Chapter One #2
The usual twisted, vacuous socialites flooded about as he moved along the outskirts of the crowd, knowing better than to get in his way.
The paparazzi, forever being fed stories by his bitter half siblings, called Thanasis the boardroom bully.
Or the real Zacharias monster. They took great pleasure in shredding him apart in their pages.
But if the goal was to isolate or shame him, it didn’t work, because he was entirely too competent at his job.
All his half siblings’ efforts had brought him was entirely too much female attention, little as he wanted it.
The idea of a demanding man with too much money on his hands was apparently catnip to some.
Yet though they flocked to him, they rarely stayed near him.
He cut through small talk like a blade. He was too intense, too certain, too opposed to the usual nonsense.
And most importantly, he had yet to get over Saskia.
In this world where everything was brightly colored, airy, and insubstantial until it drew blood, Thanasis—according to his father—dressed like an undertaker. Always all in black, he carved his way through parties like a hearse.
These frilly, frivolous people fluttered around him like he was the king of the underworld himself.
Sometimes he even enjoyed it, but not tonight.
Thanasis didn’t trust himself to drink, not when what he really wanted was to take a whole bottle of whatever was on offer and toss it back. Not when he generally allowed these people to think he was drearily sober, because it made them hate him more.
And certainly not when he couldn’t be certain how he would react if alcohol hit all the yearning and need and cruel hope inside him.
He skirted the edges of the vapid crush, listening to them bray and shriek, and got a different vantage point of this woman before him who could not possibly exist.
Saskia. Her name was a song inside of him. Saskia, whose lovely, perfect body had never been found. He had grudgingly come to accept that she had died in that train derailment, because surely no one could hide for five whole years. Not from a man like him with so many resources at his fingertips.
He had monitored her bank. Her credit cards.
She’d never returned to the flat he’d set up for her in London and he knew she had nowhere else to go.
She had been an orphan, in London for her studies and focusing on art history, of all pointless things.
She had been quick and bright, intense and in love, and he had never wished to be parted from her.
Then, after a night he wished he could do over again—oh, how he had wished it a thousand times—she had boarded that train in the morning and he’d never seen her again.
He’d been left with nothing.
And Thanasis had quickly discovered that without this woman he had hid away from the world, he was a stranger to himself.
It was possible that he had become used to that stranger. Or anyway, he’d learned to accept him, because it wasn’t as if he had another option.
But here, tonight, he was staring at her doppelg?nger.
And he felt very much like the him he had lost that terrible day…
He cautioned himself against too much hope.
He had acquainted himself with all the various stages of grief and then some, more than once, and nothing had changed the truth.
There was no reason to suppose that would change now, either.
Everyone had a twin, wasn’t that what they said? Everyone had a double.
Thanasis told himself that this woman here tonight resembled the woman he’d lost, that was all. She wasn’t—she couldn’t be his Saskia. Just someone who looked so much like her that it was almost as if she had come back from the dead.
Obviously, that was impossible.
Obviously.
Still, he maneuvered himself closer. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, though she stood in a loose group of guests.
She wore a pretty dress and a smile on her face and looked as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing from the people standing around her.
Given that those people included Pavlos himself and Thanasis’s half brother, Johannes—who could best be described as two-faced and vengeful, and that on a good day—this was not a surprise.
She didn’t look like Saskia, Thanasis assured himself. Or rather, she looked different than his Saskia. Older, perhaps.
She wore her hair differently, longer now, tumbling down her back in glossy waves that made his fingers ache with the memory of running a shorter version of those thick waves between them.
He knew how she would smell, like bergamot and flowers, and he only realized he’d clenched his hands into fists when his knuckles began to ache.
This woman, who could not possibly be Saskia because Saskia was dead, had the same perfect oval of a face.
The same clever, dancing eyes like steeped tea run through with the brightest sunshine.
She had the same delicate nose and the same high cheekbones, both of which he had traced again and again with his fingers. His mouth.
And that was her mouth, just as he remembered it. A sensual affair that made her look as if she was pouting when all she was doing was thinking. That mouth that he had felt all over his body, then lush and hot on his cock.
God help him, but he could feel himself stirring even here. In this squalid place where sex was merely one more commodity.
He stared at her so hard that it must have disturbed the air around her, because she looked up.
And he braced himself, waiting for that clash of recognition when her gaze met his.
That punch of understanding and electricity that had changed his life completely when he’d encountered her by chance in the Tate Modern in Central London.
But though she looked at him, and held his gaze, he saw nothing in the dark brown depths of hers save the mildest interest.
As if he really was nothing but a stranger.
This only proved that she wasn’t Saskia, he assured himself—but everything in him rejected it.
Emphatically.
Thanasis could feel it like a blow, a kind of terrible seizure rolling through him and churning him up, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.
He gritted his teeth. And it took him a lot longer than it should have to make sure that no matter what devastating implosions were happening inside him—and there were too many to count tonight—his face betrayed nothing.
When there was movement beside him again, he found the sly and ever chemically impaired Telemachus beside him, another half brother.
This one so dissolute that it was never clear if he knew who Thanasis was or if he thought that he was involved in some sort of extended drug-addled experience in his own otherwise empty head.
“Have to admit it,” Telemachus slurred at Thanasis as if picking up a conversation. “The old goat has always had good taste in women.”
