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YOUR DEBT IS PAID IN FULL.
CHAPTER TEN
CONSTANTINEFLEWBACKto his antiseptic penthouse in London, a modern masterpiece of low-slung furniture and strange objects that he found neither artistic nor functional. He hadn’t chosen any of it himself. It was the work of the sort of interior design firm who catered to wealthy clients like the Skalas brothers, as it meant their work was always aspirational. The flat had been the subject of at least six different fawning articles about Constantine’skeen eyeandflair for esthetics.
It looked like a bloody surgery, he thought now.
But then, that was why he’d chosen it and let the firm run wild. He didn’t want his home to be anything like the house in Skiathos. Memories lurking behind every door, rooms filled with art and nostalgia and ghosts.Feelingsoozing from the walls. He had wanted his primary residence to stand as a visual representation of what he was.
Not the playboy, but the sharp-edged angel of vengeance he had made himself into.
He looked around the clean lines and soulless expanse of the penthouse and told himself he was fine.Terrific, even.
Constantine experimented with that theory upon his return to the Skalas & Sons London headquarters, dedicating himself to his work in a way he never had before. Meaning, visibly. He showed up at the office, did not send his usual proxy to board meetings, and generally turned the place on its ear by destroying the long-held fiction that he was the useless Skalas brother who did nothing at all, as a vocation.
And it was only after his trusted assistant suggested, very carefully, that he rethink his approach to the people who believed the hype about him—that he was lazy, sybaritic, more often to be found facedown in a sea of women than in the boardroom, and if he wished to change this that he do so at a more sedate pace—that Constantine accepted the fact that he was not, in fact, fine.
In any way.
If he was brutally honest with himself, he wasn’t sure that he would ever be anything like fine again.
Because he had excavated entirely too many of his own deep, personal motivations, and the feeling that left in him was unbearable.
Constantine preferred the clarity of revenge. The force and thrust of a life committed to nothing but vengeance. Every temper, every darkfeeling,every wild and stormy thing within him—it had all been excused by his focus on getting even with Molly.
And through her, at last, Isabel.
Now all he could think about was Molly. That wasn’t new. But the way he thought of her had changed. Instead of brooding over what he would do to her and the many ways he would crush her and her mother to dust, he woke in the night in a fever of need. Instead of finding ingenious new ways to put pressure on Isabel, he found himself lapsing into daydreams about sunny afternoons in Skiathos and the sheer glory that was Molly on her knees before him, smiling up at him as if she wanted him.
As desperately and comprehensively as he wanted her.
Constantine suspected he had changed. That Molly had changed him, somehow, with her frankness and her laughter and that spirit of hers that had seemed to bloom brighter the more she was tested. The more he had tested her, the stronger she had seemed.
His revenge had backfired spectacularly, loath as he was to admit it, even as one week turned into another, then another still, and he was as unsettled as he’d been when he’d left Molly in Paris.
Because everything was different.Hewas different, and he disliked it intensely.
It was possible he dislikedhimselfintensely.
Because he’d seen himself too clearly. He could not seem to claw his way back from that.
“You do not sound well, brother,” Balthazar commented when Constantine finally gave in and called him. He told himself it was only because his brother, too, knew the lure of revenge. And the particular way a woman could twist it all around—for how else was there to explain Balthazar’s shockingly uncontentious marriage? “And how can that be? For I have never seen you look as happy as you did while engaged in your little experiment with flashbulbs and infamy.”
“You’re the last person in the world who should believe a press release,” Constantine said tersely, glaring out at London as if his brother’s face hovered there above the Shard.
“I would never believe a press release,” Balthazar returned with a laugh. Alaugh.Constantine still couldn’t believe his older brotherlaughedthese days, as if it was an ordinary, everyday thing instead of wholly out of character for the man he’d been until now. “But I’m referring to the expressions I saw on your face. Please remember, I actually know you. And more, am all too aware that you would make an absolutely dreadful actor.”
“You’re confirming my aptitude, then. For I assure you, it was all an act.”
“If you say so.” Balthazar was quiet for a moment, and Constantine could hear the sound of the sea in the background. It made him wish, with a deep passion he would have sworn could not possibly exist within him, to return to Skiathos.
To go back in time, and stay there for far longer than ten days, with nothing to do but appreciate Molly’s sun-kissed limbs. And this time, not towait.
His fist was clenched so tightly his bones ached. He forced his palm open, scowling as he did it.
“But why do you use the past tense?” Balthazar asked at last. “Do I dare even ask this question?”
“Molly has paid her debt to me in full,” Constantine said. His voice sounded gritty. Rougher than it should have, and he was afraid he gave far too much away.
