Everything he’d told Molly. And more besides.
When he was done, he felt sick. And something like hollow. And his head pounded so hard and erratically that he wasn’t entirely sure he would hear Balthazar as he spoke.
Or maybe he only wished he wouldn’t.
“A wise woman once told me that the best revenge of all is living well,” Balthazar said. “And I must tell you, I’ve taken it to heart.”
Constantine let out a dark laugh, not at all surprised to find that he was rubbing at his chest. As if he could press his heart back into place. “I live well enough as it is.”
“The key is happiness, brother. If money could buy it, we would have had a far better childhood than we did.”
“Happiness,” Constantine said, pronouncing the word as if he wasn’t sure how the syllables came together. Or if it might sting him while he worked it out.
“We could talk all day about the many sins of Demetrius Skalas,” Balthazar continued. “And in fact, I would enjoy it. There’s nothing about that man I admire and I take it as a personal challenge to make certain that I never hand on any part of him to my children.”
“I will also take this challenge,” said Constantine, who until that moment had never so much as considered the possibility that he would bring a child into this world.
And yet the moment he considered it, he could only think of one woman who could possibly be the mother to those children. His children.
Their children.
The thought of Molly, ripe with a child they’d made, made him hiss out a small breath as if he’d been punched deep in the gut.
“But we must also talk about our mother,” Balthazar was saying, unaware that yet another sea change was sweeping his brother away as he spoke. “Both you and I went to such lengths to avenge her, though our approaches were different. I was furious about what had been done to her. You were furious at what was done to her memory.”
“I fail to see the difference,” he managed to say.
“You want her to be a saint, Constantine.” Balthazar’s voice was quiet, but direct. “When, like the rest of us, she was only a person.”
“She is still a person,” Constantine gritted out.
“You and I both know that isn’t entirely true.” His brother’s voice stayed quiet. And powerful. “One of these days, when she has stopped clinging to what little life she has left in her, you and I will do what we must to honor her. But in the meantime, do you imagine that if she were not in that bed she would applaud what you were doing?”
“I like to think she would.”
“Constantine. The only reason she stopped the downward spiral she was on was because she hit the bottom too hard to get up again. You know this. Our mother was a woman of grand obsessions. First with our father. Then it was her lover.” And his voice was harsh then. For he had taken that lover down. “Then came many other lovers, and worse by far, the chemical inducements they provided her. But the one thing our mother was never obsessed with was her children. I choose to take that as a compliment. She couldn’t take care of us. We could take care of ourselves, and we did.”
Constantine stared out the window, but he didn’t see London. All he saw was Molly. And then, almost superimposed over that face of hers that seemed to be lodged inside him, what dim memories he had of his mother before he’d lost her.
Because Balthazar was right. His mother had always been obsessed. Frantic and fragile. And while it was true that their father had been cruel to her—the way he was cruel to all who crossed his path—it was also true that she had never done much in the way of fighting back.
Not like Molly, who had found a way to stand tall in the worst possible circumstances. Even on her knees she had towered over him. Because that was the difference, wasn’t it? A person either had that flame inside, or they didn’t.
They either stood up or lay down.
He didn’t think it was positive or negative, necessarily, but it did make him wonder why it was he was so determined to avenge a woman who would never, ever have avenged herself if given the opportunity.
And she would never have applauded you, that voice inside him told him harshly. She barely noticed you as it was.
He raked a hand through his hair. “When did you become a font of wisdom?” he asked his brother. Grumpily.
Balthazar laughed. Again. As if laughter was now a staple of his daily life. It was hard to imagine. Impossible, in fact, and yet he kept doing it.
“Right about the time you decided to call me for advice,” he said then. “I suppose we can call this a brand-new day, Constantine.”
When their call ended, Constantine did not fling his mobile across the room. He stayed where he was, staring out his windows until he saw London again. No superimposed faces. No ghosts. No regrets.
And when he did, he took a deep breath, then stalked out of his surgical flat and headed for one of his cars in the attached garage.
He drove out of the city, following a route he knew all too well. He took it as often as he could. At least once a month when he was in London, and he tried never to stay away for more than six weeks at a time.
Knowing full well that if their situations were reversed, his mother would not have maintained the same visitation schedule. In fact, it was likely she would never visit at all. It wasn’t as if Constantine didn’t know this. Of course he did.
But he couldn’t say he’d truly felt it before now.
When he arrived at the long-term care facility where his mother waited, he took the steps two at a time, presenting himself to the duty nurse who knew him by sight.
“She’s doing well,” the cheerful woman told him as she ushered him down the same familiar hallway he’d walked for years, always lit up with that same, enduring thirst for vengeance that had animated his every action since he was twenty. “I do think it’s that Good Samaritan of hers.”
