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“And yet, my love, the door is wide open. The past is ruining your present. The past still holds you in its grip.”
His back tensed, muscles rigid. “What happened is sordid. It was ugly. When I speak of it, I feel all that ugliness again and not just the ugliness, but the destructiveness. I want to destroy things... I want to destroy people.”
“Who hurt you?”
He pulled away from her. “What?”
“Who hurt you? Or have I got it wrong? Damen, let me in. Let me help, please.”
“What are you now? A psychiatrist? A psychologist? A therapist who is going to sort out all my problems?”
“So you know you have problems.”
He swung around to face her. “Is this fun for you? Are you enjoying yourself?” The savagery in his voice made her flinch. “
Do you feel better about yourself now? No longer the pathetic daughter of Kristopher Dukas—”
“Why are you turning on me? There is no reason to make it personal!”
“Because you have made this personal. You insist on talking, and talking and talking even when I’m feeling sick and my skin is crawling with self-loathing, but this is what you want. You want to see me brought down, reduced to your level—”
“No. You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” He drew a deep, ragged breath. “You want to know who Aida is? I’ll tell you. She was the wife of the man who owned this island. She was pretty and spoiled, and her husband was old and she didn’t enjoy sex with him. She wanted a beautiful young virile man in her bed, and she picked me. I was fourteen. I didn’t want to be her lover. I had a girlfriend. I’d been in love with Iris since we were five years old, and she was the girl I was going to marry. But Aida didn’t care about what I wanted. She liked that I was big for my age, and muscular and had a handsome face. And so her husband forced me to go to her, and pleasure her, over and over, because if I didn’t, he’d kick my parents out of their house and take away their work and we’d be homeless. We’d be paupers. We’d have nothing. All I had to do was sleep with Aida and make her happy and life would be fine for all of us.”
Kassiani had asked him to share the past, and now that he was, she wanted him to stop. She’d tried to imagine what would make him so hard, and what would make him so detached, but none of her imaginings had prepared her for this.
“For one year of my life I belonged to them. I was Aida’s pet. The sex was both exhilarating and awful. She taught me how to make a woman feel good. But she also made me hate myself, and others. Part of our deal was that no one could know. No one could know the terms of this arrangement. I thought it was a secret. I was grateful my mother and father didn’t know. It allowed me to at least keep my head up because as long as no one else knew, I could pretend it wasn’t happening, that I wasn’t this boy toy. But I was wrong, people knew. In fact everyone on Adras knew, everyone except my parents. And then they finally found out, just before my fifteenth birthday, and it was Iris who told them.”
Silence stretched. Kassiani curled her fingers into fists and pressed them to her rib cage. Her heart was beating so fast. “Did Iris end things with you?” she whispered.
“No. She pitied me. She said she forgave me because she knew it wasn’t my fault. But it was my fault. If I had been a real man I wouldn’t have been manipulated the way I was.”
“You were young—”
“Not just young, but poor and uneducated,” he interrupted harshly. “I had no power. No control. That was my ultimate crime.”
No power, no control. And suddenly so many of the jarring pieces came together in a wild tumult of words and recriminations.
His inability to feel. His inability to be physically intimate without erotic power games. His refusal to discuss the past. His desire for a wife who would be hard like him...
“Do you still love Iris?” Kassiani whispered.
“And there you go, stirring up the past. It has no bearing on the present. It is gone. Dead—”
“Not dead. It’s very much alive, and it continues to haunt you even now, coloring every single thing you do today.”
He made a dismissive sound and turned away but she followed him.
“Elexis,” she said, chasing after him out of the pool area and up the garden path. “You wanted to marry Elexis because she was polished, and hard. You thought she’d be a good wife because neither of you would expect love, and therefore, you wouldn’t hurt her, or disappoint her. Not the way you hurt, and disappointed, Iris.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Iris is nothing like your sister. She is nothing like you. She was just a girl, innocent and lovely—” He broke off, jaw tight, expression grim. “Enough. No more. Please.”
It was the first time she had heard him say please quite that way. He wasn’t commanding her, he was begging her.
Begging.
Kassiani felt a stab of pain. Not just because of his tone, but because of the way he’d spoken of Iris. With reverence. With love. Iris had been his first love and apparently his last love. “You should have married her,” she said softly. “You might have had a chance at happiness—”
“Happiness doesn’t exist.”
“It does. Only you don’t want to be happy. You’d rather keep torturing yourself over the past. But you could move forward if you wanted. You could have moved forward with Iris—”
“Iris is dead,” he ground out, turning to grab her by the arms. He gave her a slight shake, silencing her. “Iris took her life after I left Adras.”
