CHAPTER 67
NERO ZANTHOS
Kael is sitting on my shoulders when we reach the door of his house. I grip his calves firmly, holding him in place while Atlas and Drako play with my son, trying to tickle him. He leans forward and back, laughing and trying to escape.
After hours playing soccer in the square down the block, it would be reasonable to expect the boy to be as tired as I feel—and as tired as I’m sure my friends are too—but I suppose we’re the ones who are old and worn out.
The door opens, and the smile on my face vanishes instantly when I see the murderous look on Nina’s face. Her nostrils flare, her jaw clenched tight.
Okay. This is unexpected.
I turn my back to her and lift Kael off my shoulders, shielding his excited little figure from his mother. Too busy laughing to notice, he still hasn’t seen her—which is perfect.
“My boy, how about you go check out Uncle Drako’s soccer jerseys at our place?” I suggest, silently praying he’ll say yes.
Nina is very clearly itching for a fight, and I don’t want to leave without understanding why. I also don’t want Kael anywhere near whatever is about to happen.
I mentally celebrate the fact that Rosa is at work—or else she’d probably be the one opening the door, brandishing a broom, again.
“They’re there?” Kael asks, excited.
“No, but he has lots of pictures,” I say.
My son smiles and nods enthusiastically. I ruffle his hair, and Drako and Apollo each take one of Kael’s hands, leading him toward our house.
As they go, Drako silently mouths You’re screwed at me, and Atlas slides his index finger across his throat in a warning. Of course they wouldn’t let me off easy.
I wait until the three of them have passed the gate, then take a deep breath before turning back.
“I don’t know what I did,” I say, stepping through the door Nina left open and closing it behind me, “but I’m guessing it won’t help if I say I’m sorry, right?”
My Little Fae is already pacing the middle of the living room, restless. And because I apparently have no fear of death, I lose a few seconds admiring the way her skirt sways, occasionally offering glimpses of soft thighs.
“You had no right!” she accuses, snapping my attention back to her face. “I told you I was going to come back and settle the bill! I told you!”
She’s furious—really furious—and my mind wavers, dangerously tempted to admire every sign of her unleashed temper. But I force myself to rein it in, because if the problem is that I paid the restaurant bill, then no, I’m not sorry.
“I’m sorry,” I say anyway, which only seems to make her angrier. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just—”
“Just what?” she cuts in. “Just thought it would be a good idea to get there before me and do something I’ve been planning to do for a year? Or did you think Kael was the only one saving money?”
A year planning to pay for a simple dinner.
That sentence cracks my resolve not to argue, because she’s right—I did exactly what she’s accusing me of. I rushed to pay before she could, because I knew she wouldn’t accept the money if I tried to hand it to her.
And even though I haven’t been around long, I’ve been around long enough to understand how much those euros I left at the restaurant would have meant to her. Nina works herself to the bone.
She doesn’t miss a single shift and takes extra ones whenever she can. And still, she only earns enough for Kael to have a slice of his favorite cake once a month.
Since I arrived, I’ve wanted to bring up the subject of money—but I knew it would require tact.
I grew up with nothing. I know exactly what that feels like. I don’t want my son to go through anything even remotely like it. I just don’t know yet how to make his mother agree with me.
But maybe it’s time I find out.
“I just wanted to help, Nina,” I say. “I know you won’t take my money, but it’s Kael’s as much as it’s mine. It doesn’t seem fair that you should keep sacrificing so our son can have things when I’m here. I know you spent a long time alone, but you’re not anymore. I’m here.”
“And when you leave?” she fires back, slapping her hand against her thigh. “What do I do then? When you’re gone and I have to tell Kael that everything he got used to disappeared with you—how do I explain that?”
The question forces me to pause.
It’s not the first time Nina has thrown those words at me, but never this aggressively. I’d hoped that after months, she might be at least a little inclined to believe that it won’t happen.
“I’m not leaving,” I say, calm and steady. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?” she snaps. “I’m supposed to accept that and live in some sugar-coated fairytale? I don’t think so, Nero.”
“Nina—”
“No!” she shouts, her expression shifting beyond anger.
And even before the words leave her mouth, I know whatever she’s about to say will destroy me.
I don’t move—if anything, I square myself more directly in her line of sight.
“I had to deal with a doctor telling me that all I needed to get my life back to normal was to take two pills—and when I refused, I was cornered by your mother at the clinic door.”
“What?” I interrupt now, the rage still boiling in my veins at the mere mention of Lysandra. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Nina’s eyes go distant, as if dredging up old memories, and a bitter laugh escapes her lips. “You searched for me for five years, but not once did you care to find out what made me leave in the first place, did you?”
The revelation hit me like a physical blow, sending me stumbling until my back hit the wall, needing it for support.
Because no—I didn’t care.
I was convinced Nina had run away with another man. And even after I learned the truth, there was so much happening that I… never asked.
Between the desperate need to find Kael and his mother and then to become part of my son’s life, it never crossed my mind that there might be another reason for Nina’s disappearance beyond her fear that I would carry out the threat I made years ago and take our child from her.
“What did she do, Nina?” I ask, my eyes locked on hers. “What did Lysandra do?”
She stops pacing and finally turns fully toward me.
