by Maisey Yates
“I fail to understand why there was an association with him in the first place. He turned against me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“He fired you. Then, you got your job back, did you not?”
Her face got hot. “I know what you’re implying, but it didn’t happen that way. Anyway, I’m stepping down at Matte. I’m going to go back to school. I’m going to figure out what I want to do. Quite apart from your expectations, or his. I have been caught in the cross fire for too long. I just can’t do it anymore. I have to find out what I am beyond this...desperate people pleaser. I have to find out if I can be more than your shield to block you from Apollo’s wrath.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Why would I think anything else?” she asked.
“And yet, you have never said anything.”
“Yes, well, I wanted to keep the peace. I wanted to do the right thing, be the daughter you needed. But I’m over that now. I need to be the person I’m happy with, not the person you’re happy with.”
“Did I force you into the position at Matte?” he asked, his tone hard.
“You can’t deny that you used me to try and stand between Apollo and the destruction of the company. It had nothing to do with me. You never intended to give any of it to me. You always wanted a son, and until he went rogue, Apollo was that son for you. I was never supposed to be the one in that position. You used me.”
He lifted his shoulder, the lines on his face looking suddenly more pronounced. “Yes, I did use you. But how else could I defend my legacy? I knew you could do it, Elle. I had no concerns about that. I knew Apollo had...feelings for you. Feelings of some kind, and I thought that perhaps he would modify his actions if you were in the line of fire.”
“And so you used me as a target.”
“I knew you were strong enough. You might think it’s because I don’t respect or value you, but it is to the contrary. You’re strong. I would not have shielded a son from such a thing, and I did not shield you.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful?”
“I could see no other way,” he said, his tone uncompromising.
“Is that why you ousted Apollo’s father from your company all those years ago? Because you could think of no other way to be with Mariam?”
“Yes,” he said, simply. Calmly. “It was the only way I could think of to win Mariam. And so I did what I could. But she stood by him. Had his child. And for all my sins, I never held that against Apollo. That he was the product of a union I despised.”
“You don’t get a medal for that, Dad,” she said. “Not when you were so...horrible.”
“I was horrible,” he said, his tone hard, his eyes ice blue. “And I would do the same thing again. Make the same choices. I didn’t intend for his father to kill himself, Elle. I am not a mind reader. I could not predict the outcome. I did, however, think that it was likely Mariam would leave him when he had nothing and I had everything. I was wrong.”
“She loved him.”
Her father nodded slowly. “Yes, she did. But she has learned to love me, I think.”
“You think?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Have you ever asked her?”
Her father’s face went blank. “No. I haven’t. But then, I’m not certain it matters. Not now.”
Elle’s heart crumpled. “I think it always matters. It doesn’t matter when love comes, as long as you know it’s there. Does she know you love her?”
“I destroyed her world to move her into mine. I cleared my world to make room for her. If that is not love then I do not know what is.”
He didn’t. Elle could see that. He truly and honestly knew nothing of love being two-sided. Of giving rather than taking.
He was an unbending man. Unyielding. All arrogance and a stiff neck. Unable to truly turn and look at anyone else.
“I think perhaps love isn’t destroying worlds. Or moving people around like chess pieces,” she said, her voice shaking. “I think maybe it’s giving more than you take. Showing it, even when someone may never show it back. Being kind even when the other person is cruel. I think love isn’t always balance, but if both are willing to give more than they take...it might be a beautiful, rare sort of treasure.”
“I don’t know about any of that, Elle,” he said. “I do know that I have you, and I still have Mariam. In that I find some success, I think.”
“Do you love me?” She might as well ask. She had already been rejected by Apollo, so there was really no reason to protect herself at this point. She had been flayed already. She might as well allow some salt to be rubbed into the wounds.
Her father only looked at her for a moment, his gaze unreadable. “Did you not know?” he asked.
“How would I?” she answered.
“I am your father, Elle.”
“That doesn’t make any guarantees.”
“I am a man who has built my life on a foundation made of ruthless decisions. I did not become rich by following the rules. I did not obtain my wife by playing fair. I hurt Hector. I hurt your mother. I have never known quite how to handle the people in my life. But for all of that, I do love you.”
It was still indirect. Still impersonal. But she felt it was very likely the best he could do.
She also saw, for a moment, herself in the old man’s gaze. Waiting to be given what she wanted, all of her conditions met. No, she wasn’t being unreasonable wanting love from Apollo. But she had to consider where he had come from. What he knew.
Apollo had been broken. Battered by life. People he had trusted had abandoned him. Betrayed him. He needed someone to show him something different. Needed someone to stand by him, no matter what. To take what he could give now, and trust there would be more in the future.
She would do that for him. For her. Just because he couldn’t meet her here now didn’t mean he never would.
