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She tried to imagine what it would be like to hear an apology from her parents and realised that she never would. Everything they had done was for Svardia and if Marit confronted them with the hurts of her childhood, Svardia would be their answer and she couldn’t argue with that. It was sad that it had taken beingneeded, being given that responsibility, to finally understand what it was like to go against the heart’s wishes for duty. But maybe her parents had gone against their own wishes too. Maybe Kyros had and only now was able to admit it.
‘Perhaps,’ Marit said, thinking of how much time she’d needed even to begin to feel some kind of peace with her hurts, ‘you don’t have to do anything with it yet. Maybe you need time just to feel it?’
He stopped and pulled her to stand before him. ‘Can I kiss you?’
Love blazed in her heart for this man and she promised that even though they could never have a future, this would be what she took with her. ‘For the next two days, you don’t have to ask.’ She pulled him to her and the kiss burned from sweet to almost indecent in a heartbeat.
‘Perhaps we should find your apartment,’ Marit teased.
‘Soon. There’s something I want to show you before we do.’
Curious, and a little excited, she searched the length of the cobbled street he’d brought her to. There were boutiques and coffee shops on either side of the street, but nothing that she could tell as being special. A knowing smile curved Lykos’s lips as he pulled her towards a small wooden door she had missed completely.
Frowning, he drew her across the threshold and down a set of stairs. As they reached the bottom of the stairs, the dark underground room opened up and she saw a bar on one side and small tables opposite. The place was packed, the smell of wine and something sweet, and there were so many conversations going on that it made her feel deliciously anonymous rather than overwhelmed. But beneath it all she heard something that made her look towards the corner of the taverna where a man sat on a dais. A quick peal of notes rippled over the chatter and soon the audience quietened. Lykos watched her with a smile and she knew somehow that this was what he’d wanted her to see.
‘What instrument is that? It sounds like a mandolin, but...lower in pitch?’ she hedged.
‘It is a bouzouki.’
Listening intently, she didn’t realise that she’d pulled them through the mass of people, leading Lykos by the hand until she stood at the front, watching the man on the small dais, his foot resting on a block and a long-necked instrument in his lap, his fingers flying across the metal strings. Marit marvelled at the stillness of his body and the incredible flight of notes that poured into the air between them.
Lykos drew her against his chest as they listened, his arms enfolding her. He dipped his head to her ear and, keeping his voice low, told her how he and Theron used to sneak in here when they were teenagers. He explained that the music was calledrebetiko. In words that raised goosebumps on her skin, he told her that it was the music of the underground, favoured by the country’sundesirables. Many of the songs had been subject to censorship for a time because the lyrics spoke of alcohol, drugs, and were politically disruptive.
As Lykos spoke to her of the music’s history the song morphed and the cycling chords drew foot taps from the crowd, growing loud enough to become the song’s heartbeat. Claps soon joined in and somehow the music took on the weight of an orchestra, as if everyone present had a part to play in the production of the music. And, above it all, the trembling melody spun higher in a pitch that wound in her heart until she felt a burning against the backs of her eyes. She felt the rebelliousness of the song in her soul, the expression of frustration and fight similar to that of blues, but different. There was a yearning torebetikomusic that felt strangely just out of her grasp. As if she were so close to understanding it, to feeling it, but also knowing that it was something she would never be able to hold.
She began to sway in Lykos’s arms just as some of the crowd pulled back from a man, arms outstretched and clicking his fingers in time with the claps and foot taps. His hat, looking like something from the thirties, was at a downward angle, his face partially hidden as he swayed from side to side, his footsteps surprisingly light for the circular steps he was making. There was a grace that reminded her of flamenco dancers, but heavier, grounded, deeper and so much part of the music that the dancer and musician became inseparable.
‘Are your feet hurting yet?’ Lykos whispered into her ear beneath the trill of the music she had half fallen in love with.
‘What?’ she asked, momentarily confused.
‘Your list,’ Lykos whispered in her ear as she wondered whether she and Lykos might have also become inseparable. ‘You wanted to go to a concert. And this is the best one I’ve ever been to.’
‘And dance until my feet hurt,’ she remembered.
He looked down at her, and the words sat on her tongue, waiting for her to speak them. Waiting for her to tell him that she loved him. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t be another person who claimed they loved him and walked away. So instead she kissed him with all the words that she couldn’t say, she kissed him with such passion that the crowd around them began to laugh and whistle and, smiling into one last kiss, Lykos took her home.
CHAPTER TEN
LYKOSWOKEWITHa start. It was not a gentle way to do so. His pulse raced, his breath was rapid in his chest, as if someone had fired a starting gun and not told him that he was in the race. He looked to where Marit should have been in the bed beside him and saw that it was empty. Panic fired through him, even though he was sure she was still in the apartment, because he saw in an instant that this was how he would wake every morning for the rest of his life. Knowing that something was horribly wrong, because she would never be there next to him.
It was only when he caught sight of her on the balcony that looked out onto the azure blue of the Aegean that his breath slowed, even if his heart didn’t. She was wearing one of his shirts—the blue cotton dwarfed her and billowed around her thighs in the early morning breeze. The blonde jagged twists of her hair fell around her shoulders, making him want to sweep them aside and press kisses to her shoulder blades. And then he realised why he was so disorientated.
He had slept. He had slept not only through Marit waking up, but he didn’t remember anything after bringing her to the bedroom last night. But he never slept.
In all the years since he’d been on the streets he would pace his way through the night hours. He had never felt comfortable in a bed. As if he didn’t trust the softness of it. Never stopped expecting it to bite him or be taken away. He racked his brain. He’d not had a drink yesterday at Theron’s party, not with so many people around and not with Kyros.
I let you down. I am sincerely sorry for that.
Kyros’s apology whispered into the morning. He still didn’t know what to do with it. Those words had recalled a part of him he’d thought he’d buried so deep he’d never have to face it again. It made him feel unsettled and disorientated, but also in the midst of all of that was a core of stillness. A moment that made him feltheard, that made him feltseen.
And he began to understand what Marit had been trying to do by marrying the Frenchman. To avoid being tied to another person in her life who didn’t see what she needed, what she loved, what she was so damn good at that he wanted the world to see it too. A new fresh pain sliced into his heart then. In doing her duty by returning to Svardia, Marit was knowingly sacrificing her soul’s needs for her country and her family. A family that might never see her the way she needed. He wanted to rage against the injustice of it. He wanted to howl at the fact that, for the first time in his life, there was nothing he could do about it.
You’re wrong. This isn’t the first time.
Memories sucker punched him in the gut. His mother walking away, without even looking back, her last words to him written on his soul.
No!He would not let that happen. Not again. He would show Marit that she had a choice. That she could have the future she wanted away from Svardia, away from duty and people who were blind to just how incredible she was. She could have a futurewith him, if she would just take it and let the rest burn. Kozlov, the shares, the whole damn lot.