Her lips parted but she made no sound.
“So no,” he added, giving her another slight shake. “I don’t feel and I don’t care and it’s better this way. I am happier this way.”
Kassiani understood so very much more now, but understanding his secrets wouldn’t make them closer, nor would it change the distance between them because Damen was determined to hang on to the pain. His pain was his motivation. His pain fueled his decisions, driving him forward.
His pain allowed him to be ruthless and hard.
She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “If you hated this place so much, why did you buy the island? Why make it yours?”
“It was my revenge on Spiro and Aida. They had overextended themselves financially and were looking for an investor to help them save their business. Instead I forced them out. I took everything from them—their home, their livelihood, their reputation. The family had been here for generations and I wiped every trace of them out.” He paused, and his upper lip curled. “It felt good. It felt great. It was maybe the happiest moment of my life,” he concluded, dropping his hands.
Kassiani felt numb and nauseous. She reached for her damp towel, tightening it around her chest, unable to think of a single appropriate response.
“You might have excelled in school,” Damen added mockingly, “but you know nothing about real life, and you know nothing about me. I am not a wounded man in need of saving. I don’t wish to be saved. You see, the only time I feel, and feel good, is when I hurt others.”
“No. That’s the pain in you, that’s not you. You are a good person, and you are worthy of love—”
“Stop it.”
“I love you, Damen, but I need you to get help. I’ll help you get help—”
“We’re done here.” He paused and then added even more flatly, “We’re done.”
* * *
They returned to Athens by helicopter. He had a driver chauffeur her to the villa in Sounio while he remained at his penthouse in Athens.
It was strange being back at the villa where it had all started. She was in the room she’d slept in as a guest of Damen’s. This was the room he’d come to after they’d married and she’d failed to show up for the reception.
The room was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. She had changed so much since she’d first arrived in Greece.
Kassiani couldn’t sleep, though. Her brain felt as if it was on fire, her thoughts swirling, her pulse pounding. She couldn’t catch her breath, not when everything seemed to be closing in on her.
Everything he’d told her explained his behavior, but it also made her grieve for him, and them. He’d been treated terribly—abused repeatedly for over a year—which explained why home was still so difficult for him. She hated what had happened to him, but he wasn’t going to let her in, and he wasn’t going to include her in his world. He needed his boundaries and rules to cope with emotions...which meant he was determined to shut her out. Keep her at arm’s length.
She couldn’t handle being at arm’s length. She needed to love, and be loved.
Kassiani hadn’t married Damen to leave him. She really hadn’t.
Her vows had been si
ncere. She’d wanted to be a wife, a good wife, and she had just gotten to the point where she could picture their children—gorgeous children with dark hair, and bright eyes.
And maybe this could have worked, if she hadn’t fallen in love with him. Loving him made his cynicism so much worse. Loving him turned the lovemaking into something heartbreaking. To be so close to him, to be possessed by him so thoroughly, while he felt absolutely nothing for her... It made her heartsick.
She’d known going into this that he didn’t love her and would never love her, but she hadn’t imagined falling for him. She hadn’t imagined the sizzling sexual chemistry.
She thought she could handle his moods. She thought that she could remain emotionally detached—and maybe she could have, if the lovemaking hadn’t been so fierce, so intense, so consuming.
When they were together, when he was with her, in her, his arms wrapped around her, the world shrank to just him and her.
When they were together she lost track of herself, and her focus became him. He felt like an obsession.
It wasn’t good for her head, and it wasn’t good for her soul. She felt damaged...hopelessly damaged, damaged to the point where she worried about her ability to survive this life.
And hadn’t Damen warned her of this?
Hadn’t he said that he’d chosen Elexis because she was hard, and she wouldn’t care, and he needed a wife who was as hard as he was?
Kassiani hadn’t understood what he meant. She hadn’t understood his past, and the abuse he’d suffered—abuse she couldn’t bear to think about because it was beyond horrible—but that abuse shaped him, and his past haunted him, and she hadn’t been prepared to fall in love only to be pushed away because she loved him. Unrequited love was one thing if the significant other was distant and far removed, but Damen was close, always so close, and his appetite for her only seemed to grow. In his bed, she felt stripped bare—mentally, emotionally, psychologically.
Now tonight, she couldn’t breathe. In her room, on her bed, she lay on top of her covers, fighting for air. It had been years since she’d had a panic attack. Was that what this was? Kassiani felt as if there wasn’t enough oxygen left. She lay on her bed, gasping for breath, feeling as if she was suffocating, and it terrified her.
