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“Apollonia?” Susannah shook her head, and her gaze was hard. “I don’t believe she can be humbled.”
Leonidas stepped away then, before he couldn’t. Before he took his wife into his arms and said the things he knew he couldn’t say. There was no place for that here. That wasn’t who he was, that certainly wasn’t what he did, and he couldn’t allow that kind of weakness. Not now, when all he had in this world was betrayal on one side and a captive spouse on the other.
And a baby who would come into this world and know only a father who had imprisoned his mother on an island.
He had never wanted to be his own father, a brute dressed in sleek clothes to hide himself in plain sight as he went on his many rampages. And yet it had never occurred to Leonidas that when all was said and done, he was more like his mother than he wanted to admit.
What he was doing to Susannah proved it.
His father would simply have beaten a defiant woman. This sort of game was in Apollonia’s wheelhouse. Manipulation and treachery were her life’s blood.
How had he failed to see it?
“I hope you let her know that you know what she did,” Susannah said, frowning. “That she hasn’t gotten away with it. That there will be consequences, whether she likes it or not.”
But Leonidas was looking past her then. He looked out toward the rocks and the sea beyond. The wild Greek sea that stirred something deep in his bones. It always had. He liked the rawness of these islands, unmanicured and untamed. They spoke to something deep inside him, and he understood in a sudden flash that Susannah did the same.
She had warned him. He couldn’t pretend she hadn’t. He could keep her, but he would never have her. A cage was a cage was a cage.
And he recognized that now only because he’d broken out of his. At long last, he’d finally seen his mother for who she was. Not an amusing socialite, flitting here and there as the whim took her. But the woman who had ordered the murder of her own son. On a whim.
She hadn’t even denied it.
“You were being so tiresome about my allowance,” she’d told him when he’d called, her voice shifting over into that nasally whine she used when she thought she could plead her way out of a scrape. She didn’t seem to understand that this was no “scrape.” That Leonidas was done. “What did you expect me to do?”
Some part of him—most of him—might have preferred to stay imprisoned in the last gasp of the lie he’d built a long time ago to explain Apollonia’s behavior, because it was easier. It was what he knew.
But this was better. It had to be. There had to be a point to this sort of bleak freedom, he was sure of it, even if he couldn’t see it now.
“I have never loved anything in my life,” he told Susannah, out where the air was fresh and the sky was blue and none of the stink of his family could taint her. “I doubt I am capable, and now I know why.”
“You are not responsible for the things that woman did,” Susannah retorted, instantly drawing herself up as if she intended to go to war with Apollonia there and then. “Not a single thing.”
“I fear it is in my blood,” he confessed. “It’s not only the Betancurs. It’s every single part of me. Venal. Malicious. Scheming and vile. Those are my bones, Susannah. My flesh. My blood.”
“Leonidas,” she began.
But he couldn’t stop.
“I have been a god and I have been a king, of sorts. I have acted the lover, but I have never felt a thing. I can run a company and I can lead a cult, but I have no idea how to raise a child. How to be a father.” He shook his head, not sure if he was dazed or this was what it felt like to finally have perfect, devastating clarity. “I’m not entirely certain I know how to be a man.”
“Stop it.” Her voice was ragged. A scrape of sound, and then she was moving toward him again. He hadn’t realized he’d stepped away. “Just stop this.”
Susannah didn’t wait for him to argue as she must surely have known he would. She crossed the distance between them, dropping her shawl at her feet and not bothering to look back. She leaned in and wrapped her arms around him at his waist, then tilted her head back to scowl up at him.
“I want you to stop talking,” she told him.
And he heard it then. All the power and authority of the Widow Betancur herself. A woman who had every expectation of being obeyed.
But he had never been anybody’s underling. “And if I refuse?”
She studied him for a moment, then she stepped back again. Keeping her gaze fixed to his, she reached down to gather up the loose, flowing dress she wore. It was long and deceptively shapeless while managing to emphasize the sweetness of her figure, and she simply watched him with that challenging glint in her eyes while she pulled it up and off. And then she stood before him in nothing at all save a pair of panties.
