Chapter Seven
She woke to another phone call.
The room was unfamiliar for a moment—too large, too quiet, the sheets too crisp against her skin—and then the memories came flooding back. Monaco. The hack. Leon carrying her through the terminal like she weighed nothing at all.
Leon.
Her phone was still ringing, and she answered it without thinking. “Hello?”
“I’m sorry I keep calling.”
But as soon as Lexy heard the voice from the other end, she already knew who it was.
“You’re in Monaco,” Lydia said shakily, “aren’t you?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because Ga—” Lydia stopped abruptly, and even through the phone, Lexy could hear the sharp intake of breath, the barely suppressed curse, and she knew right away that Lydia had almost let slip who was feeding her information about Lexy’s whereabouts.
“Look, it doesn’t matter how I know.”
I think it does, Lexy thought, with how Lydia was suddenly speaking to her with such sharpness.
“I just want to talk. And it’s something that I find difficult to explain over the phone. I was hoping we could meet?”
Every instinct Lexy had was screaming at her to say no, but instead she heard herself ask, “Where?”
****
The cafe was small and bright, all white marble and gold accents, the kind of place that looked like it had been designed for women who wore silk scarves and ordered espresso without checking the price.
Lexy felt immediately out of place in her rumpled clothes and messy braid, but she pushed through the door anyway because she had never been the kind of person to turn back once she’d committed to something.
No matter what.
She had resisted the temptation to look Lydia up online from the moment she’d learned of the woman’s existence.
Some part of her hadn’t wanted to know—hadn’t wanted to put a face to the name that had haunted her since Shayla’s conference room, since the words ‘long-term companion’ had shattered everything she thought she knew about her marriage.
But the moment she stepped inside the cafe and saw the woman sitting alone at a corner table, she knew.
It wasn’t just that Lydia was beautiful—though she was, stunningly so, all dark hair and red lips and a figure that belonged on magazine covers. It wasn’t the designer clothes or the perfectly manicured nails or the way she held herself like someone who had never doubted her own worth.
It was her eyes.
The moment Lexy looked into Lydia’s eyes, she knew with absolute certainty that this woman still wanted Leonidas.
And had never planned to let him go.
“Thank you for coming.” Lydia’s voice was soft, halting, every syllable dripping with carefully manufactured vulnerability. “I know this is so...”
“Inappropriate?”
The word came out mild, almost gentle, but something flickered in Lydia’s expression—a flash of rage, quickly suppressed—and Lexy felt a grim satisfaction in knowing she’d landed a hit.
“I just wanted to give you a heads up.” Lydia reached into her bag and withdrew a manila envelope, sliding it across the table with the kind of graceful movement that suggested she’d rehearsed this moment.
“I managed to buy the rights from the photographer, but I think he’s lying when he told me it’s the only copy he has.
Leon doesn’t deserve this kind of trouble. ”
Leon.
Not Leonidas.
Not Mr. Gazis.
But...Leon.
And the way the other woman said it with such intimacy had Lexy’s stomach turning.
She stared down at the envelope, making no move to touch it. It sat there on the white marble like something poisonous, something that would bite if she got too close.
“What’s inside?”
“Photos of us together.” Lydia’s voice was pained. “Photos that no one had any right to take.”
Photos of them together.
Photos of Leonidas with this woman.
Photos of him doing to Lydia what he had done to her just hours ago—his hands, his mouth, his body moving against someone else’s in ways that Lexy had thought, foolishly, were hers alone.
“You should look—”
No.
Bile rose in her throat, hot and acidic, and she had to clench her jaw to keep from gagging right there at the table.
But to show weakness in front of this woman—this woman who had shared her husband’s bed for six years, who had known his touch when Lexy had known nothing but lonelines—felt like a defeat she couldn’t afford.
She jerked to her feet instead, grabbing the envelope with fingers that shook despite her best efforts to steady them. “Thank you for this.”
The words came out wrong—too fast, too uneven—but she was already moving, already weaving through the tables with the kind of clumsy haste that had her bumping into chairs and knocking against other patrons and not caring, not caring about any of it, because she just needed to get out, needed air, needed to be anywhere but here.
Behind her, Lydia watched her go with barely concealed triumph.
