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“Thanks, Sherlock. As if I hadn’t figured that out. She thinks we betrayed and abandoned her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hated us.”
“Hopefully, she’ll stay calm when Andraius drops the bomb about the detail change.” I pictured her face for a moment. “She’s going to lose her shit.”
“Maybe she’ll keep it together long enough to let us explain it was for her own good. That everything we’ve done has been to keep her safe,” Theo contemplated, and then, before I could tell him he was fooling himself, he spoke again. “She’ll pull a gun on me if I say that crap to her.”
I said nothing, feeling the weight of the last few years settle on my shoulders.
Then Theo added, “She has to love us still, or she wouldn’t watch us when she thinks no one will notice. She’ll forgive us.”
I cocked a brow as if he’d lost his mind. “You know, there is a thin line between love and hate. We can only hope the love hasn’t morphed into hate.”
Three
Nerine
“Tonight, you will see how a proper wife behaves in public.”
I stared out the window of the limousine. I and the jackass who’d forced me to marry him were going to the Drakos Estate for an evening of hobnobbing and elbow-rubbing. I’d spent the last ten minutes ignoring Andraius as he rambled on and on about my lack of ability to be the type of spouse he desired. He played this monotonous track every time we were near each other, especially on evenings when we attended any event.
My response, as always, was to give him my flat, expressionless face. The image of a woman who felt nothing and gave no reaction to any dig thrown her way. She protected herself with an ironclad armor that no person could penetrate.
The facade was all bullshit, but a girl had to learn a few tricks to survive in her hellhole.
One day, I’d escape this prison. I’d take my mother and sisters and find my freedom. Then, everyone who wanted to take this dynasty could do whatever the fuck they wanted with it.
Destroy it, for all I cared. I wouldn’t be in the picture. The Angelos women would disappear, and no one would find us ever again.
Especially this bastard who sat across from me. The one who’d stolen so much from me.
I loved my family history, the long Angelos legacy going back nearly seven hundred years to old-world Greece. But this legacy, this lineage, had cost me too much, and I’d rather have no part of it.
Papa, please forgive me for thinking this. I would rather live and be free of this family than preserve it and stay locked in a cage.
“Don’t ignore me, Nerine.”
“I couldn’t ignore you even if I tried.” I glanced in his direction. “We both know you wouldn’t let me.”
His dark brown eyes held a glaze of irritation, and a few glasses of bourbon. “I mean it. You need to watch and learn. Nyx Mykos-Drakos is the type of wife I need.”
He must have forgotten that before her marriage, people called her the Mykos Hellion for being a cutting bitch to anyone who crossed her. There were even rumors that she liked to pull knives on people and threaten to slice their throats.
I guessed marriage to the right man had tamed her wild ways.
“What do I need to look for since you have spent so much time ogling another man’s wife?”
“She stands by her husband’s side, increases his connections, knows how to conduct herself in public, and occupies her time by doing feminine things like gardening. I believe she will spend the summer developing the new botanical gardens.”
The woman has a PhD in horticulture, that’s why the foundation invited her to lead the construction of the botanical gardens, jackass.
I’d read about it in the news. Nyx loved plants and studied them, not as a hobby but as a vocation.
Her father and brothers believed in treating her as an equal and sent her to school just like the rest of the family. Something I would have had if Papa was still alive.
Instead, a fifty-year-old man had forced me to marry him at gunpoint and shattered my dreams of a college education by never allowing me to take a single class at Boston College again.
The dumbass thought if he kept me from an educational institution, I’d give up on pursuing my education.
Big mistake.
