actually believe that Theios Alex would assign anyone to her that would invade her privacy? He loved her as if she were his daughter.
No, she had a right to her concerns. In the group were some of the traitors, Andraius’s men, he’d sprinkled into the mix. They’d rat out their own mothers.
Every single man from the originals protecting her was loyal only to her. They’d keep any secret she wanted them to keep. But weeding out who she could trust would have taken her time, and the thought of going through that again probably gave her anxiety.
God. We’d fucked up, letting her believe she had no one. And it just wasn’t fair to expect Theios Alex to pick up our slack and keep our secrets.
“Then you don’t have anything to worry about. Do you?”
“Fine. Do what you want.”
“I will. Theo, she is all yours.”
Immediately, she whirled in my direction. Her dark blue eyes bored into mine. A storm of emotion swam in her irises. Was it surprise or rage, or worry? Or maybe betrayal?
Keeping my expression locked down as we stared at each other, I inclined my head as any support staff would do. She furrowed her brow and shifted back to Andraius.
“Why would you put your top enforcer on me? Isn’t he needed to do you dirty work in Europe?”
So she’d kept tabs on me.
“I have my reasons.” Andraius lifted the tumbler of scotch he held in his hands and took a sip. “And you have two.”
“Two what?”
“Two enforcers. Theo and Xander. They will be responsible for you, day and night.”
She stiffened, narrowing her gaze. “And where will you be? Let me guess, with your whores.”
Andraius tightened his grasp on his glass, jerked his other hand as if to strike her, thought better of it, and slid his palm into his pants pocket.
“I plan to do my job by putting the family’s interests first. As you are going to do by keeping Nyx Drakos happy.”
“As if you’d know anything about putting family first.”
Ignoring her jab, he taunted, “You won’t be able to hide anything from me now, Nerine.”
“Let me repeat, do what you want.” Nerine turned and stalked away from us.
I nodded to Robert Lavinos, the head of Andraius’s security, who came into view. He followed Andraius as he strolled toward a group he wanted to meet, and then I followed Nerine.
I kept a healthy distance as Nerine headed into the ladies’ lounge, where I’d positioned a female team member to watch for any information she may hear tonight.
“So, how mad is she?” Xander asked into the earpiece.
“Between one and ten. I’d say nuclear. Something isn’t right.”
“As in?”
“It’s like she wanted to antagonize him. As if she wanted him to lash out at her.”
“There has to be some truth to the rumors.”
I clenched my jaw as roaring flooded my ears. “We didn’t protect her.”
“How the fuck were we supposed to protect her when we were living on different continents and were barely able to see which side was up? You need to let it go.”
“I was assigned to protect the family.”
“No, Theios Mik was assigned to them. You were nowhere in the vicinity when everything went down.”
No, that wasn’t how it had gone down.
Theios Alex had ordered Papa and my brothers to watch the five Angelos children so Xander and I could take our fucking finals.
The memories of the blowup I’d had that morning with Papa still haunted me to this day. The old man had raged about having to babysit instead of doing, as he liked to call it, real work in the field. He viewed my time spent studying or teaching any of the Angelos girls anything as time wasted.
He’d never respected me or anything I valued. In his eyes, a college degree had no value in our world. And for the most part, he was right, but he also knew about the promise I’d made to Mama to become the first person on either side of our family to go beyond high school.
Papa only believed in keeping his word for things that benefited him, and I was never part of that equation since he’d hated me from the moment of Mama’s death.
Hell, even before that, I couldn’t remember a time the man showed me any affection other than the standard nod of the head. It had always been my mother who’d given me any form of kindness or an ounce of love.
My brothers were the ones Papa loved. They were over-macho assholes like him who used brute instead of brains.
Fuck, what the hell was I doing?
I focused back on Xander. “I bet Papa is sitting in hell thinking that if I hadn’t skipped out on my responsibilities, Theios Peter, him, my brothers, and countless others wouldn’t have been slaughtered.”
“I loved Theios Mik, but he was a dick to you.”
“It doesn’t change the fact the bastard was right in this case. That degree has done nothing for me, just like he said it would. And in the end, we had to play traitors.”
In one afternoon, Xander and I had lost everyone, from our leader and his little boy to all of our siblings and my parents. The only reason Andraius let us live was because we pledged loyalty to him. And we’d agreed to that only because Theios Alex said the only way to protect the Angelos women was to hold our noses and play the betrayers.
I still couldn’t understand how Andraius believed we would immediately give him our allegiance. But thank God for small favors.