She loved him. She would love him enough for them both.
“I love you,” she said, because she thought she might as well practice saying it again, to another man who had difficulty hearing it, saying it. To continually practice this new start, where she didn’t hide. Where she didn’t try to make herself palatable. “In spite of everything.”
“I haven’t changed,” he said. “I am the man you have always known. You just know a bit more of the story.”
“Yes, well, the whole story is important. It doesn’t mean I think you made good choices.”
“I never asked anyone to sign off on my choices. I made my bed, and it has the woman I love in it. How can I have regrets?”
“Well,” Elle said, “I’m going to go after the man I love now. Because he’s pigheaded and stubborn and scared. And I’m okay with that. As long as I can be with him. Oh. I’m having his baby, also. That might be relevant, too.”
That seemed to successfully shock her father. His gray eyebrows shot upward, his mouth dropping slightly open. “You didn’t see fit to mention that sooner?”
“We got philosophical. I imagine this will be the only time. But... Apollo is the father of my child. You’re married to his mother, you’re both the grandparents of the baby.” She frowned. “It’s very complicated. And you’re going to have to make some kind of peace with him.”
“It may not be possible. As you said, the whole story changes things. And for him, I think it transformed me into a villain. One I cannot deny I have been in years past. I tried to make it up to him by giving him all I could. But as you have pointed out to me, my demonstrations are not always clear.”
“You’ve both caused a lot of damage. Fighting, seeking vengeance, going after what you want with no care for others...it just has to stop. If it can’t be anything more than a cease-fire then let it be that. But it has to stop. I can’t be in the middle. I won’t allow my child to be in the mi
ddle.”
“And if you have to choose between me or him?”
“It would be him,” she said, not even hesitating. “Assuming he felt the same way.”
Her father nodded slowly, his lips curving into a smile. “Maybe you even understand my more ruthless decisions.”
“Where Apollo is concerned I have no doubt I could be ruthless. Where my child is concerned... I would shed blood.”
“I fear I was too selfish to make that choice,” her father said. “And that I did not have the pride that you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did not care if Mariam felt as strongly as I did. I only cared that I had her.”
“Well, I lived too much of my life that way and I won’t do it now.”
Her father regarded her with...pride. For the first time she could honestly say she felt it. A strange moment because she didn’t feel particularly triumphant. She only felt...broken. Sad. Pride was a poor salve for a broken heart.
“I need to be loved,” she repeated, for herself as much as anyone. “And I need to be assured that my son or daughter will not be used as a pawn. Not for Apollo to hurt you, not for him to hurt me. I think you will find my love for my child the most ruthless of all.”
“Then go,” her father said. “Tell him. Go and be ruthless for love.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
APOLLO WAS NO stranger to despair. While he had not been terribly conscious of the loss of wealth as a boy, the loss of his comfortable bedroom, his bed, had certainly been things he’d felt deeply. After that, the loss of his father. Then, the loss of the man he had come to think of as a father.
But he had never once experienced loss like this. A loss that was, in many ways, his own doing. There had been no control in his hands when they had lost their livelihood and their money, there had been no control when he had discovered the true nature of David St. James. But here... With Elle, he’d held the power. The power to tell her what she wanted to hear, to find a way to be the man she needed. And he had turned away.
“Coward,” he said aloud to the empty space in his office. He paced in front of the window, looking out over the city below. He had gone back to Greece, because he had not known what else to do. Had not known where else to go. He felt helpless, and it had been a long time since he had felt helpless. He despised the feeling. More than anything. It was one of the many reasons he had turned so sharply, so hard, on David St. James.
Because when the revelation had struck him it’d been with the force of a killing blow. It had chopped his legs out from beneath him, left him gasping, shocked. He was not a man who took kindly to such a thing.
Wounded pride, Apollo? That is a very small reason to seek revenge. A very small reason to hold on to anger.
But what his father had been through... What his mother had been through...
He knew he should speak to his mother. But the simple fact was he was afraid to hear what she had to say. He had been from the moment three years ago when the revelations about David had become clear. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say. For fear that she loved him. For fear that she was happy. For fear that she supported the decisions her new husband had made because it had resulted in the two of them being together.
But he knew now that he needed to ask her. He knew that he needed to find out why she had stayed.
He picked up the phone, dialing her number, dimly aware that it was very early in the morning in New York. “Hello?”
His mother’s faintly accented voice came over the line. “Hello, Mother,” he said.
They had barely spoken over the course of the past three years, and when they had, it had been very carefully. Because she had known that he was actively pursuing vengeance against her husband, and while she had kept her feelings to herself, he could always sense the fact that she didn’t approve. Certainly, she didn’t necessarily support him, as she had not demanded he take her with him, back to Greece. He was more than capable of supporting his mother now. She did not have to stay with David St. James. And yet, she did.
