Ours
"YOU'RE NOT GOING TO be the one to speak."
"I know!"
"Then why are you nervous?" Mykos asked in amusement.
"I don't know!"
He chuckled, but she only kept wringing her hands.
They were standing in the hallway of their home, and Mykos was already dressed in a tuxedo that made him look like the cover of a magazine she couldn't afford, while Maika was in a dark green gown that Portia had helped her zip into twenty minutes ago.
She had looked at herself in the mirror and thought she almost looked like she belonged in his world.
Almost. But not quite.
"I'm not joking, Mykos. I'm really nervous. What if I do something that will embarrass you? What if—"
"I understand," he soothed, and the way he said it—gently, like she was something he needed to handle with care—had her heart doing that familiar, inconvenient thing where it tried to climb out of her chest.
"I think we have..." He checked his watch. "Ten minutes."
For what?
Instead of answering his wife, he took her hand, drew her to the nearest room, which this time was her favorite library, and well...
She didn't even get to ask the question again, because the moment the door was closed behind them, his mouth was on hers, and his hands were sliding the straps of her gown off her shoulders, and her back was against the bookshelf (again), and books were threatening to fall (again), and she had just enough brain function left to think we really need to stop doing this to the library before she stopped thinking entirely.
Ten minutes was all it took indeed. Ten minutes in which she forgot the gala, the speech, the five hundred guests, and her own name.
After that, Maika was still rosy-cheeked and flustered when they arrived at the ball. Mykos, naturally, looked exactly the same as before, because of course he did. The man was incapable of looking disheveled. It was deeply unfair.
The hotel ballroom was enormous — crystal chandeliers, white linen tablecloths, centerpieces that probably cost more than her old monthly rent.
Hundreds of guests in evening wear, and she wanted to turn around and flee, but every single one of them turned to look when Mykos Ravensworth walked through the door with his wife on his arm.
Maika's grip on his arm tightened. He covered her hand with his and squeezed once, and somehow that single gesture said I'm here, you're safe, and if anyone looks at you wrong I will end them, which was both terrifying and exactly what she needed.
They found their table near the front. Mykos pulled out her chair for her the way he always did, like it was a reflex he'd had since the day they married. She sat down, smoothed her gown, and tried to look like a woman who hadn't been ravished against a bookshelf seven minutes ago.
"Your turn," she whispered once it was nearly time. "I'll be cheering for you."
"Please don't."
Maika pretended not to hear this and blew him a kiss.
"I'm serious."
"You should go," she urged. "It's not good to keep anyone waiting."
"Mrs. Ravensworth is right, sir." Orion had appeared at Mykos's elbow like he always did—silently, suddenly, as if he simply materialized from the nearest shadow. "I've been asked by the host to escort you backstage."
Mykos knew when he was beaten. But as he and Orion took the side door that would lead directly to the backstage area—
"You seem to have forgotten who's employing you," he drawled.
"Not at all, sir," Orion said politely. "I serve at your pleasure."
"And that's why you're always taking my wife's side?"
"Indeed, sir."
A pause.
"It's only because she's always right, sir."
Mykos gave Orion a look that would have made lesser men reconsider their career choices, but Orion received it with the serene indifference of a man who had been receiving that look for fifteen years. Was there anything in this world that could rattle him?
Apparently not.
Orion fell back once they made it backstage, and while Mykos had a few minutes alone, he found himself reflecting on how his life had been completely transformed in the past few weeks.
Thank You, God.
Thank You for saving Maika and me.
He had started praying after the abduction, and he hadn't stopped.
It didn't come naturally to him. He wasn't eloquent about it the way his wife was, with her long, rambling conversations with God that sounded like she was talking to a friend.
But he tried. His prayers were short. Sometimes just a sentence. Sometimes just a name.
Maika.
That was a prayer, too. Her name in his chest, her face in his mind, and the quiet, persistent certainty that he had been given something he didn't deserve and intended to spend the rest of his life earning.
"And for tonight's keynote speaker, let's welcome one of our board members, Mr. Mykos Ravensworth."
The applause that followed was thunderous, and Mykos had recently reached legendary status.
Due to FBI involvement, Maika's abduction and rescue was made known to the public.
It started as a news story—billionaire's wife kidnapped, rescued within hours—but it didn't end there.
The investigation peeled back layers that Mykos had kept hidden for over a decade, but what emerged changed everything.
The mayor had officially recognized the Greek-American billionaire as a local hero. There was a ceremony. A plaque. A handshake that made the front page. Mykos had stood through it with his usual stoic composure, and Maika had stood beside him and cried, which also made the front page.
The FBI also gave a press release about how Mykos, in all the years he was vilified for being the son of a former mob boss, had actually been serving his country in a series of successful undercover operations that nabbed many of America's most wanted men.
And so the man everyone used to fear was now the man everyone adored—
"That's my husband!"
The words rang out from somewhere near the front of the ballroom, bright and proud and completely inappropriate for a black-tie gala, and the entire audience burst into laughter.
Mykos, standing at the podium under the spotlights, closed his eyes for exactly one second.
Lord, give me strength.
He opened them.
His wife was on her feet, clapping with her whole body the way she always did, her green eyes shining, her face glowing, and she was so, so beautiful that for a moment the words on his prepared speech blurred and he forgot what he was going to say.
The laughter in the room turned warm. A few guests started clapping along with her. Mrs. Wright, seated three tables away, dabbed her eyes with a napkin and said to the woman beside her, "I told you he had a heart."
And no one adored him more than his own wife, Maika, whose outburst had the rest of the audience laughing and clapping in equal measure.
After his speech, the other guests stopped Mykos on his way back to his wife's side, asking to take a photo with him.
Maika saw this, too, and she had a hard time biting back her laughter at the way Mykos was doing his best to change.
He did accommodate every request, but his handsome face remained stoic.
He shook hands. He nodded. He stood for photos with the rigid posture of a man who was enduring something, and Maika loved him so much in that moment that her chest physically ached.
He had never wanted to be loved by the world.
He had only ever wanted to be loved by her.
And it was only when he was once again on his way back to her, and his golden gaze found her in the crowd—
That was when his expression softened.
Not a smile. Something deeper than that. Something that lived in his eyes and in the way his shoulders dropped, just slightly, like a man finally setting down a weight he'd been carrying for thirteen years.
Because theirs was no longer a loveless marriage.
It never had been from the start.
They just needed time to know this, too.
The End
Thank you so much for reading Mykos and Maika’s story.