CHAPTER TEN
A POSTOLIS FLEW TO Paris the next day, though he couldn’t escape the feeling that he had not so much settled the issue between him and Jolie as postponed it.
They had exploded into their usual passion, but maybe that had been a mistake. It had all been...too much. Too real.
Or maybe it was his own weakness that so disgusted him.
Because he wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe it when she said those things about who they could be, about the kind of marriage they could have—
But he had given up on bedtime stories like that long ago.
And he had known the truth about Jolie from the first. He would be a weak man indeed if a pretty face changed his mind. He would be no better than his father.
He landed in Paris in a foul mood that the rain did not improve.
He met Alceu in one of the properties he kept in Paris, a town house a short walk from the Musée d’Orsay, and found his friend a curious reflection of his own odd frame of mind.
“You seem agitated,” he told Alceu after they concluded the business that they’d ostensibly met to discuss.
“I am never agitated,” his friend replied at once, making it clear enough to Apostolis that he was not quite himself. “You are the one who has the steam coming out of his ear. Is that not the phrase?”
As if Alceu did not know the damned phrase, fluent as he was in every language he encountered. But he did like to pretend otherwise for his own entertainment, and who was Apostolis to stand between his friend and his fun?
“What I cannot abide,” Apostolis said instead, “is a liar who cannot determine that the time has come to stop spinning her stories.”
But he regretted saying it instantly, because something in him...balked.
Rationally, it didn’t make any sense. This was his oldest friend in the world. When he’d had no one, when his father had disowned him and made it clear that he was not permitted to come home, Alceu had been like a brother to him. Like more than a brother. They had forged their way through the world together. They had always, always stood tall at one another’s backs.
He had always considered Alceu closer to him than his actual family.
All the same, something in him considered it the deepest kind of betrayal that he’d said even something so opaque about Jolie.
He understood in that moment that if she unburdened herself in a similar way to a friend of hers—or worse, his sister—even if she kept what she said as devoid of details, he would feel it like a knife in the gut.
And he could not say that he cared much for the way that realization made him feel, now that it was too late. Now that he’d said the thing he shouldn’t have said. Maybe he’d needed to say such a thing to understand that things really had changed between him and Jolie, despite his protestations.
But she is a liar, a voice in him insisted.
Because the alternative was untenable.
Perhaps it was lucky that his friend seemed entirely preoccupied with the view of Paris outside his windows. A view that Alceu had seen before. Too many times to count.
“You seem unduly interested in the city tonight,” Apostolis pointed out. “You must have developed a love for Paris that I did not think you possessed.”
His friend did not turn back to face him. “I live at the top of a mountain. My nearest neighbors are trees. Sometimes it amazes me that so many people live like this. And on purpose.”
Somehow, Apostolis didn’t think that was it, though he knew better than to push. Alceu was less flexible than the mountain he lived on. “My sister said something similar.” He laughed, remembering his last call with Dioni, who had managed to sound even more flighty and Dioni on what had sounded like the busiest street in Manhattan than before. “Did I not tell you that she has taken himself off to New York City, of all places, for the duration.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Apostolis thought that Alceu seemed...even stiffer and more forbidding than usual, then. “I too was amazed that the little mouse would take herself off to the big city. I thought perhaps, one day, she might spend some time in Athens, I suppose, as many do. But New York?” He shrugged. “Yet as she tells it, it is as if she has never known home until now.”
Alceu let out a laugh, then, and the sound made Apostolis frown. It was too bitter. It was...
But he never finished that thought, because Alceu turned around and was looking directly at him again, and his eyes were dark. And his voice was terse when he spoke. “As far as liars go, at a certain point it is better to choose to believe a lie if it leads to peace.”
Apostolis blinked at that most unexpected statement from a man he would never have described as peaceful but Alceu was already moving, heading for the door as if responding to an alarm only he could hear.
“I beg your pardon, but I must go,” Alceu bit off in that frozen way of his. “I forgot that there are some calls I must make.”
And he shut the door behind him when he went in a manner that Apostolis thought boded ill for whoever it was he needed to call.