Idiot.
Leonidas’s wife might be hailed as a genius in the world of racing and engineering, but in this world—the real world, the world where women fought for men and the ruthless always won—idiots like her always lost. Too nice, too trusting, too pathetically—
Lydia’s eyes widened.
Was that Leonidas?
Was that him bursting through the cafe door like a man possessed, his gaze fixed on his wife with an intensity that made something cold settle in Lydia’s stomach?
Was that him going after her like he was desperate to keep her?
Like their marriage had become something more than a business arrangement?
Like she actually meant something to him?
No.
No, that wasn’t possible.
That wasn’t—
But Leonidas was already gone, chasing after his wife without so much as a glance in Lydia’s direction, and for the first time since she’d set this plan in motion, doubt began to creep in.
****
Leonidas had known something was wrong the moment Sienah told him where Lexy had gone.
The cafe she’d named was one of Lydia’s favorites—he’d taken her there himself, years ago, back when their arrangement was new and he’d still been foolish enough to think that keeping a mistress was simply a practical solution to a physical problem.
The coincidence was too perfect, the timing too convenient, and even as he ran through the facility and out into the Monaco morning, he knew he was already too late.
The damage was done.
He could see her through the cafe windows as he approached—his wife, his Lexy, tears streaming down her face as she stumbled between tables like a woman who had forgotten how her own legs worked.
She was clutching something to her chest, a manila envelope, and even from this distance he could see the way her shoulders shook with barely suppressed sobs.
No.
No, no, no.
He didn’t know what game Lydia was playing, but he could not—would not—let her win.
Lexy just wanted to go home.
It didn’t matter where. Athens, New York, anywhere. She just needed to be as far away from Leon as possible, away from the evidence of his hands on another woman’s skin, away from the proof that everything she’d thought they were building was nothing but—
She crashed into something solid.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and for a disoriented moment she thought she’d walked into a wall—but then the wall spoke in a voice that was hoarse and raw and heartbreakingly familiar.
“Lexina.”
No.
Not him.
Not now.
She tried to step back, but shock had made her clumsy, and her fingers loosened without her permission. The envelope slipped from her grasp, and a silent broken cry escaped Lexy’s lips as she watched the photos spill across the cobblestones like a wound tearing open.
Leonidas looked down.
And went completely white.
Because there they were—image after image of him and Lydia, captured by some paparazzo with a long lens and no conscience.
Lydia draped across his lap at a restaurant.
Lydia pressing a kiss to his cheek outside her apartment building.
Lydia’s hand on his chest, her smile catlike and possessive, while he looked at her with an expression that made Leonidas want to reach back through time and shake his past self until his teeth rattled.
Not explicit. Not scandalous in the way tabloids craved.
But intimate.
Undeniably intimate.
And his wife had just seen all of it.
God, please.
It was Leonidas’ first time thinking of Him.
And praying.
His first time to feel so desperate that he’d call out a name of someone he had never seen. Someone he didn’t even know he believed in until he realized that he needed someone larger than himself.
Please, God. Please.
Praying was all he could do because it was also Leonidas’ first time to truly understand what he had done.
Not in the abstract, not in the careful rationalizations he’d built around his arrangement with Lydia, but in the concrete reality of his wife’s tear-streaked face and trembling hands and the way she was looking at him like he’d taken something precious and ground it beneath his heel.
He had hurt her.
He had been hurting her for six years, and he hadn’t even known it, hadn’t even cared enough to find out, because he’d been so certain that their arrangement was fair, that she’d given permission, that none of it really mattered because their marriage wasn’t real anyway.
But it was real.
It had always been real.
And he had failed her in every way that counted.
Lexy dropped to her knees, bruising them against the cobblestones as she scrambled to gather the photos, to hide them, to make them disappear—but her hands collided with Leon’s when they both reached for the same image at the same time, and his touch—
His touch, which had given her so much pleasure just hours ago, which had made her feel cherished and wanted and finally, finally seen—
It burned now.
She jerked back like she’d been scalded, and she watched something shatter in his expression, watched him withdraw his hands and hold them up in a gesture of surrender that made her heart crack even further.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I’m so sorry, Lexina.”