Katrakis's Last Mistress (15 page)

What had Peter ever done? Tristanne, who had never asked him for anything, had asked him for access to her trust fund a few years early and what was his response? To whore her out at his command, for his purposes. And now, in the worst moment of her life, abandoned at the altar on her wedding day—still wearing her wedding dress—he behaved liked this. If she could have felt something beyond the agony of Nikos’s betrayal, she might have felt sick.

“I am not your sister,” she told him, feeling more free in that moment than ever before. “I don’t know why I ever cared to honor the relationship when you, clearly, do not. Consider it ended.”

“How dare you—” he began.

She turned her back on him, and looked wildly around, her gaze landing on her mother. Beautiful, vibrant Vivienne, so diminished now. So delicate. She was the only family Tristanne had ever had. The only thing worth protecting. And she was worth this, Tristanne told herself fiercely. Her mother was worth any price, no matter how heavy.

“Mother,” she said, her voice rough enough to be a stranger’s. But then, she felt like a stranger to herself, almost as if she inhabited someone else’s body. A body Nikos would never love again, never taste again; a body that would never melt into his—she shook the thoughts away, and bit back the sob that threatened to spill out. “I must change out of these clothes, and then we are leaving this place.”

“Where will we go?” Vivienne asked, like a child, her voice soft. Weak. It only hardened Tristanne’s resolve.

“You will go directly to Salzburg,” Peter ground out behind
her. “Or I will cut you both out like the parasites you are. Do you hear me?”

“Do what you must,” Tristanne said offhandedly—only to gasp when he reached over and grabbed her arm, hauling her toward him as he had many times before, his fingers digging into the flesh of her arm.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded. “Your pathetic life in Canada? You are useless and
she
makes you look industrious! Do you imagine you can
both
work on your backs?”

Tristanne heard Vivienne’s shocked exclamation, but she focused on Peter’s hard, cold eyes, and let all of her pain and rage build inside of her.

“I doubt my imagination is half so vivid as yours,” she spat at him. She jerked her arm out of his grasp, shoving back from him with a force that surprised them both. He was stronger than her—and a true bully—but he did not expect her to push back. He dropped his hand. She moved around him, heading for the dressing room door.

“This is all very impressive, but we both know you’ll come crawling back to me within the month,” he snarled. “Don’t think I will be as generous with you as I was this time.”

“Believe me,” she threw over her shoulder, her sarcasm practically burning her tongue. “I am well aware of the limits of your generosity.”

He laughed at her. “And what exactly do you think will become of you, Tristanne?” he taunted her.

She looked back then. For the last time. She knew in that moment that she would never see Peter again. And in the midst of all the rest of the pain, the horror, that she was not certain she would ever sort out, it ignited one small flare of hope.

“I will survive,” she told him, and she knew, somehow, that she would. “No thanks to you.”

All she had to do was keep standing.

N
IKOS
sat in his favorite small bar in Athens, drinking the most expensive liquor available, and told himself he was celebrating.

He had been celebrating in this manner for weeks now. He had so much to celebrate, after all. He should be overjoyed. The pictures of his aborted, abandoned wedding were in all the papers, the humiliation for the Barberys as extreme as he’d anticipated. He had it on excellent authority that Peter Barbery’s investors had abandoned him, and the Barbery fortunes were in free fall. Peter was expected to declare bankruptcy before the year was out, whether he had faced this truth or not.

At first, Nikos told himself that the odd feeling that claimed him was no more than the usual letdown after a particularly long campaign. One should expect to feel the absence of focus after living with such a specific goal for so long. It was natural—logical, even. And that was all that it was. There could be no other explanation.

So he told himself while he closed other deals, racing through them like a madman. A chain of hotels in the Far East. A thoroughbred race horse considered highly likely to win the Triple Crown. A boutique inn on the French Riviera that catered to a very elite, very private few. All deals that should have made him feel that his position—his global
dominance—was cemented. Unassailable and assured. All deals that would have had him truly celebrating not so long ago. With the prettiest women, the most expensive wine, in the most glamorous places he could find.

Instead he found himself on the same bar stool in this same hidden-away bar that he had once worked in, in another lifetime, bussing tables for the actors and actresses who frequented the place. Tonight he swirled a fine whiskey in his glass and stared at nothing, unable to avoid the truth any further.

He had achieved his ultimate revenge—made all of his dreams come true—and he simply did not care. He had stood at his father’s grave, laid flowers for Althea and her lost child and he had not felt a thing.
What a pointless exercise
, he had thought, staring down at a stone marker that commemorated the man who had never cared overmuch for him, the girl who had hated him and the baby who had never had a chance. He had become the man his father would be proud of, finally. He knew this was true the moment he realized he simply could not bring himself to care about the family name he had taken all this time to avenge. It was as if he had turned to stone himself.