Constantine blinked at that. “I beg your pardon? A Good Samaritan?”
“Oh yes,” the nurse said as they reached the door of his mother’s room. She looked at Constantine with a slight frown between her brows. “She comes in most every week? I know I’ve mentioned her before. It’s been years now?”
“Yes, of course,” Constantine murmured, though he had no memory of any Good Samaritan. But then, would he have listened to anything that didn’t serve that cold knife edge inside him? That intense focus on revenge? “How lovely.”
Constantine supposed it was nice that someone else was visiting his mother. And yet when he walked inside and seated himself in the chair beside her bed, he knew it didn’t matter. People made all sorts of claims about patients in the same state as his mother, and maybe they were right. But not about his mother. As he took her hand and looked down at her, at her still dark hair and soft face, he knew the truth. She was not trapped in there. On the contrary.
She was at peace.
A peace he knew she had never found while she was alive.
His conversation with his brother kicked at him. He looked into his mother’s faintly lined face, looking far more at ease now in her endless sleep than she ever had when she’d been awake. She had forever been falling apart when they were children. As terribly as Demetrius had bullied his sons, he had bullied his wife even more. And when she did not cower or cry enough for his liking, he’d made sure to hurt her in other ways. Appearing with his mistresses in public. Making certain she always knew his unfaithfulness was epic and constant.
Constantine was not convinced he had ever seen her smile. Not a real smile. Not one that required anything more from her than good manners.
And he had loved his mother, truly he had, but looking back he could not say with any conviction that she had felt the same. They had been raised as much by nannies as by her, which had suited everyone.
Particularly when she had started taking lovers of her own.
His father had delighted in calling her selfish, which had been laughable coming from him.
The truth was, Constantine thought now, she had earned that selfishness. She had earned any life she wanted after surviving Demetrius.
Why don’t you deserve the same? something asked inside him.
But he put that aside, because he knew better. He was a Skalas male, not the victim of one. It was different.
“I’m so sorry, mitéra,” he found himself saying, there alone in the room with only the quiet beeping machines that kept her alive for company. “I put you on a pedestal. And how was that so different from what my father did, if in reverse? Who knows how things could have been if I had only let you be who you were. Not what I wanted you to be instead.”
He understood that the opportunity to know his mother had been taken from them both. And it was possible that had he come to know her, he might not have liked what he found. He understood that his mother was weak in many ways, but so, too, had his father exploited that weakness for his own amusement. Most of all, Constantine understood that he had been young when his parents had made the decisions that would mark them all.
Too young, and time had not been on his side.
Still...wasn’t that what he did? He decided that there was a certain truth, and then he charged directly at that truth, forever. He would accept no complications, no complexities, no mitigating circumstances. Only what he accepted as truth existed, nothing else.
How else could he have missed the fact that Molly had been an innocent?
He thought that might haunt him forever.
Constantine kissed his mother on her soft cheek, whispered a goodbye he knew she couldn’t hear, then rose.
And when he turned, there was a woman standing at the door.
For a moment he didn’t recognize her. Perhaps he didn’t want to recognize her.
He took in the pretty face, the quietly elegant way she held herself. And how startled her cool blue eyes looked as she beheld him.
Isabel.
The first thing he’d done after leaving Molly in Paris, when he’d returned to his offices in a fury, was to restore everything he had taken from Isabel over the years. And from Molly.
With interest.
He’d considered it wiping the slate clean.
And he couldn’t tell if he was pleased to see Isabel now, or if it only added to how hollow he felt. How dark and empty, all the way through.
Constantine held himself tightly, as if standing at attention would make this confrontation easier. A confrontation he knew, if left to his own devices, he would have avoided forever.
“If you came here to thank me for not ruining you, or indeed to take me to task for coming so close in the first place, I’ll save you the trouble.” He inclined his head. It was not Molly’s majestic act of kneeling, but then, he doubted he possessed her strength. “It is I who owe you an apology, Isabel. For too many things to count.” The words he needed to say clogged his throat. They actually hurt, but he made himself say them anyway. “I am sorry, Isabel.”
It occurred to him that it was possible she’d come here to gloat. To taunt him. To take a piece out of him for what he’d tried to do to her daughter as well as to her. And he would take it, because he’d earned it, and he—
“Oh, Constantine.” Isabel let out a laugh that reminded him entirely too much of her daughter. It was warm and husky, filled with life even as it sounded a bit rueful. “You have always been so touchy, haven’t you?”
If he stood any straighter he would break in half. “...touchy?”
The older woman sighed. She gestured toward the bed. “I come to see your mother all the time.”
Constantine stared at her, because her words didn’t make sense. On any level. Isabel Payne came to visit his mother? Whatever for? Dimly, the nurse’s chatter about a Good Samaritan came back to him. Could it be?
