Prologue
EVEN AT THE best of times, the island of Therasia Notia, deep in the Aegean Sea, covered in ancient, now-dormant volcanic mountains, was rugged and impenetrable.
But when the wind howled and the heavens opened up with lashing rain, and the sky split itself asunder with shocks of light, Nikos Konstantinou could almost convince himself he was the only man remaining on earth.
Just as he liked it.
Just as he knew he deserved to be.
Alone, isolated, and left to suffer, for the sins of his past. Sins for which there was no hope of repenting—no hope of repairing.
The mother he hadn’t been able to help, who’d turned to prostitution to keep a roof over their heads until she’d died, young and miserable.
The wife he’d all but abandoned in his pursuit of success.
The life he’d once forged, through sheer grit, building his private equity business to the point of global domination, was now a distant memory.
Though he kept himself apprised of operations, he was no longer hands-on in the way he’d once been—the satisfaction he’d drawn from those long, difficult days was now a poisoned chalice: something he was determined to deny himself.
As penance, for what his ambition had done. The pain he’d caused.
He stood in the doorway to the small cabin he’d built, stone by stone, three years earlier, when he’d bought this island and come to it, not caring if he lived or died.
Long, laborious days, finding rocks, carrying them up the steep hill, mortaring them into place until, eventually, walls began to take shape.
It had been a long time since Nikos had needed to work with his hands.
Wealth had made him lazy, had risked turning him soft.
Not that anyone who encountered him in the business world would ever have dreamt of describing him thus.
No, Nikos was famed, not only for his competence, but also his ruthless determination.
It was that same determination that had seen him work twenty-hour days, losing himself to the empire he was intent on creating, at the expense of all else.
Even his marriage.
And his wife’s happiness.
At the time, it had seemed like a necessary focus.
Not only had he known extreme poverty as a boy, he’d also experienced the galling frustration of being told that ambition was pointless—to give up on wanting more.
His father had likely been trying to adjust Nikos’s goals to something more ‘reasonable’, but instead, he’d hammered the point into Nikos so hard that, with each scathing comment, Nikos’s determination had formed like steel.
He closed his eyes and took a step further, so the rain now lashed him, his thick, dark hair loose almost to his bare shoulders, the denim shorts he wore covering his body only between the hips and mid-thigh.
He spread his arms wide, and surrendered himself to the heavens, the gods, that were said to have created this mountainous island as a prison for one of their erstwhile demi-gods.
If they wanted him, they could take him.
For Nikos Konstantinou, one of the most successful billionaires in the entire world, had nothing and no one to live for, and every day, he wondered if it might be his last. His wife had died miserable, because of his neglect; surely he didn’t deserve anything other than the same fate?