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“My brother and I vowed that we would take our revenge on the man who targeted her,” Balthazar said, the ring of something heavy in his voice. And stamped all over his face. If she didn’t know better, knowing this man as she did, she might have imagined it was guilt. “No matter how long it took. No matter what it entailed.”
“Do you mean your father?”
His smile was thin. “My father did not help, I grant you. But it was not he who pushed my mother over the side of that cliff. It was not he who used her, then discarded her, and laughed about what he’d done.”
“You said he was unkind to her.”
“He was unkind,” Balthazar snapped. “Had she never met this friend of his, she would have survived it like the rest of us.”
“I don’t blame you for hating him,” Kendra said softly.
Balthazar’s eyes blazed. He stopped moving, though he was still more than an arm’s length away from her.
“I am delighted to hear you say that, Kendra,” he said. “Because the man I am speaking of is your father.”
It was like the world dimmed, or she slid off the side of it. She stared back at him, convinced her ears were ringing. Convinced her heart had stopped. Convinced she must have misheard him.
But none of those things were true.
“Your father,” he said again, so there could be no mistake, “drove my mother to her current state. And has never looked back. He prefers to dance around me in business situations as if I don’t know what he did. What he is.”
“But... But you...”
“I assumed you were nothing but another knife he thought to plunge in the side of my family,” Balthazar said. “Some men deal with their guilt in extravagant ways. Of course he sent you to me. I have no doubt his greatest hope was that history would repeat itself.”
“All along,” Kendra whispered. “All along you’ve...” She felt as if she might collapse, but she didn’t. “You don’t just hate me, do you, Balthazar? You want to use me to hurt him. You didn’t take your revenge—you made me become it.”
He bared his teeth as if the pain was too great. As if the villa they stood in was nothing but ash and ruins at their feet.
But she couldn’t tell if he wanted it that way, and it broke her heart.
“And I might have dreamed of your innocence, Kendra,” he managed to grit out, turned once again to a storm. She could feel the rain on her face. She could hear the thunder in his voice. “I might have imagined what it would be like if you are not as tarnished as the people you come from. But that is not who we are. And this marriage is nothing more than a weapon I will use to cut down a monster.”
“Balthazar...” she whispered, agonized. “You can’t mean that. You can’t.”
His mouth was a merciless lash. “You should have run when you had a chance, Kendra. I regret that you are not the woman I thought you were. But you will pay all the same.”
And then he left her there, in her wedding gown with his scent all over her like a curse, to let her tears fall at last.
Alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BALTHAZARMEANTTOleave the island entirely.
He stormed from the bedchamber and pulled on the first clothing he could find in the attached dressing room. He would go to Athens, he decided. He would do what he had always done and lose himself in work. In the business. In the things that made him who he was and more, who he wished to remain.
The things that mattered, he thought.
And thinking of what mattered, perhaps heading back to New York made even more sense. He headed for the office suite he kept in the villa, finding all of his devices charged and ready for him, but he didn’t pick up his mobile. He didn’t give the order to have the helicopter readied for the flight to the mainland. Instead, he found himself staring at the desk before him, seeing nothing.
Nothing but the choices that had brought him here.
And wrapped around everything, shot through it all, he saw Kendra’s face. Her beautiful face and her lovely eyes filled with tears.
Tears he had put there, Balthazar knew.
He saw the way she’d stared at him, clutching that dress to her chest as if he was nothing more than a rampaging beast. A soulless monster, as he’d often been accused.
