Captive in Greece

CHAPTER TWO

She didn’t flinch.

Alexandros watched for it anyway— that little shift in the shoulders, the flicker across the eyes, the moment when people finally understand just how deep the hole they’re in really goes. It never came. Vera sat across from him with her hands folded and her back straight, and the only hint she’d even heard him was the tiniest tightening at the corner of her mouth.

Four years, and that part of her hadn’t changed at all.

He’d wondered, in the weeks since finding out whose brother was currently sitting in his security office, if memory had played tricks on him. People rarely live up to the version you keep locked away. She did. If anything, she was sharper than he remembered— the diner uniform doing absolutely nothing to dull whatever quality had stopped him cold in that ballroom four years back.

He pressed the intercom.

A quick phrase in Greek—quiet, unhurried— and the door opened almost right away. Theo, one of his security guys who’d been around long enough to read between the lines, crossed to where Adrian sat.

Adrian looked at his sister.

“Go with him,” Vera said. Calm as anything. “I’ve got this.”

Alexandros watched the boy leave, watched Vera track him with her eyes, and filed away—like he filed away everything worth knowing— that she hadn’t raised her voice once. Not even now. Not with her brother’s future hanging by a thread.

The door clicked shut.

Just the two of them.

He’d told himself after that night four years ago that the curiosity was practical. You don’t let strangers drift in and out of your world without knowing who they are— basic protocol, same instinct that made him vet every investor, every partner, every name that landed on his desk.

That’s the lie he’d fed himself while his assistant pulled together the file.

Took less than a day. Vera, twenty-one then. Miami. Working at a diner. Orphaned at eighteen, raising a younger brother ever since. College acceptance she’d given up.

He read it once.

Then closed the file and convinced himself it didn’t matter.

He didn’t chase what walked away from him. Never had. There’d just never been reason to test that before— no one had ever been the one to walk away first.

So he’d decided it didn’t matter.

Turned out he was wrong, but it took four years and a completely unrelated theft to figure that out.

The Miami branch flagged the discrepancy during his monthly review— small transfers, carefully spaced out, the kind of thing that screamed competent rather than sloppy. His security director had the employee file pulled within the hour.

Adrian Holt.

The last name snagged first. A weird, illogical catch, the kind he usually had zero patience for. He’d pulled the older file mostly to prove the connection was nothing— coincidence, common enough surname— and found a photo of a seventeen-year-old kid who was now, four years on, twenty-one and skilled enough to exploit a hole in the company’s accounting software and almost pull it off.

He didn’t move on it right away.

Told himself it was just due diligence— documentation, verification, building a case solid enough to hold up if it ever had to. That part took maybe a week. The other three he spent doing something closer to honest, though he hadn’t called it that at the time: deciding.

Fate had dropped in his lap something he’d refused to reach for himself.

He wasn’t someone who bought into fate, generally speaking. He believed in opportunity, and the discipline to spot one when it showed up disguised as something completely different.

This one showed up disguised as theft.

He planned to use it.

Now she sat across from him, and that whole month of deliberation collapsed into one simple truth: he wanted her, and pure dumb luck had just handed him the one situation where she couldn’t just walk away again.

“Your brother stole sixty-two thousand dollars,” he said. “Documented, traceable, more than enough for a conviction.”

Her jaw tightened. For just a second, something raw surfaced behind her eyes— fear, maybe, or anger, or both. Then it disappeared, tucked back under the composure she’d been holding since she walked in.

“What do you want?” she asked.

No dodging. No pretending she didn’t believe it. Straight to the real question. He found, against every carefully built instinct toward restraint, that he liked that.

“This isn’t about money,” he said.

“Then what is it about?”

He looked at her—the grey eyes, the steady hands, the composure that still hadn’t cracked once since she’d walked through his door. Impressive. And completely unaware of where this was headed.

“I’ll drop the charges,” he said, “on one condition.”

Something shifted behind her eyes. Wariness, finally.

“I’m listening.”

Alexandros leaned back, taking his time with it, letting the silence stretch just a beat longer— because he’d learned years ago that the pause before you make an offer matters more than the offer itself.

“You,” he said. “For one month. You come to Greece with me, and for that month you answer to no one but me.”