He motioned the bartender toward his glass, and stared down at the amber liquid. That emptiness had been the first feeling, and he had denied it, but he had never expected what came behind it. He had never imagined that he, Nikos Katrakis, could
hurt.

Because he knew that was the only word to describe the agony in his chest, the heat of it, the impossible weight of all that he had lost. He was not ill, as he had first assumed. He simply ached. He could not sleep. He was irritable by day and his head was a vivid mess—and she was the only thing he saw. He imagined what she must have done that day, how she must have felt. He imagined how she had received the news, and how soon she had accepted what, he knew, she could not
have wanted to believe could be true. How long had it taken? What had she felt? He tortured himself with images of her tears—or, worse, her bravery. Then, even more insidious, he imagined different endings to the same day. What if he had not left her there? What if he had chosen to marry her despite everything? What if he could lay beside her tonight, smelling the sweet scent of her hair, the faint musk of her skin?

What if he had let himself believe her when she’d claimed to love him?

Nikos growled under his breath, cursing himself in every language he knew. Now that he had done what he set out to do, he could not see how it had consumed him for so long. What had he won? What had he achieved? Why did it all feel like so much wasted breath and misery, for absolutely no reason?

How could he have prized a loyalty to people who had disdained him over what he should have owed to Tristanne—the only person in all his life who had looked at him with joy in her eyes, however briefly? She had told him that she loved him, and he had responded by abandoning her at the altar. He was no better than an animal. He was exactly the kind of scum he had spent his life attempting to distance himself from. He, who had always vowed that he would never be Peter Barbery, had become something far worse. At least Peter had ended things with Althea himself—he had not allowed his absence to speak for him.

What kind of man was he, that he could have done what he had done?

“She is not worth it, my friend,” the bartender said, shaking Nikos out of his brooding contemplation of his whiskey.

Nikos focused on him, surprised that the man dared to speak to him after weeks of careful silence.

“Is she not?” he asked lightly. “How do you know?”

“She never is,” the man said. He shrugged. “What do they
say? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them, yes? It is always the same old story.”

He moved down the bar to answer another patron’s demands, but Nikos felt frozen into place. It was as if a light had gone off inside of him, and he finally, finally understood.

He was not a man who wallowed—nor one who ever backed down from a challenge, even if the challenge was of his own making. He had more money than he could ever spend. He had homes in every city that had ever caught his eye. He had come from nothing, and now he had everything. And none of it meant anything to him without Tristanne. He could not live without her scowl, her defiant chin, her thoughtful brown eyes. He did not
want
to live without her, no matter what her last name was, no matter who her family were, no matter what.

He could not feel this way. It could not continue. He could not live without her. It was as simple as that.

Everything else was negotiable.

Tristanne was not surprised, necessarily, when the sleek black car pulled to a stop beside her as she walked back along the avenue toward the little house she and Vivienne had rented when they’d first arrived back in Vancouver. She was not
surprised
when Nikos unfolded himself from the back of the car, his long, hard frame as lethally graceful as she remembered.

But that did not mean she was happy about it, either—to look up from her life and see him. To feel him steal all the light from the world and the breath from her body. She stopped dead in her tracks, a carrier bag swinging from her arm, and stared.

He had commanded all the light in the sunlit glory of the Mediterranean; on a street in a Vancouver neighborhood, gray with the start of the fall rains, he was magnificent—like a supernova, for all that he was dressed in black. Dark black
sweater, charcoal-colored trousers and that sleek black hair that very nearly tousled at the ends. Tristanne ignored the wild tumult of her heart, her nerves, her stomach as he moved toward her. He looked graver than she remembered—more grim. No hint of that half smile on his full lips, no gleam at all in his tea-steeped eyes.

She told herself she was glad. That it made him a stranger to her. And there was no need at all for her to talk to a stranger.

“I imagine you hate me,” he said, coming to a stop in front of her.

For a moment she could only blink. Then Tristanne felt a wave of something deep and messy wash over her, through her. Rage? Grief? She could not distinguish between the two.

“No preamble?” she threw at him. “No greeting, even? Do I deserve so little from you, Nikos? Not even the sort of courtesy you would extend to a stranger?”

She started moving then, jerky and rough, but she could not stay there. She could not look at him. She needed to barricade herself in her new bedroom, cry into her pillow and tell herself that she did not still yearn for a man who could treat her like this.
She could not.

“Did you mean what you said?” he asked. He kept pace with her with no apparent effort, which made her even more furious.

“We said a great many things, you and I,” she muttered, scowling at the ground. “One of us meant what was said and the other was nothing but a very practiced liar—so you will have to be more specific.”

She could not seem to keep her composure any longer. She had cried more in the past weeks than she had in the previous long years of her life. She hardly recognized herself anymore. She was what he had made her—this smashed, ruined, broken thing.

