Chapter 5 Control Freak
Control Freak
Kaz
Twenty minutes before I pick her up, I'm standing in the security office watching a red dot crawl across a map of Santorini.
"Zeno Christopoulos." Thysa pulls up the latest intel, her expression grim in the holographic blue light. "Checked into Hotel Santorini Palace two hours ago. Fira. Main tourist district."
Four kilometers from the resort. I stare at the marker, calculating.
"Search pattern?"
"Methodical. Hotels first, then rental properties, then private estates. He had coffee at a café with sightlines to three major roads this morning." She zooms in. "He's mapping his territory."
Professional. The Syndicate doesn't send amateurs for simple jobs, and it seems they don't consider Edith a simple job. Good. That means they respect the threat she poses to their client. It also means Zeno won't be sloppy.
"ETA to us?"
"If he's thorough? Forty-eight hours. If he gets lucky?" Thysa shrugs. "Sooner."
The resort sits on the southern tip—isolated, defensible, but ultimately a trap if he finds us. The main town is too exposed. The villages too small.
"The vineyard," I say. "Yiannis's place."
"The old fortress?" Her eyebrow lifts. "That's thirty minutes inland."
"Private. Walled. No tourist traffic. And Yiannis owes me a favor."
"So your plan is to hide her at a winery." Thysa leans back in her chair. "While also taking her on what is unmistakably a date."
"It's not a date."
"Boss, you ironed a shirt yesterday. You baked bread at three AM. You just asked me to call ahead to a private vineyard to arrange wine and cheese for two on a terrace overlooking the sunset." She counts on her fingers. "That's a date. In any culture. In any galaxy."
"It's a tactical relocation disguised as—"
"A date. The word you're looking for is date." She stands, grabbing her tablet. "I'll call Yiannis. Prep the villa security for full lockdown when you get back. And boss?"
"What."
"She's wearing a blue sundress. I saw her from the kitchen window." A pause calibrated for maximum damage. "You're going to want to breathe through your mouth."
The Mercedes takes the coastal curves faster than it should.
Edith's hand finds the door handle on the first hairpin, knuckles going white, and guilt pulls me back to the speed limit. Every meter between us and the resort is a meter between her and the threat, but scaring her off the road defeats the purpose.
The wind pours through the open convertible, hot Mediterranean air that carries her scent directly into my face.
Vanilla and jasmine and warm skin, concentrated by the sun on her bare shoulders.
The sundress is exactly as Thysa warned—blue cotton skimming her body in ways that make my hands ache with the effort of keeping them on the wheel.
"Kaz?" Her voice cuts through the engine noise. "Are you okay?"
"Fine." I ease off the accelerator. "Eager to show you the vineyard."
She gives me a look that says she doesn't buy it but isn't going to press.
Smart woman. She's learning when I'm deflecting, cataloging the tells, filing them away in that pattern-recognition brain of hers.
The technical writer who catches discrepancies.
The whistleblower who noticed what everyone else looked past.
If she keeps watching me this closely, she's going to see something I can't explain.
The island interior opens up as we leave the coast—volcanic rock and scrub brush and the occasional white chapel gleaming against rust-colored earth. The tourists stay on the caldera side. Out here, it's honest. The land shows what it's survived.
"It's beautiful," she says, and her voice goes soft in a way that tightens something in my chest. "Different from the coast."
"More honest." The word comes out before I can filter it. "The caldera is the performance. This is what Santorini actually is underneath. Volcanic. Unforgiving."
She turns to look at me, and I feel her gaze like a hand on my skin—assessing, curious, seeing too much.
"Is that why you like it here? Because it's honest about being harsh?"
The question slides between my ribs. "Maybe. I've spent a long time in places that pretended to be something they weren't."
"Like what?"
Like an arena that called slaughter entertainment. Like a galaxy that called my species primitive while using us as weapons. Like this body, which pretends to be human while something else strains against every seam.
"Like most places," I say, and leave it there.
The vineyard appears around the next curve: ancient stone walls, iron gates, gnarled vines crawling across black soil like they're holding the earth together through stubbornness alone.
I kill the engine. The silence is immediate—just wind and cicadas and Edith's heartbeat, which has slowed from the drive to something steady and curious.
"Kaz." Her hand lands on my forearm. Small fingers against my skin, the contrast stark—her pale, mine bronze, both sun-warm. She's touching me casually, unconsciously, the way someone touches a person they trust.
