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For the mother he had lost when he was young, then had pushed away when she returned because he’d thought that might please his father. Only accepting the guilt and shame he’d felt over her treatment when it was too late for her. No amount of revenge in her name was ever going to change the fact that he was the one who had abandoned her.
And another kind of grief seized him, because while he had seen his father for who he was, Balthazar had always imagined himself immune. He’d been expected to be immune. He’d known Demetrius was a cruel man, certainly. A viciously cold one. A father who could not love and refused to allow such soft sentiments in anyone near him. A man who had raised two sons with enough violence that they felt that they dared not attempt it themselves.
Balthazar could do the same, of course. That had been his plan.
But for the first time he understood, not only how much damage had been done to him, but what he had lost.
How much he had lost.
That he had such darkness in him made him despair of himself. But the greater punch of grief was that, had it not been for Kendra and this baby he would have sworn he did not want, he might never have seen the truth about himself so clearly.
If it weren’t for Kendra, he would never have known.
He tried to fight it, but it was no use. Night was coming, bringing with it the heartless stars, each and every one of which seemed to punch their way inside of him.
And he could call it what he liked.
But Balthazar understood that the emotion he’d been avoiding the whole of his life had come for him, at last.
And it was no mystery to him why his father had abhorred them so. Emotions were messy. They tore through him now, storm after storm, never ceasing and always changing, making a mockery of the anger he tried to throw up as a shield.
He took it, one hurricane after the next turning him inside out and then slapping him back together as if he could ever be the same.
When he knew better. Because he’d seen colors now, and there was no way to go back from that. There was no way to make himself willfully blind.
Even if he had tried, he knew that he didn’t have it in him to sentence his child to that same stark and lifeless fate.
He was Balthazar Skalas. He surrendered to no man.
Lucky for him, then, that the only person on earth he intended to surrender to was a woman. His wife.
Assuming she would have him now that she knew the truth about her family and his, and the great, ugly weight of the revenge he’d tried so hard to take out on her.
He turned, surprised to find that he’d made his way to the altar where he had married her a lifetime ago on this very same, endless day. The ruins of the old chapel gleamed in the starlight and for moment, when he saw movement, he thought it was an apparition.
Or better still, that dream of his, come to comfort him once more.
But as she moved closer, he saw that it really was Kendra.
His heart skipped a beat.
She still wore her wedding gown, that flowing, frothy gown that gleamed an unearthly white in the starlight. And she looked wilder than she had this morning, as if the daylight had required compliance, but here in the dark, there was only her.
Her hair was a tousled flame, and he longed to run his hands through it all over again. He could see traces of the tears she’d cried, there on her cheeks as she drew closer, but she was not weeping now. If anything, she looked determined.
His own little warrior, who could not stop fighting, no matter what.
Balthazar had a vision of her in his New York office so long ago and felt his heart lurch all over again. In those moments before she’d seen him she’d stood at the window, staring out at the glittering sprawl of Manhattan. Her face had been so soft, suffused with that sweet heat that had entranced him, even then.
He had told himself he was unmoved, but that had been a lie.
And he’d waited longer than he should have, drinking her in. Something he would have denied to the death if she’d called him on it.
Something he couldn’t have admitted then, especially to himself.
Kendra stopped before him, the breeze making her seem half ghost, though he knew better. She was made of warmth and sunlight, even in the dark.
Maybe especially in the dark.