But he did not brood any further over his friend’s behavior—or the odd thing he’d said about peace— once he’d gone. He moved over to the window himself and looked out at the scene that had so captivated Alceu. Paris at night, gleaming in the rain.
Yet he didn’t see it. All he could think about was Jolie.
Jolie kneeling before him, whispering, what if.
And Jolie after that moment, spread out before him like one more decadent feast, giving all of herself to him. And murmuring things she should not while he took her, as if all of this was a different kind of story than the one he’d been telling himself all along—
But he could not accept it.
He would not.
The next day, he made a few calls. And as Alceu was nowhere to be found, he took leave of Paris and set off for Switzerland instead.
The last payment sent from Jolie’s bank account had been to an address in Geneva, only two days before. It was time, he concluded, to find out the real truth. Then, perhaps, he would treat his darling wife to a few what ifs of his own design.
It was a short flight, and the closer he got, the more he felt that deep, dark, boiling fury inside of him.
He was certain that whatever he was about to find he would not like.
If she had not been a virgin, he would have assumed that she was supporting a lover. He could hear her as if she was sitting beside him on his plane, making arch comments about the power of her built-in lie detector .
Something about that seemed to shift inside him uneasily.
But he could not believe the things she had said to him. He could not believe she was simply an innocent, caught up in Spyros’s game.
And then, the way she told it, in his.
He could not believe those things because if he did, he realized as his plan set down in Geneva, he would have to accept that he had not distanced himself from the old man the way he’d been so certain he had.
It should have been impossible that anyone could compare him to his father.
That it was not—
That thought was so horrifying that he found himself clenching his own jaw so tight that it was a wonder he didn’t crack a tooth or two.
He had a car waiting for him and he stalked off the plane and into the backseat, letting the driver worry about getting him where he needed to go. Though that allowed him perhaps too much time to sit and consider the problem that was Jolie.
Apostolis didn’t want to think about her. He didn’t want to think about the seven years she had carried the hotel on her own slender shoulders. He did not want to think about the reading of his father’s will. Or that stormy wedding that they had both surrendered to with such ill grace that their only two guests had removed themselves to get away from the vitriol between them.
He did not want to think of the years that stretched ahead of them still when it already seemed as if a lifetime had passed since his father had died and his vindictive intentions had been made clear.
There was only Jolie, for five whole years, if he wanted to claim his own birthright.
Then he thought about that birthright, too. And wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him that it was an act of aggression on his father’s part to have left nothing at all to Dioni.
Then again, argued a voice inside of him that sounded suspiciously sharp, like Jolie’s, it’s likely not you that he expected would take care of her. It’s her friend. Her stepmother. Your wife. Spyros trusted her more than you, so does your own sister.
In the back of the car, sliding along through the streets of Geneva, the lake gleaming at him and far-off mountain ranges standing proud. But he didn’t see any of that. Apostolis felt his own chest vibrating and realized that he was actually growling .
Out loud.
He stopped at once.
Jolie wanted him to trust her. His own father had never trusted him, but then Apostolis had known better than to trust him. And he could not remember how or when that had started. It seemed to him that it had always been that way, since long before he had gained enough perspective on the world to make such a decision.
It felt like a simple gut feeling, and one he’d had his whole life.
Spyros was untrustworthy. Everything he did had deep, sharp talons attached and he never seemed to care who got cut. It was easy, even as a child, to make sure to keep away from that type of person.
He looked down at his hands, stretching them out as if looking for the blades attached to his own fingers that he was sure, suddenly, he could feel.
And then, perhaps inevitably, he thought of his mother.
Apostolis so rarely allowed himself that kind of nostalgia. When he thought of her, it was always from back when he was very small. When she had been a voice, soft and loving and instantly able to soothe him. He could remember the way she smelled like summer and that sometimes, when he passed the flowers that Jolie took such pride in arranging about the hotel, there were certain varieties that stopped him in his tracks.
Though he would never have admitted it.
Apostolis had never blamed his sister for his mother’s death, though he wondered, now, if his father had. Because it would be just like Spyros to nurse a grudge for nearly thirty years, act as if he felt nothing but tender feelings for Dioni, and then wait for his will to do the real talking for him.