The contact burns through me. Not painfully; not the searing heat of my biology going haywire. Something quieter, deeper. The warmth of being chosen. Of a hand reaching for mine rather than flinching away.
"This is gorgeous," she says.
Old Yiannis steps through the gate, weathered as the stone behind him. White shirt, dark vest, a face carved by decades of Aegean sun. When he sees me, his expression shifts from guarded to genuinely pleased.
"Kazvir!" He approaches in rapid-fire Greek. "You honor my house. And with a beautiful companion—I should have prepared a feast!"
I respond in kind, the language sitting more naturally in my mouth than English ever does. "Your hospitality is already a feast, old friend. The terrace, if you'll permit. And your Assyrtiko."
"The 2019? The one we discussed?" He claps my shoulder hard enough that a human would stagger. I don't move.
"Perfect." I slip him a folded bill. He pockets it with the smooth discretion of a male who understands that generosity buys silence.
Edith emerges from the car with wide eyes, taking in the fortress walls, the ancient vines, the volcanic landscape stretching in every direction.
"Welcome, koukla," Yiannis says, switching to accented English. "Any friend of Kaz is family here."
"Thank you. Your vineyard is extraordinary."
"Extraordinary? Bah." But he's pleased. He gestures broadly at the vines. "This soil is volcanic. Ash and stone. Nothing should grow here. But the vines—" He kisses his fingertips. "They push their roots deep. They fight. They make the sweetest wine in all of Greece because they suffer for it."
Edith glances at me. Something passes across her face—recognition, maybe. Understanding.
"Struggle makes things sweeter," she says.
Yiannis nods. "Exactly so. Come. Sit. I'll bring the wine."
He vanishes into the main building, and I guide Edith through the courtyard to the terrace. My hand hovers near her lower back—close enough that I can feel the warmth of her skin through the cotton, not close enough to touch. The restraint costs me more than she'll ever know.
The terrace is private, walled on three sides, open to the view of rolling volcanic hills disappearing into haze.
A table sits under a wooden pergola laced with grape vines that filter the sunlight into shifting green-gold patterns.
The air smells like warm earth and growing things and the mineral tang of stone baked by centuries of heat.
"Kaz." She's looking at me instead of the view. "What did he call you? Kazvir?"
My jaw tightens. "My full name."
"Kazvir." She tests it, and the sound of my true name in her mouth does something to me that I don't have language for—not in English, not in Greek, not in any of the six tongues I speak. It sounds like being known. "What does it mean?"
"Crimson warrior." The literal translation. What it actually means—forged in blood, born for violence, named by an arena master who saw what I'd become before I did—stays locked behind my teeth.
"It suits you," she says, without fear, and the trust in that nearly undoes me.
Yiannis returns with wine, cheese, bread, olives—a spread that appears with the efficiency of a male who understands that the best hospitality is invisible. He pours two glasses of Assyrtiko, the wine catching sunlight like liquid silver, and leaves with a knowing wink.
We're alone.
She picks up her glass. "To struggle."
"To sweetness," I counter, and watch color rise in her cheeks.
She sips. Her eyes close. "Oh my god. This tastes like... minerals and fruit and sunshine. How is it dry and sweet at the same time?"
"The volcanic soil. The roots grow deep trying to find water, and the struggle concentrates the sugars." I lean back, trying to manufacture distance in a space that makes intimacy inevitable. "The harder something has to fight, the more complex it becomes."
Her eyes fix on mine. "Are we still talking about wine?"
"Maybe not."
The air between us changes. Not gradually—all at once, like a pressure shift before a storm. She holds my gaze, and I hold hers, and the table between us might as well be made of tissue.
I reach for the cheese. Need something to do with my hands that isn't reaching for her. I cut a piece of sharp white cheese, pick up a grape—and it looks absurd in my palm, this tiny sphere of sugar and water held by fingers that have broken things made of much stronger material.
"Here." I hold both out across the table. "Together."
She leans forward. Opens her mouth.
And I'm supposed to simply hand them to her. Like a civilized male at a civilized table. Like I'm not watching her lips part, her tongue visible for just a second, imagining—
The cheese and grape tumble from my fingers onto her plate.
"Sorry." My voice comes out wrong. Rough.
"You're the least clumsy person I've ever met." She picks them up herself, pops both into her mouth. Chews thoughtfully, and her expression shifts into something close to bliss. "Oh. The salt and the sweet—"