Chapter Thirteen
BETTINA KRAUS HAD WAITED a long time for the observation car to go dark and empty, and she didn’t intend to waste it.
She came at Loukas as she came at everything she wanted, all at once and certain of her welcome, her arms going up around his neck before he could read her intent, her mouth finding his in the dim glass with the whole black country streaming behind them.
He didn’t startle. That wasn’t in him. What he did, in the half-second before he moved, was master the urge to shove her bodily off him, his mouth going tight to keep it from curling into the contempt he could feel rising.
A man didn’t let his face do that to the wife of his oldest friend. Not even now. Not even her.
He took Bettina by the wrists and firmly put her off him, setting her back at arm’s length the way a man sets down something he’s found in his food.
“No.” There was nothing courteous left in his voice now, none of the careful diplomacy he’d shown this woman’s husband all these years. “Not now, not on this train, not on any day ever made, Bettina. I’ve told you in every language I know. The answer doesn’t change.”
Her lovely face did something ugly. “What’s wrong with you?” she breathed, reaching for him again, and she got no further, a familiar voice speaking from the doorway behind them, quiet and terrible.
“You are.”
It was Artie.
He stood in the doorway with the light of the party at his back and an expression Loukas had never once seen on his old friend’s open, trusting face, and Bettina went the color of the tablecloth.
For a moment nobody moved. Then Artie came into the dark car, and he didn’t look at Loukas at all. He looked at his wife.
“You’re what’s wrong, Bettina.” His voice didn’t rise, and that was the worst of it, a loud man all his life and now, when it cost him everything, gone quiet.
“Loukas tried to tell me. More than once. I wouldn’t hear it, because the alternative was more than I could carry.
” A breath. “I can’t go on not hearing it. And I find I no longer want to.”
For the first time since Loukas had known her, Bettina had no script ready. The poise dropped clean off her, and underneath it was a woman scrambling.
“Artie—Artie, it isn’t, you’ve misread it, he kissed me, ask anyone—” She heard how thin it sounded even as she said it, and her face changed, the fluster hardening into something colder. “You’d take his word. Naturally. All these years married to me, and you’d take his word over your own wife’s.”
“I’d take the evidence of my own eyes,” Artie said, “which I should’ve done a long while back.”
And that was when he saw her understand it was over.
Not the marriage only. The whole long campaign, the years of patient positioning, the version of her future she’d been building one dinner at a time.
He saw the loss go through her, and he saw it curdle, in the space of a breath, into something he recognized, having spent a lifetime around people who couldn’t forgive being thwarted.
“Fine.” Her voice had gone quite even. She looked, for a moment, not at her husband but at Loukas, and then past him, toward the party and the green silk and the woman who’d worn it. “Fine.”
What passed between Artie and his wife after that, Loukas didn’t stay to witness.
It wasn’t his to witness. He heard the shape of it from the next car, the low sentences and then a steward summoned and then the particular hush of a woman being walked somewhere she doesn’t wish to go.
Bettina didn’t scream. Her kind never did, not when there was nothing left to gain by it.
But he’d seen where her eyes went, at the end. And it hadn’t been at Artie.
Artie found him a few minutes later at the window of the empty car.
For a while the two men stood and watched the dark go by and said nothing, the way old friends can.
“Do you want me to talk to Blythe?” Artie asked at last. “She wasn’t supposed to see that.”
Loukas said nothing for a moment. He hadn’t known, until Artie said the name, that Blythe had seen anything at all. The knowledge went into him cold and final. And still he answered in the same sealed voice he’d used on her all day, the voice he’d built that morning like a wall.
“Maybe she was.” He didn’t look at his friend. “You’re the one always telling me there’s nothing your God doesn’t allow to happen. So maybe it’s just as well.”
Artie was quiet a moment.
“Our God allows things for a reason,” he said at last. “He also gave us free will.” The older man turned from the glass and studied the younger one with eyes gone shrewd and sad. “Is this really how you want it to end, you and Blythe?”
“I don’t do love, Artie.”
“Is it that it’s messy?”
“Because—” He stopped. The true answer had his mother in it, and his father, and a smiling photograph in a magazine, and he’d sooner cut out his tongue than say any of it in a railway car at midnight.
So he reached for the crueler thing, the one that ended conversations.
“Why do you even still believe in it, after what Bettina did to you?”
Artie smiled then, and it was a terrible smile, full of grief and conviction at once.
“I found the real thing the first time, and it was very, very good.” He let that settle.
“Bettina was the mistake I made reaching for it again, with the wrong woman, out of loneliness. But what I had before her, I wouldn’t trade one year of it to be spared all of this.
” He put a heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“Let Blythe go, and there’s no guarantee you get her back once you’ve worked out you were wrong.
And you will work it out, son. The only question is whether it’s too late by then. ”
He squeezed once and left. Loukas stood alone at the glass, jaw hard, and looked at the truth his oldest friend had set in front of him. Then he turned from it, the way he’d turned from every soft and dangerous thing his whole armored life.
His pride did the rest. I’ve gone forty years without needing a woman, he told himself, cold and final. I don’t need this one.
He believed it for the length of the corridor.
He walked through the coupling into the next car with his spine straight and his face like stone, telling himself the ache under his ribs was relief, that he’d spared them both something worse, that a man of his discipline could put down the memory of her weight against him in the dark and simply decline to pick it up again.
He’d mastered harder things than this. He’d mastered everything.
He was most of the way down the corridor when he heard the voice.
Not quite raised. Pitched low and vicious and delighted, and he knew it before he placed it, Bettina Kraus having one last card and no reason left on earth not to play it.
He came around the corner and there she was, her steward nowhere in sight, bent over the bench where Blythe sat very still in the green silk, pouring poison into her ear, smiling as she did it.
“We were together the whole time you wore his ring,” Bettina purred. “He’ll never admit it, but we were. He thought it such fun, making a fool of you. The little bird woman, in her borrowed dress.”
And Loukas, frozen at the turn of the corridor, watched what it did to her.
This was the woman who’d walked into his office swinging. Who’d bared her teeth at a billionaire over her own poverty and never flinched. Who’d told him to his face that a spreadsheet doesn’t do what his heart was doing.
Every muscle in him strung tight to cross the floor and break Bettina’s venomous mouth open with the truth. He didn’t move. Moving meant Blythe seeing his face, and his face would tell her everything he hadn’t had the courage to.
So he held still, the way he’d held still his whole life, and watched that strong, proud, ferocious face begin to come apart, slow, the way fragile glass goes when the crack has already happened and the surface simply hasn’t fallen yet.
He was losing her. He’d done it himself, with his own hands and his cold breakfast voice and his sound, sensible, cowardly arrangement, and now a crueler woman was finishing what he’d started.
He had never once in his life failed to take what he wanted. And here he stood, useless, watching the only woman he’d ever wanted break apart at the hands of his own cowardice. Theos mou. What have I done?