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‘I grew up wondering why they didn’t just go back after I was old enough, to clear their names. My grandfather forbade me from asking, and my grandmother would weep whenever I asked about Ayia Hera. When I was nine I discovered the box in my mother’s belongings.’
Sage tensed. ‘The box Ben took?’
He nodded. ‘It contains a ruby necklace.’
‘She took it?’
‘No. Every piece of jewellery was returned. But somehow the necklace found its way back into my grandparents’ house.’
‘You think your father was trying to make amends for what he did?’ Sage asked.
His gaze met hers for a brief moment. ‘I asked him that same question when I met him for the first time ten years ago. A part of me was stupid enough to want to believe he had a shred of decency.’
‘And?’
‘He had no idea what I was talking about.’
She gasped. ‘You think it was planted again?’
He shrugged. ‘My grandparents never found out who put it in their belongings. Returning it would’ve incriminated them all over again.’
‘So they kept it as a reminder.’
Xandro shifted restlessly beneath her. She caressed his chest and after a moment he stilled. ‘I used to hate that necklace. My mother would stare at it for hours, crying over it. She never told me why. It was my grandmother who eventually told me.’
‘But it came to mean something to you, didn’t it?’ Why else would he have gone to such great lengths to come after it? Come after her.
‘It wasn’t all bad. The ne
cklace also brought her joy. She wore it when she was happy. I was okay with that.’ He shrugged, a touch of that arrogance on display. ‘And eventually it became my reason to succeed. I wanted to buy more of those things for her. I wanted more happy moments for her.’
‘But?’
His face grew bleak. ‘It wasn’t the right kind of success to start off with.’
Sage’s heart lurched, and she pressed her palm against his cheek. He didn’t seem to notice her touch, his gaze lost in the middle distance of the past.
‘I ran away from home and got involved with the gang when I was sixteen. Things spiralled downward from there until I had a choice—do what needed to be done to elevate myself or take the more difficult road to success.’ He exhaled. ‘I made the wrong choice and eventually ended up in juvie a year later.’
‘Oh, Xandro...’
‘She pawned the necklace to bail me out, and spent every night for the next three months crying about it because she missed it. The gang leader found out about the necklace and decided he wanted to use it to expand his drug empire and told me to bring it to him.’ He stopped.
‘But you didn’t, did you?’ she pressed gently.
He swallowed. ‘No, but I almost did. Instead I went to the pawnshop. The rubies were worth a quarter of a million dollars. I negotiated for a hundred-thousand-dollar advance, used half of it to ensure the gang left my mother and me alone, and enrolled myself in college, got a business degree and discovered that honest work that earned me money wasn’t so bad.’ His smile was less bitter. ‘I wanted more of it. So I worked harder and eventually got the necklace back.’
After a minute, she cleared her throat. ‘What about your father?’
He tensed again. ‘What about him?’
‘You said you went to see him ten years ago.’
‘After my mother died, yes. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. I haven’t seen him since, and I don’t plan to again.’
‘You don’t want to have a relationship with him?’
He rose and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I found out after my mother died that she’d written to him about me over the years. He never wrote back. He never attempted to find me. He got her pregnant then abandoned her. I have no intention of interacting with him.’