“I’m aware of only one woman who fits that description,” Thanasis replied frigidly. “My sainted mother, may she rest in peace. The one and only wife he ever took.”
“My mother was a whore,” Telemachus said cheerfully, as if in agreement. “She’d have been the first to admit it if she was still alive. Not just admit it, but defend it. That doesn’t change the fact that she was beautiful.”
“I have asked you repeatedly not to speak to me in public,” Thanasis reminded Telemachus, who likely forgot that again the moment he said it. He moved away, growing more impatient with each step.
Though impatient for what, he could not have said.
He was too aware of the ghost of Saskia, there in the center of this room, as if this entire party was about her. For him, of course, it was.
Thanasis could not manage to think past it. He could not make any sense of it.
He could feel his father looking at him, but he didn’t move toward the old man. He refused to give him the satisfaction.
You must come to the villa , Pavlos had told him, hijacking a business call to make this demand.
I need to do no such thing, and won’t, Thanasis had replied, mildly enough.
It had been years since he’d darkened the marble arches of the villa with his presence.
He preferred to avoid it altogether. Refusing to return to the island meant he only had to interact with his father in Athens, where they could keep it in the office and talk some semblance of business, though he kept that to a minimum too.
Handling his father was much easier from afar.
Pavlos stayed in Greece, flitting in and out of the office in Athens as it suited his sense of importance. Thanasis remained in London, where he could run the business with the focused ruthlessness that had made him a billionaire in his own right before the age of thirty.
As the years passed, fewer and far between were these visits home.
If he had his way, he would see to it that there was no crossover between Pavlos’s vanity projects and the actual concerns of the shipping business that had been in the family for generations, but that Thanasis had turned into a multinational conglomerate.
You must come, Pavlos had said merrily, sounding wholly undeterred, as ever. I have an announcement to make of supreme importance .
Are you terminally ill? Thanasis had asked dryly.
Pavlos had laughed. You wish, my boy. Soon enough, all this will be your problem to solve. But in the meantime, I require your presence at the villa.
If I refuse this invitation, will you finally cut me out of your will? Thanasis asked.
But the old man only laughed again, and rang off.
If Thanasis had thought that Pavlos really would disinherit him, he might have stayed back in London the way he’d wanted to do.
But everything with his father came down to weighing the options.
Deciding what was worse at any given time—or what would become worse in the future if ignored—and acting accordingly.
At the end of the day, it cost him relatively little to turn up, appear to dance attendance on the old man’s whims, gather what intelligence he could, and then leave.
Not that there was ever much intelligence on display, of course.
Now, fully in his glory and with all of his children in attendance, Pavlos tapped his glass with one of the signet rings he wore on his thick fingers. He kept going until he claimed the attention of everyone in the room.
It was perhaps more true than Thanasis wanted to admit that his father had excellent taste in women.
But what they saw in Pavlos in return was his wealth.
His power. His status and fame. A woman who dated Pavlos Zacharias could be certain she would find herself infamous almost at once.
Some of his mistresses had parlayed that notoriety into something resembling a career, depending on a person’s definition of that term, but one thing remained certain.
Not a single one of them could possibly have dated the old man for his looks. Not in decades, anyway.
Because Pavlos had once been tall and commanding.
Thanasis had seen the pictures. But he was not a handsome man.
All of his features were bold and arresting, and he had been called exciting and powerful in his heyday.
Those same bold and arresting features coupled with a lifetime of dissolution and excess, however, meant that these days he resembled nothing so much as a goblin.
Something Thanasis had told him once, though it had done nothing but make the old man howl with laughter.
Jealous, are you? Pavlos had asked when he stopped laughing. A goblin I might be, my boy, and yet still the whole world finds me magnetic beyond reason.
You pronounced rich incorrectly, Thanasis had replied in his usual dry way, but that had only made his father laugh more.
Someday you will understand that these things are the same, the old man had said. Or you will be poor and forgotten.
Thanasis liked to think that he would be neither, thank you.
Pavlos, ever attuned to the shifting sands of attention and admiration, waited until everyone was staring at him. He smiled broadly. He looked beside him, and took the hand of Saskia’s ghost.
His Saskia’s ghost, Thanasis thought.
And something inside him…detonated.
He had kept her hidden away from any and all prying eyes, his Saskia. He had protected her when she was his. He had kept her a secret from everyone who knew him, the paparazzi, the world. She had come to think that he was ashamed of her, but nothing could be further from the truth.
What he had never wanted was this. His corrosive father anywhere near her—
But he shook himself.
Saskia was dead. This woman was an imitation, not the real thing.
And still, he didn’t like his father touching her. It crawled all over him like something sick.
“I have invited everyone here to celebrate with me,” Pavlos boomed out, smiling fatuously in all directions. “I have asked this beautiful woman, my lovely and innocent Selwen, to marry me. Better yet, she has accepted.”
He beamed at Saskia. Thanasis thought he might actually have died himself.
But Pavlos wasn’t done. “And she has graciously accepted,” he continued. “And who can say, perhaps she will be the making of me. Isn’t that wonderful?”
The crowd burst into the expected applause. The band began to play something saccharine.
And Thanasis stared at the ghost of his lost mistress and vowed, then and there, that she would marry his degenerate of a father—apparition or no—over his dead body.