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He moved toward her then, something terrible on his face.
It didn’t make him any less beautiful.
“And would you like to knowwhymy family is as complicated as it is?” he asked, his voice stark.
Kendra admitted to herself that in that moment, she really didn’t.
“When my mother came back from her stay in her private hospital, she tried to make amends. With my brother and me, it was easy. We loved her.” Balthazar’s eyes had gone cold. “With my father, on the other hand, she had much less success.”
“The poor woman,” Kendra breathed.
“My father hated my mother for her weakness,” Balthazar told her. “Whether that was just or not is beside the point. It happened. After a while, I found myself following suit.” Kendra let out a ragged sort of sound, but that only made his mouth curve into something grim. “He beat me into his image, Kendra. Constantine was permitted his little rebellions but I never was. It was easy to take everything my father said as gospel. My mother was weak. She deserved no loyalty from my father. He believed this and so did I. He acted it out and so did I.I believed it.”
“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,” Kendra threw right back at him. “They’re not facts, Balthazar. They’re feelings. You can change them. All you have to do is want to.”
“If only it were that simple.”
“What in life is simple?” She found herself moving to her knees, still clasping the wedding gown before her, like an offering now. “Do you think that I wanted to find myself pregnant with the child of a man who made it clear he hated me?”
“Yes,” he said, the simple syllable cutting deep into her. “Until today I assumed that was exactly what you wanted.”
Kendra was terrified she might break down into tears. And she couldn’t bear it. She crawled over to the edge of the bed and stood, pulling the dress up and over her head once more.
And the irony wasn’t lost on her that she stood there, wedded and bedded and discarded at dizzying speed. Barefoot and pregnant. A collection of worst nightmares, really.
She almost thought she should laugh at the absurdity. But the laughter wouldn’t quite come.
“You really thought I got pregnant on purpose?”
The look on his face made her hug herself. “My father believed in consequences,” Balthazar told her in that same grim tone. “When I was a small boy, he beat me himself. As I grew older and bigger, he used other means of punishment. Sometimes he would beat my brother for my infractions. Other times, he would do things he knew hurt my mother. In time, he promised me, I would stop caring about either, and he was right.”
“He sounds like a broken, horrible man, and what does that have to do with us? Or this baby?”
“He raised me to care about the business alone, as he did,” Balthazar continued, as if he had no choice. As if these things were being dragged out of him whether he liked it or not. “And I thought it made sense that he should have his other women if he wished, because he was the one who worked so hard to build the Skalas empire. What did my mother do but waft around the house, haggard and pathetic?”
His voice was hard, like bullets, but somehow Kendra thought he was aiming the gun at himself.
“A friend of his started to spend more time with the family,” Balthazar continued, a stark, ferocious thing on his face. He stood there, much too still, and though all Kendra wanted to do was go to him, she knew better. She knew he wouldn’t allow it. “He flattered my father. He took an interest in what Constantine and I were doing. And then, because he could, he started an affair with my mother. Right under my father’s nose.”
“But your father was already having his own affairs, wasn’t he?”
Balthazar shrugged. “He was not a rational man when it came to the things he considered his. When my father discovered this affair, he confronted the two of them. He made my brother and me witness it, because he said it affected the family. I was sixteen.”
“Balthazar...” she whispered.
“My mother was regretful, but she said they were in love. That he was kind to her, which was more than my father had been. That she would sign whatever he liked if he let her go.” His grim expression did not alter in the slightest. “But his friend only laughed. He called my mother names and told my father it was no more than he deserved for some or other business deal. He left my mother sobbing on the floor.”
“You shouldn’t have seen that,” Kendra said fiercely. “Your father should have protected you from that.”
“He was too busy throwing my mother out,” Balthazar said icily. “And when she went, she fell apart.”
He ran a hand over his face, then. Maybe she only thought she saw it shake.
“You don’t have to tell me the rest of this,” she said, even as she racked her brain to remember what had become of his mother. Why did she think it was something sad?
“But I do,” he replied. He started toward her then, slow and deliberate. “My mother descended into a squalid little life of men who took advantage of her. She turned to drink. Then to drugs. One night she took too much and slipped into a coma. She has never awoken. She lies there still, slowly wasting away, trapped in her despair.”
Kendra’s pulse rocketed around inside her. Her stomach twisted. But still he drew closer in that same, terrible way. She wanted to run, but she wanted to stay where she was even more. As if she was proving something.