He shook his head, baffled.
And found himself wholly unable to speak.
“She and I have a lot in common, for our sins,” Isabel said, sounding far too wise for Constantine’s taste. “I like to think we could have been friends, if things had been different.”
“I’m not entirely certain my mother was capable of having friends,” Constantine forced himself to say, as a kind of olive branch, though tearing the words out of him felt more like ripping trees apart than extending branches.
“Everyone is capable of having friends,” Isabel replied. Her eyes were too blue. Too much like Molly’s. Too capable of seeing straight through him. “But like most things, not just anyone will do. It has to be the right friends.”
Isabel moved further into the room, holding herself like a person who had every expectation of being welcome wherever she went. Something, he could see now, she had handed down to her daughter, along with those blue, blue eyes. Because Constantine was the one who suddenly felt out of place. Who stepped back as if this was a hospital room Isabel belonged in, not him.
Which was currently also how his life felt around him. Misshapen, because Molly had been in the middle of it.
But then every muscle in him tensed up when Isabel reached out and laid her hand on his arm.
Her gaze on his was far too warm. Far too knowing.
“You should hate me,” he gritted out. “Why don’t you?”
“I have spent too much time being hated myself,” she replied. “I would never inflict it on another. Or myself. What a waste. Might as well chain yourself to whatever you’re hating and leap into the sea. That’s the kind of power you give it.”
Constantine thought of the stories Molly had told him about her childhood, more when she’d been sixteen than now. Back then he’d been far more interested in piecing those stories together to make them scandalous. SAD SINGLE MUM TO SKALAS BRIDE! PREGNANT AT SIXTEEN!
Only now did it occur to him that Molly had not been as naive as he’d imagined her back then. She had already faced all manner of close-minded ignorance. All he’d done was show her that such mean-spiritedness wasn’t the unique province of small country villages.
He kept thinking it was impossible to hate himself more. And in that, too, he was wrong.
Isabel squeezed his arm and he stared down at her hand, still astounded that she had simply...reached out and touched him. As if he was a regular man instead of this monster he’d become.
A monster far too like his father.
“And I want to apologize to you, Constantine,” she said softly. “I should have tried harder to get through to you, but not in my usual clumsy way. I know I only made things worse.”
Constantine couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cope with this. It was as if this woman was a tsunami, ripping into him years ago and now again, and in all this time he still hadn’t figured out how to survive her.
Maybe he never would. Maybe all these years of plotting and planning and honing himself into what he’d thought was the perfect weapon for his revenge had all been leading here, to a quiet care facility and a soft hand on his arm.
Maybe he had always been meant to go out with a whimper, after all.
“Some people aren’t worth these efforts, Isabel,” he managed to say, though everything inside him seemed to rock wildly back and forth. “There’s no getting through to them. No matter what you do, or what you try, it will always be futile. There’s nothing clumsy or elegant that could ever be done to reach them where they’ve gone, and good riddance.”
Isabel squeezed his arm again, as if that was a normal thing that people just...did. And worse, smiled at him. As if she couldn’t see what
a monster he was, when she should know better. When she’d been married to his father, the worst monster of all.
“I suppose vengeance can be elegant,” she said as if this was nothing but happy cocktail chatter. “It requires surgical precision, doesn’t it? I think you’ll find that in contrast, love is often clumsy, Constantine. Or it wouldn’t hurt so much, would it?”
And it was not until that moment, with Isabel Payne’s hand on his arm, his own mother there in the same room, and his heart flayed wide open, that Constantine understood at last.
He was in love.
All this time, all these years, all his grand plans...and he was in love.
And the moment that was clear to him, at long last, there was only one place for him to go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MOLLY WAS ENJOYING a quiet evening in—or more accurately, brooding with wine yet again, because that appeared to be all she did when left to her own devices since she’d returned from Paris—when a terrific pounding started up on her front door downstairs.
She had long since removed any buzzer from her property, because the paparazzi had regularly abused it. Anyone who wished to contact her should have her mobile number, and if they didn’t, they shouldn’t contact her. Packages and other such deliverables she had delivered to her agent’s offices instead. Where they could be picked up at her leisure or delivered by messengers she recognized.
There was no reason anyone should be pounding on her door.
She set her wine aside and stalked across to the windows that opened up onto the balcony that sat up above the street. She stepped out, breathing in the warm air. It was full summer in England. Light held on until late and even though it was just as likely that it would take a cold turn by morning, it was impossible not to feel a bit giddy.
But when Molly peered over the side of her balcony to see who was abusing her front door, she found she did not feel giddy at all.
Because Constantine stood there. Staring up at her as if she had left him, naked in a bed in a different country.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 13