“Why?” he asked, with no preamble at all. He had not meant to launch straight into it like this, but he had been unable to help himself.
“Why what, Apollo?”
“Why do you stay with him? I don’t understand. The truth about David St. James was hidden from me for all of my life. But it was not hidden from you. You knew exactly what manner of man he was. And yet, you remain with him. You could leave. I could take care of you until the end of time, and you would never want for anything.”
There was silence on the other end. “Yes,” she said softly. “I do know what manner of man he is. I have known David St. James since long before you were born. I knew him from the beginning. I met him when I met your father. I don’t know why, but I have a tendency to love hard men. Though perhaps that is a good thing for you, I think.”
Apollo chuckled. “I suppose it is.”
“I did love your father. And I stayed with him even when we lost everything. Even when David ousted him from the company.”
“Which David did to hurt him.”
Mariam continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I do believe that at the time, your father already had a bit of an issue with drugs. Though they had not yet consumed him as they did later. He was working long hours, and he needed something to help him keep up. It was competitive. He didn’t want to sleep. I rarely saw him. And I would be... I would be lying if I said we were perfectly happy. But I was never unfaithful to him. I knew that David had feelings for me. But I had chosen Hector. And so I remained with him. I remained with him until the end, when everything became so twisted, and so hard. By the time he died he was not the man I had first known.”
“Because of David St. James.”
“Yes, and no. Business is harsh and uncompromising. It has always been so. Many men lose all their earthly possessions and come out the other side.”
Apollo was having trouble processing what she was saying. “You’re saying you harbor no anger against him over what he put us through?”
“I am sorry to tell you that I put much more of the blame at your father’s door than I do at David’s. Yes, he ousted him from the company, but had your father taken better care of our assets we would not have been destitute. Had he not completely given up, we could have come back from it. I had no skills. I was nothing more than a village girl who knew how to do little more than sew. And while that could support us in a very modest fashion it was never going to pull us out of poverty. When David contacted me... I am not proud of what happened after that, because for all of my sins, for all of my divided loyalty, the one thing that I truly regret was any part I might have played in the destruction of his marriage.”
Apollo swallowed hard. It was difficult to hear such things. To take on the knowledge of his own mother’s part in all of this. “Yes, well, you had a child to take care of.”
“He did not force me into an affair,” she said, her voice soft. “That was my choice. When he discovered how we were living he asked us to come, he offered to buy me a house, and to care for you. A relationship was not part of that. But I... I was lonely. And I recognized what I might have had. I regretted not choosing him, I think. Because he seemed stronger. That was my mistake, Apollo. His as well, but do not blame it all on him.”
“Well, his ex-wife didn’t care enough about her own child to stick around after she was deposed.”
His mother sighed. “No, she did not. Again, it does not excuse my actions. But I do love Elle, almost as if she were my own.”
“She knows that.”
“I hope so. There was a time when I thought you knew that David loved you as a son, as well.”
“I did believe that,” Apollo said. “But when I found out the level he had stooped to to bring you to him, to get revenge because of his love b
eing spurned, I could not simply stay in his home, stay as his son.”
“It is done,” she said. “It may have been wrong, but it is done.”
“I loved him,” Apollo said. “What kind of a son does that make me? I cannot love without it becoming something horribly twisted. You had to care for me, and that forced your hand. I loved my father, but it wasn’t enough to make him stay... David...”
“None of this, none of the tangled web, is your fault. You should not place more consequences onto yourself. We were badly behaved adults, who got our children caught in the cross fire of terrible games. Neither of you deserved it. I wish very much your father had not killed himself. But he was not simply a victim, either. Your love didn’t bring out the worst in us, Apollo. Your love was the best of us.”
He swallowed hard, his throat suddenly tight. “None of it is simple,” he said. “None of it. So I do not understand how I am supposed to sort through it all.”
“I can’t answer that question for you. I do know that it doesn’t benefit anyone to hold on to anger. To hold on to the past. It twists you. That’s what it did to Hector. It broke him completely. All of the anger that he felt toward David... I would hate for you to suffer the same fate.”
“And so...you would simply forgive?”
“I cannot make the decision for you, Apollo. I should like, for the sake of our family, for you to find it in you to forgive. But it is your journey. Perhaps I was wrong to forgive. I do not know. I only know that I had choices before me and I took the one that made me happiest.”
“We can never be a family as we were,” he said, “in part because while you may love Elle as a daughter, I do not love her as a sister.”
That declaration was met with silence. “I know,” she said finally. “I have always known.”
Those words nearly broke him. Shattered him entirely. She had always known, because his feelings had always been there. Every action, every cruelty, all the anger that had passed between them over the years had been there simply to disguise that fact.
From himself.