“Wrong. Without your degree, we couldn’t have run this organization without the moron knowing. Now, do you want to ease up on the guilt? I thought it was my job to play the martyr.” Xander hummed. “I know you need to visit Father Michael. He’ll give you a komboskini to pray over as you count the knots, and then all the sinners’ guilt will disappear before you finish all fifty-two prayers.”
“You’re such a jackass.”
“The truth is the truth.”
“Shut up and come down from your perch. We need to get Nerine home.”
“On my way.”
Xander had barely finished speaking when Nerine came out of the lounge. From how she moved directly toward me and the ire filling her blue eyes, I’d done something to piss her off.
What the fuck could I have done already?
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Angelos?”
She paused two feet from me. “I do not need someone in the toilet with me. Where the hell do you think I will go in a gown like this? It’s not like I can sneak out a window.”
“Rebecca will only intervene if your safety is compromised.” I kept my tone bland and without inflection.
She cocked a hand on her hip. “My other team lead didn’t feel this level of security was necessary. Why is it so important now?”
“Your other security lead wasn’t me.”
“Or me,” Xander added, coming up behind me. “We take our roles seriously.”
A flush crept up Nerine’s face as that unsaid energy that seemed to flow from the three of us surged. We shared so much history, and it couldn’t reach the light of day.
How long had it been since we’d been this close? Almost five years. The night before everything went to hell.
“I’m not a child.” She kept her gaze between Xander and me, not daring to look us in the eyes.
We knew this firsthand.
“We have our orders to keep you safe,” Xander responded.
“This is all to keep me safe?”
I hoped she read past the words I’d say next. “Everything we’ve done is to keep you safe.”
“Is that right?” She smirked. “Could have fooled me. Fuck off with keeping me safe.”
I should have known better, subtle never worked with her.
“Whether you want it or not,” I said, “we will make sure nothing happens to you, Angel.”
Fire lit her eyes, and for a split second, I thought she’d deck me.
“Never call me Angel again. I’m not your angel. You lost the right.” Her attention moved to Xander. “And so did you. I am only an assignment to you. Follow his orders like the good little enforcer lapdogs you are. I’ve survived on my own so far. I can keep doing it.”
Turning, she stalked toward the main entryway of the house.
“That went better than I expected.”
I glared at Xander. “We shouldn’t have stayed away. She hates us.”
“No, she doesn’t. She’s smarter than everyone around us and knows we had no choice but to keep our distance.”
I resisted the urge to smack him on the back of the head. “From where I’m standing, she’d rather gut us than look at us.”
“Did you forget how you two started?”
Only an idiot would forget how we’d circled each other as if we were feral cats ready to claw each other’s eyes out. It had annoyed the hell out of me that Papa saddled me with babysitting duty for the boss’s fourteen-year-old daughter. And she’d felt the same way about me being her babysitter.
After getting expelled from her elite private school with all the debutantes like her and where security was part of the tuition, she’d decided to attend school with all of us peasants instead of finding another institution on par with her social status.
So my job was to keep an eye on her as she navigated her first year of high school.
“That was a lifetime ago.”
“Doesn’t change the dynamics.” Xander’s gaze locked with mine, the undercurrent of the unsaid pulsing between us.
Nerine folded her arms, shooting me a glare as she waited for us. The giant rock on Nerine’s left hand glimmered with the reflection of the light.
Needing to correct Xander’s perspective, I said, “You’re an idiot if you think it doesn’t. She belongs to Andraius.”
“The fuck she does,” Xander retorted, his pace growing faster. “She is trapped. We will get her out. Then all bets are off.”
“You act as if it is a done deal. We are a long way from that day, and how I look at it, waiting will only make her hate us more.”
“It’s better for her to hate us now and make it believable than to get her killed.”
Nerine glanced over her shoulder as if she wasn’t sure if we’d actually followed her and then quickened her pace. Right before she turned back around, her gaze locked with mine for the briefest of seconds, and that fucking undercurrent of anger mixed with longing hit me.
Christ. With the rollercoaster of emotions Nerine and Xander were about to throw at me, this was never going to work without killing me.
“And how will you explain the attraction if anyone notices it?” I asked.
“You’re good at playing the emotionless asshole. Just keep doing what you do best.”
I scowled at Xander. Not a few seconds ago, he told me that Nerine and I were volatile together. “And you?”
“I’m a flirt.” He shot me a bright grin. “Everyone knows this. Andraius will think I’m sweet-talking her into doing what he wants. I’ve done this shit for him before.”
Hearing him talk about himself like that annoyed the hell out of me. We’d become completely different versions of ourselves to survive our new realities. However, the way we’d moved on wasn’t a topic I anticipated. Especially Nerine’s reaction to the way Xander and I moved on without her.
“We are fucked, and not in the good way. We’ll be lucky if we keep our balls.”