“She paid a doctor to offer me money to have an abortion. And then she said it wasn’t the first time she’d done it—that I wasn’t the first woman you got pregnant, nor the first one you proposed to just to keep quiet while you ‘handled the situation.’”
She makes air quotes around the last words, and I lean harder against the concrete behind me.
“She—”
“She showed me recordings of you,” she cuts in. “Audio recordings of you talking to someone, saying that by the end of that week you’d gotten rid of me and the baby—and that if I didn’t cooperate, you’d take the child from me.”
“She doctored the tapes,” I shout, horrified just hearing it. “I never—never said that. That conversation never happened.”
She laughs again.
“And that answer is five years too late, Nero.”
I drag my hands down my face and back through my hair, gripping it until pain sparks.
“I was destroyed in the back seat of a car,” she continues, “and even with all my certainties torn to shreds, I still came back.”
“You came back,” I whisper as every missing piece of Lysandra’s scheme clicks into place—the days Nina disappeared before the photos surfaced, her insistence on talking to me even after I rejected her twice.
Everything fits.
“I came back for you,” she says.
I close my eyes, unable to handle my own pain and hers at the same time—even knowing this is the least I owe her.
“And all I needed, Nero, was for you to tell me exactly that five years ago, and I would have believed you. I would have believed you. I would have left all my fears behind and continued our life exactly where we left off. But you didn’t.”
She shakes her head, tears streaming down her face.
“You believed the lie. You didn’t even give me the chance to explain. You humiliated me, turned me into a pariah in the only place I’d ever called home, and then you promised to take my son from me. And you know what’s worse, Nero?”
She laughs bitterly through her tears.
“Even then, I would have stayed. I would have stayed and tried to live with you—with your hatred—even if it broke me a little more every day. For our son, I would have endured that and much more.”
“But she did more, didn’t she?” I ask, eyes still closed, not daring to wipe away my own tears.
“The day you and your lawyers forced me to go to that appointment on the island, as I was leaving, I was almost run over. And the driver made sure I knew it wasn’t an accident. He gave me a message straight from your mother: The island was no longer a safe place for people like me.”
“So you ran,” I say, opening my eyes.
“So I ran,” she agrees. “I ran for my son’s safety.
Because a woman capable of everything I’d already seen Lysandra do to me—to us—was absolutely capable of harming an innocent child.
I was alone, in a foreign country, pregnant, with no idea how I’d support the baby inside me.
I was alone on an operating table, risking my life, terrified—terrified because if I died, who would take care of my child?
My mother is older; she already raised her daughter. ”
“I was alone, Nero. Alone on the nights Kael screamed with colic. Alone when he decided he was Superman and jumped from the second-floor window, swearing he’d fly. Alone on every birthday until the fourth. Alone every time he got sick. I was always alone!”
She’s breathless by the end.
“So no—you don’t have the right to tell me I need to believe you. You may be here now, but you’ve been gone far longer than you’ve been present.”
I don’t respond.
What could I possibly say?
No words could ever measure the depth of my remorse, or the scale of my hatred for Lysandra. If I’d had any doubt about whether I could ever look at her again, it has been obliterated.
There is no argument against everything Nina endured alone while I failed, day after day, to keep every promise I’d ever made—to her and to my son.
As silence settles between us and the truths that were never spoken take their seats around the room, I become nothing but a rigid mass of guilt and self-loathing.
I lived in a hole, was treated like trash, later was deceived inside the house I learned to call home—but I was never alone.
One way or another, I always had a family beside me. I knew they would stay as long as I stayed for them, because my brothers and I are nearly the same age.
Looking into Nina’s wary, wounded eyes, the certainty I’ve carried since the moment I uncovered the truth—back in that sauna, facing Oliver Sarris—swells in my chest until there’s room for nothing else:
I will do everything it takes for Nina to forgive me, or I will die trying. But I will never be able to forgive myself.
Nina hides her face in her hands, shaking her head. And as if the weight of the truths she’s revealed is too much to bear standing, her body gives way and she drops to the floor, legs stretched out, her back against the coffee table behind her.
The sight of her fully exposing that last vulnerability makes it impossible for me not to touch her.
I need to do this. I need to show her that I’m never leaving again. I need to make her believe me—about this and every promise I still want to make.
I don’t have the right.
But it’s not as if I have a choice.
My body moves toward hers without my permission. In a few steps, I close the distance and kneel beside her. I take her hands, lower them to reveal her face, and gently turn it toward me with my thumb and forefinger.
Everything is there—every emotion bled out in her words.
In her light-blue irises I find exhaustion, fear, insecurity, pain, and above all, loneliness.
So much loneliness that suddenly being close to her no longer feels like enough to quiet the screaming need in my chest to be everything Nina needs.
She needs to know she’s not alone anymore. She needs to feel it far more than she needs to hear it.
I need to show her that even if it’s just so she can torture me every day—tattooing into my brain, again and again, the same truths that have reduced me to rubble—I will still be here.
I don’t ask for permission this time.
I wrap my arms around her in a firm embrace, one hand pressed to her back, the other threaded into her hair, holding Nina tightly against me.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t return the hug—but she doesn’t push me away either.
“Forgive me.”