12. Konstantine
CHAPTER TWELVE
KONSTANTINE
Iam in the south office with the door open.
The video conference runs on the screen in front of me, the same feed the chamber sees.
The brothers sit in a small cabin on a yacht twelve kilometers off Mykonos, a leased white motor cruiser that I can also see if I want to, on the harbor camera at the south point of the island, with two of Adrian’s men shadowing it from a Drakos boat.
The brothers do not know my men are there.
They will know within the hour, because Adrian believes a lesson unobserved is a lesson wasted.
Isadora is at the table in the chamber, down the corridor, thirty steps from where I sit. She is in the black dress and wears the chain Calliope fastened at her throat this morning, in my place, because I could not.
She does not look toward the south office door.
She does not know exactly where I am. Nor does she need to.
That is the arrangement, and it cost me more than any negotiation of my life: to be a corridor away while she does the bravest thing I have ever asked of anyone, so that every word of it belongs to her.
My hands lie flat on the desk. They stay flat. I have taken ships, docks, men’s futures with these hands, and this morning their entire assignment is stillness.
Stavros chairs.
The brothers speak first. Vassilios the younger opens in his dead father’s formal mode with a request for the immediate return of his sister to Patras, in exchange for the surrender of three Piraeus docks and a non-aggression undertaking of ten years.
The Drakos cousins hear him out in silence.
Stavros notes the request and Adrian sets the agenda for the next item.
The next item is Isadora.
She stands. I hear the chair move before the camera finds her, and my hands press flatter on the desk.
She speaks for seven minutes.
She tells her brothers that she renounces the Kallis name.
That she has chosen the Drakos name, of her own, under no man’s hand.
That she will not be the lever any of them want her to be, not her brothers’, not ours.
That the Kallis house’s part in the deaths of the Drakos women is documented in a file she has read in full, a file she has not destroyed, a file that now lies on the desk of the man whose wife her father killed.
And that if her brothers pursue her further, she will testify to its contents in any court that will seat her, international, Greek, or God’s.
Seven minutes, and not one tremor in it. I listen to the daughter of my enemy dismantle the last claim her blood holds on her, and what moves through me is not triumph. It is awe, the kind the archaic Greek keeps a separate word for, the awe owed to something that has decided to be unbroken.
The brothers go silent.
On the feed, Vassilios looks past the camera at someone in his cabin, and I mark it, because I have marked it before. A head of house who checks another face before he speaks is a man holding a title someone else is using. That is tomorrow’s problem, a real one. I set it aside.
He looks back into the camera. He says: “Sister. The Kallis name accepts your renunciation.”
The call ends and the chamber goes quiet. I sit in the south office, and I do not move, because the next thing that happens must not be coming from me.
Then Stavros, dry, unhurried, on the feed that has not yet been cut, knowing exactly which door stands open down the corridor: “The lady has chosen you, Konstantine. Come in here, brother.”
I come in as the cousins get on their feet. Calliope stands at the back of the chamber with her hand resting on the doorframe, sentry done with her watch. Adrian is opening a bottle. Theron is at the table looking at his papers while Stavros stands at the head.
Isadora sits in the chair where she spoke and looks at me.
I cross the chamber, and in front of the cousins, in front of Calliope, in the chamber of the office wing on Kalydon at half past eleven on a Tuesday morning, I kneel, take her hand and press it to my mouth.
“Mikrí mou,” I say, in the archaic Greek of the Iliad. “Eísai dikí mou.” You are mine.
She closes her eyes and lifts her other hand to lay it on my hair, lightly.
“Konstantine,” she says. “Set a date.”
I look up at Stavros.
“Friday,” Stavros says, dry as August. “Yia-Yia has decided.”
I have not laughed in five years, but the corner of my mouth moves. Across the chamber Adrian sees it and forgets to pour. That too will be told at dinners for years.
I stand and lift Isadora from the chair, up against my chest, her arm coming around my neck, the chain and the signet lying together at her throat between us.
I carry her out of the chamber. The cousins do not follow. Even Adrian knows there is nothing left in this scene for an audience.
I carry her up the south stair, down the corridor, to my own room. I lay her on my own bed and lie down beside her, and take the chain at her throat in my fingers, the small gold dragon, new from Athens, already warm from her skin.
“The chain is good, mikrí mou. I will have a second one made, for Sophia. She will wear it when she is twelve.”
“Yes.” And then, because she misses nothing: “You are planning six years ahead, Konstantine.”
“I am planning sixty, Isadora.”
She takes my hand and places it over her heart. Then she lifts it, places her own over mine.
I close my eyes, and I sleep for the first time in five years, in daylight, in my clothes, with her hand on my chest. No dreams come, or none that dare. When I wake, the light has crossed the floor, her hand has not moved, and the count that has run in me has stopped asking to be kept.
It was three hours.
It is enough.