Lysandros’s bolstering touch on her back felt like a whip on her aching flesh. “We know it hurts now, but it’s for the best, sis. He would have picked your bones and spit you out sooner or later. We just forced him to do it now before he damaged you for life and did the same to Alex.”
Damon, her closest brother, and clearly the most disturbed by her role in the whole thing, shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you fell for his act, how you—”
“Stop it.”
She couldn’t bear it. Being touched. Hearing anything. Logic, consolation, blame, promises that she’d get over it. She didn’t want to get over it. Didn’t want anything. Didn’t want to breathe. To be. To…to… And she wailed, “Leave me alone. Just leave me.”
She sank into turmoil after that, barely seeing their faces darken with concern, or hearing their protests that she shouldn’t be alone now. Then she saw or heard nothing but the bloodred cacophonous landscape of her own shock and grief.
Her brothers’ accusations, the corroboration of Aris’s silence, then his threats, his desertion, hacked at her, gored her mind as they rewrote all their time together, his every word and look and touch with their macabre interpretation.
She knew hearts didn’t get crushed. Not by emotions.
She didn’t care what she knew. Hers was. Ruptured, mangled into a bleeding mess inside her.
It had all been a lie.
It took her two days to come out of her haze of misery.
She did only to call her brothers. They came to her condo one after the other, and she saw her condition reflected in the horrified looks in their eyes.
The moment they were all there, she started. “I want you all to do something you’d never do of your own accord. But if you care about me and Alex, you’ll do it.”
Damon groaned, “Theos, Sel. We only did what we did because we care, because we want you to be happy.”
“Too late for that.” She heard her lifeless voice, saw its effect in their pained grimaces. “But you can help give me closure. Please, let Aris…” She paused, swallowed. She couldn’t call him anything else yet. “Let him back into the contract.”
They exchanged an uncomfortable look. Then Nikolas sighed. “Believe me, Selene, if we could pay for your peace of mind with that, we would have considered it a very cheap price.”
“You mean you won’t?” she choked.
Lysandros shook his head. “We can’t. Sarantos already carried out his threat. He wrested the contract out of our hands. He’s now the builder, and he’ll decide who the outfitters will be.”
Damon exhaled. “We’re damned if we know how he managed that.”
But she suddenly did. In the last days, when he’d seemed to open up to her, she’d told him everything, too. Among the confidences had been information she realized now that he could use—and evidently had used—against Louvardis.
So this was her confirmation that his manipulations and exploitations knew no bounds.
Only one thing was left inside her now. Fear. For Alex.
What would the monster she now knew Aristedes Sarantos to be do to get his son?
Even if Alex had started out being the pawn Aris had played to checkmate her and her brothers, she had no doubt he wanted him now. From the depths of his fathomless abyss of a heart.
But then, she’d been certain he’d wanted her.
She hoped she was wrong about his feelings for Alex, too.
Or she’d have to fight the devil for her son.
The next day, she dragged herself into her office.
She had to prepare a battle plan in case Aris decided to fight her for Alex. So far, she could see no way to block him if he decided to play dirty to get Alex.
She jerked as her door burst open. Her PA’s mortified voice blurted out in the background.
“I tried to stop him, but—”
Everything tapered off into a vacuum.
A vacuum that Aris filled.
So it’s true, she thought. She felt nothing. Not shock, not anger, not pain. Nothing. He had finished her.
He closed in on her like a stalking tiger, pinning her with the power of his inescapable intent and her dreadful fascination.
He came around her desk like he had that day a lifetime ago, slapped the dossier he was holding onto its surface. He glared at her, his face a mask of fierceness. That face that had filled her fantasies, commandeered her emotions since she was old enough to realize her femininity. That face she’d always felt was carved of power and nobility, but that camouflaged his cruelty and deceit.
“I think congratulations on your sweeping victory are in or—”
Her words backlashed in her chest. Aris swooped down, clamped her arms in a convulsive grip, hauled her out of her seat, brought her slamming against him, again like that day from another life.
After a moment of paralysis, she squirmed in a silent struggle as he held her captive.
Suddenly the mask of his intensity cracked, contorted with an array of what so uncannily simulated distraught emotions.
She began to struggle for real now, desperate not to be snared in his heartless manipulations again. “Let me go,” she cried out, a trapped beast’s last desperate protest before it was devoured.
“Never.” His growl consumed her in its finality and inescapability as his lips crashed down on hers.
Ten
Aris was kissing her.
Kissing her as if she were the air he’d been suffocating for, as if he’d absorb her into a being that had been disintegrating without her.
No. She wouldn’t let him draw her into the illusion again. She wouldn’t let the heart and body that were starving for him tell her what they were dying to believe.
She struggled harder, against her own overriding needs, the clamor of everything in her urging her to surrender, take whatever she could have with him, of him, on any terms.
He at last wrenched his lips away, leaving hers stinging and swollen and bereft. She almost pulled his head back down, sealed their lips again, and her fate.
The moment of madness sheared past, and she had to hurt herself now, badly, to prevent worse future injuries.
“What will you do now?” she moaned. “Take me, and keep me, against my will?”
His eyes stormed as they bored into hers. “It won’t be against your will. Whatever else you feel or don’t feel for me, you want this.” He pressed her against the wall, lifting her off the floor and into his power, his hunger hard and imprinting every inch of her. “You want me, Selene.”
She jerked her head away as he swooped down again to claim her lips, had the heat and insistence of his hunger trail a path of devastation down her cheek and jaw and neck instead.