“You are crying,” he said, as if he was horrified. She stopped walking and whirled on him, wishing she was stronger, bigger. Wishing she could make him feel what she felt. Wishing she could hurt him.

“I do that often,” she snapped. “Congratulations, Nikos. You undid almost thirty years of self-control in one day.”

“And yet this is the man you claimed to love,” he said, his voice darker and rougher than she remembered. Almost as if he hurt, too, though she knew that must be impossible. “This monster, who would do this terrible, unforgivable thing!”

“I know what you did,” she gritted out. “You did it to me. But why are you here? What could you possibly want?” She laughed then, the kind of laugh that was torn from inside of her, hollow and broken. “I have to tell you, Nikos—I do not think there is anything left.”

“I am not a man worth loving,” he told her. “You were a fool to say such a thing to me, to admit to such a weakness. You should count yourself lucky that I did not believe you—that I did not hold you to such an insane pledge.”

She opened her mouth to scream at him, to demand he leave her before she broke into even tinier fragments, but something stopped her. His eyes were too dark. His mouth was too hard. If he was another man, she would have said he looked almost…desperate.

“Is that why you came all the way to Vancouver?” she asked him, her voice uneven. “To explain to me why I should not have fallen in love with you?”

“There is nothing in me worth loving,” he said, his gaze intent. “You need only look at my history. My mother. My father. My sister. All these people abandoned me, hated me. All of them. One family member, perhaps, could be excused away as an anomaly, but all of them? One must look to the common denominator, Tristanne. One must be logical.”

“Logical,” she managed to say. She shook her head, as if
that could make what he said make sense. “You think this is logical? You truly do, don’t you?”

She searched his face, that dark face she had never thought she’d see again, though in the dark of night, when she could no longer hide painful truths from herself, she’d
hoped.
She saw the truth in it—that he believed what he said. That he had not believed her when she’d said she loved him. That he did not—could not—know what love was. It made her ache. For him, in ways she knew she should not.

“It is as if you have some hold on me,” he said, his voice almost accusing. “I spent years dreaming of revenge, and now I dream only of you. I destroy everyone I touch.” He shook his head. “I am a curse.”

Hadn’t she said the same thing herself? Hadn’t she screamed it into her pillow to muffle the noise, so as not to disturb her mother? So why, now, did she feel herself frowning up at him, as if she wished to contradict him? As if she wanted to argue with him—make him treat himself better than he had ever treated her?

What was the matter with her?

She looked around as if she might find help, or answers, on the sidewalk. But the day was chilly and wet. Everything was gray, except for Nikos, and that hard look in his eyes that made her want to cry and not, for once, for herself.

She could not pretend to herself—when he stood in front of her, when he was within reach, when her palms itched to touch him and her body ached to press against him—that her feelings had changed at all. She wanted it all to have disappeared, or for the anger and betrayal to have bleached away what she’d felt for him.

“I can’t blame you for hating me,” he said quietly. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and she had the distinct impression that he was uncomfortable. He, who had never seemed to show the slightest bit of uneasiness. It sent an arrow spearing through her, piercing through
her anger, making it wither away, leaving the maelstrom beneath.

“I want to hate you,” she said, with more honesty than he deserved. “But I don’t.”

“You should,” he bit out. “If you had any sense of self-preservation at all, you would.”

“You are the expert,” she retorted. “Aren’t you? Hate, revenge, deceit. I believe that is your forte, not mine. I merely wanted to marry you. More fool, me.”

“I do not care about revenge!” he burst out. “I wish I had never heard the word!”

“How can that be true?” she asked, dashing the wetness from her eyes with the backs of her hand. “Peter told me. What he did to you. To your family. To your sister—”

“My sister took her own life, with her own hand. Nothing Peter did can match what I did to you,” Nikos said, in that low, painful voice. “I promise you.”

“You promise me,” she echoed. She laughed again, another hollow sound. “Please, Nikos. Do not make me any more promises. I do not think I can survive them!”

He looked at her for a long moment, those dark eyes seeing into her, through her. Seeing far more than they should.

“I cannot pretend I did not deceive you, because I did. I do not deserve you, Tristanne, but…” His eyes when they met hers were so dark. Tortured. His hands reached out, but did not touch her. “Please believe me,” he whispered. “I cannot let you go.”

She felt the truth of things well up in her, then, despite everything. She felt that fierce, uncompromising love for him soar through her, making her feel both impossibly dizzy and firmly grounded at the same time. It moved through her like the blood in her veins. Like the air in her lungs. An irrevocable biological necessity without which she could not walk, talk,
live.
And so she knew why she could not run away. Why she could not bring herself to leave him here on the street,
as she should. Why she would not abandon him, even when he all but told her to do so.

My dragon
, she thought, and it felt like a promise. A vow.