This, he assured himself, was why he insisted on uncovering Jolie’s lies.
They both needed to know where they truly stood, always. So that there could be no pretending.
So that what happened to him once already could not occur again. He would not be, again, the recipient of a terse voice message from Spyros shortly before he’d finished university, letting him know that he was on his own. And was not welcome to return home until he could afford to get there himself.
I cannot imagine that this will surprise you, Spyros had said slyly. You know how irresponsible you are, do you not?
But he had known that it was a surprise. He had planned it that way.
If he was on his own, Apostolis preferred to know it from the start. There was a reason that the only person he had ever trusted on this earth was Alceu, because they had proven themselves to each other. Time and time again.
What was that saying? Trust, but verify.
That was all this was, he assured himself, as the car pulled up in front of a block of flats in a neighborhood nowhere near the beautiful views that Geneva was famous for. He frowned down at the address in his hand, but told the driver to wait as he climbed out.
Then he strode to the door of the building, and wondered how, precisely, he planned to go about this—
But he didn’t have to figure that out, because the door opened as he stood there. A couple came out, bickering in low, bitter tones.
He caught the door and brushed past them without a second glance. Then, inside, he followed the stairs up three flights until he found the flat number that he had written down.
There was that band tied around his chest once more, and much tighter than before. There was something drumming in him, and he didn’t like it.
Did he really want to knock on this door and have his questions answered?
For a moment he wavered, thinking of those golden nights out on the terrace, awash in starlight and wine. The flush of music and something that felt like magic.
You know what that magic is, a voice in him whispered. It’s only that you don’t want to admit it.
He thought of Jolie climbing over him in the bed they shared, moving over him like more of that same perfect light, as if every time she touched him was an act of hope.
But here, in a downtrodden building in a questionable neighborhood in a city he had never particularly cared for, he shook that off.
This wasn’t about hope. It was about truth.
He stomped forward and pounded on the door in question. He waited. And heard faint sound from inside, so he pounded again. Harder this time.
And he was ready when he heard the latch. He was ready when the door swung open. He would handle this, whatever it was, and if she thought that this would end their war, she would find he had been keeping the tanks and missiles at bay—
But then the door opened, just a sliver, and he stopped.
Everything in him stopped.
Because a girl stood there, looking back at him through the latched opening. He estimated that she was in her late teens or early twenties, and he recognized her immediately.
It was the eyes, far too blue for any land this far north. It was the hair, chopped short around her face, but still, a shade of sunshine he knew too well.
“If you’re here for debt collection,” the girl said, in a voice that sounded controlled enough, though he could see a bit of anxiousness in her expression, “I’m afraid that my parents have just left—”
Apostolis felt an earthquake rip through him, mercilessly. A fundamental, seismic shift. He had to reach out to steady himself on the doorjamb, and the girl’s eyes widened.
“Don’t be afraid,” he managed to get out. “I won’t hurt you. I am not here for debt. ”
And he had no idea how he would go about paying his. How he would ever manage to make up for the things he’d said.
The things he’d done, so convinced that Jolie was a villain.
“It’s only that you look ill,” the girl whispered. “You’ve gone pale. Are you going to be sick?”
“That,” he gritted out, though he was surprised he could even speak through the upheaval inside of him, “would be an upgrade.”
And he had to wait until the racket inside of him stilled. Not entirely. Just enough that he could feel the destruction and function anyway.
“I think I passed your parents on the way in,” he said when he could speak without thinking it might knock him over. “Do you expect them back soon?”
She swallowed, but didn’t answer—and he understood immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I’m doing this all wrong. I am Apostolis Adrianakis. I am your cousin’s husband, Mathilde. Jolie is my wife.” And that he had claimed her like that, with no mocking aside, made everything in him shake anew. But he kept his eyes on Mathilde. The girl Jolie had given so much of herself for. How could he do any less? “It is time for you to be free.”
Then he held out his hand and waited for Jolie’s cousin to take it.
As if, once she did, it might redeem him.