Captive in Greece

CHAPTER FOUR

By the time the office emptied out for the evening, Alexandros had still not managed to put the afternoon behind him.

He had sat through three meetings he could not, if pressed, properly account for—a contract review, a call with his Singapore hotel director, a budget proposal from his Miami branch manager that he had approved with considerably less scrutiny than it deserved. His attention kept slipping sideways, back to the moment in his office hours earlier—back to the particular sound she had made against his mouth when she stopped fighting it.

He had kissed her to prove a point. A demonstration, nothing more—the kind of thing he did when someone needed to be shown rather than told.

It had worked. She had kissed him back with everything she had four years ago and everything she'd apparently been pretending she didn't still have.

Proving it had not made it go away.

If anything, it had made it considerably worse. He had planned for satisfaction. Resolution. The closing of a four-year-old account. What he had instead was a far more specific, far more inconvenient kind of want than the one he'd arrived with, and no explanation for it that he found remotely acceptable.

He picked up his phone.

— * —

He sent Daphne the file first—Adrian's details—then called.

She answered on the second ring, the particular brisk warmth in her voice that had not changed in nine years of working for him, regardless of the hour. Athens was seven hours ahead; for her it was nearly seven in the morning. She would already have been awake. Daphne always was.

He spoke to her in Greek, the way he always did with the handful of people he trusted completely—a short list, and she sat near the top of it.

"You'll have seen the file I sent," he said. "I need it handled quietly. Pay off his tuition completely—not just what's overdue. The rest of his degree, paid in full."

A brief pause, the sound of a pen against paper.

"And the source?"

"Anonymous. He isn't to know where it came from. Neither is his sister."

"Consider it done."

He ended the call.

He told himself this was simply practical—a variable removed before it became a complication, a boy who would not need to do anything else foolish to solve a problem he no longer had. By any reasonable measure, good business.

It had nothing to do with the way Vera had looked walking into his office—that particular stillness, the look of someone who had spent a very long time carrying weight without letting it show.

It had nothing to do with that at all.

He stood at the window a while, and thought—briefly, unbidden—of a boy in an orphanage in Thessaloniki who had never once had anyone clear a debt on his behalf. Who had built everything himself because there had been no one else to build it for him.

He did not examine that thought either.

He went back to his desk.

— * —

Her message came at eleven forty-seven.

Far sooner than he had expected.

He had given her twenty-four hours, certain she would use most of them—weigh the practicalities, perhaps call someone, circle the decision the way careful people did before committing to something irreversible.

She had taken less than seven.

He looked at the message for a moment without touching the phone.

— I'll do it.

Four words. No conditions. No negotiation.

It did not surprise him that she had decided. It surprised him slightly how quickly. He thought of the way she had gone straight to practical questions in his office, skipping past the performance of disbelief most people produced when cornered. Decisive, even under pressure.

He filed the observation away without drawing further conclusions from it.

He picked up the phone. Read it again.

Then he set it face-down, rose, and crossed to the bar cabinet on the far wall. He poured two fingers of whisky and stood at the window with the glass, looking out at the city.

He had told himself, in the weeks since learning exactly whose brother had been caught stealing from him, that this was straightforward. A loose thread, tolerated for four years because pride had got in the way of sense. He would tie it off. One month. Greece.

Then whatever this was—this persistent, unreasonable thing that had lodged itself quietly in him since a Miami ballroom—would finally dissolve.

He took a mouthful of whisky.

He was no longer entirely sure he believed that.

— * —

He had loved someone once.

He did not make a habit of returning to it. The past, generally, was not where he spent time—he had built everything he had by looking forward, and the few things that lived behind him he had made his peace with, or something close enough that the difference no longer mattered.

But tonight, with her message still glowing faintly at the edge of his memory, he found himself thinking of Elena.

He had been twenty-six. She had been twenty-four—beautiful in the way that announced itself and then kept revealing new dimensions, clever enough to seem softer than she was.

He had met her at a business dinner in Athens.

She had laughed at something he said, and he had thought, for the first time in his adult life:

I want to keep this person close to me.

He had gone in clear-eyed, or so he had told himself. He had let her in anyway because something in him had wanted, just once, to try.

She had been with his friend Nikos for four months before he found out.

Nikos had told him himself—not with guilt, but with a kind of uncomfortable defiance, as though honesty alone absolved him of everything that had come before it.

Alexandros had listened. Said very little. Gone home to the apartment he and Elena had shared and stood in it a long time in the dark.

By morning he had made a decision: he would not do that again.

Not because it had destroyed him—he had survived worse and would survive worse still—but because the cost had outweighed any possible return, and he had not built what he had built by making investments with no floor.

Love, he had concluded, was a liability he could not afford.

He had held that position for six years without difficulty.

Until a grey-eyed woman in a red dress had looked at him across a ballroom and something in him had moved that he had not given permission to move.

He had told himself afterward that it was simply desire. Clean. Manageable. Temporary.

He was still telling himself that now.

He set down the empty glass, and did not believe a word of it.