Captive in Greece

CHAPTER SEVEN

Long after the sound of his footsteps had faded down the corridor, Vera sat on the edge of the bed and let the silence settle around her properly for the first time all day.

The room was enormous.

Far larger than her entire apartment back in Miami, with a private terrace she had not yet stepped onto and a bed large enough that it seemed almost wasteful for one person. Her bag sat where Maria had left it, by the wardrobe.

Vera unpacked slowly.

Two pairs of jeans. A few blouses. Underwear, toiletries, the photo of her parents she kept tucked in a side pocket, the edges soft from handling.

It did not take long.

She sat back down.

For the first time since she had walked through Alexandros’s office door, she was entirely and completely alone.

— * —

It was a strange kind of loneliness. Not the familiar ache of missing Adrian, though that sat in her chest too—wondering if he’d eaten properly, if he was lonely in the apartment without her, if he’d call when he said he would. Not just missing Bernice either, though she found herself wishing, sharply, for her friend’s particular brand of chaos right now, the way Bernice always knew exactly when to make her laugh and exactly when to simply sit beside her and say nothing useful at all.

It was something more specific than that.

The loneliness of being somewhere no one knew her.

Where nothing carried her history in it.

Even the diner—exhausting, underpaid, the air conditioning always one bad day from finally dying—had Kate. Had Dom behind the register, gruff and kind in the way he never quite said out loud.

She thought of her last shift there, unbidden.

It had taken Dom a long moment to understand what she was telling him—standing behind the counter with the schedule still in his hand, looking at her the way you looked at a sentence that didn’t parse the first time through.

“You’re leaving,” he’d said. Not quite a question.

“I’ve been offered something else. Temporary. Abroad.”

He had studied her for a moment, the way he studied people when he was deciding whether to push. He hadn’t pushed. He never did.

“You’ve got pay owed,” he’d said instead, gruffly, like that settled something. “I’ll have it sorted by Friday.”

She hadn’t even remembered to ask.

And Kate—Kate had cried, which Vera had not been prepared for, the two of them standing by the service station in a rare quiet moment before the lunch rush, Kate pressing her lips together and going pink around the eyes and saying, “You’d better come back and tell me everything,” in a voice that was working hard to hold steady.

Vera had left before she could do something equally inconvenient.

Like cry herself.

Now she sat in a room the size of her old apartment’s entire floor and missed the particular smell of diner coffee and the creak of the floorboard near the service station.

— * —

She could not sit with it any longer.

She got up and went looking for the one person in this house who had made her feel, even briefly, like she was not entirely a stranger here.

The villa was quiet.

Big houses were like that.

Not empty.

Just unhurried, sound travelling oddly through high-ceilinged rooms and long corridors.

She followed it instinctively, the way you followed any sound when you didn’t know where you were going: down one corridor, through an archway, until she caught the low murmur of someone humming and the smell of something with garlic and lemon in it.

She found Maria in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up, moving between the counter and the stove with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had done this every day for years and still, somehow, enjoyed it.

Maria looked up and smiled.

She didn’t seem surprised to see her.

“You were not going to sit alone in that room all evening,” she said.

Not a question either.

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is always obvious.”

Maria nodded at the counter, where a bowl of something green sat half-chopped.

“Make yourself useful, if you like. I never say no to a second pair of hands.”

Vera washed her hands at the sink without being asked twice.

— * —

They worked side by side for a while in companionable quiet, Maria correcting her knife technique twice with the patient bluntness of someone who had clearly trained kitchen staff before, Vera finding something steadying in the simple, repetitive motion of it—chop, scrape, chop—after a day that had otherwise refused to feel steady at all.

“You cook,” Maria observed, watching her hands. “This is not your first kitchen.”

“I worked in a diner. Not quite the same thing, but you learn to move fast.”

Maria made a small, approving sound.

“Good. I like a woman who is not afraid of work.”

She glanced sideways, something assessing in it, then set her knife down slowly.

“Do you know you are the first?”

Vera looked up.

“The first what?”

“The first woman he has brought here.”

Maria held her gaze for a moment, something quiet and certain in it.

“There has never been anyone.”

Alexandros appeared in the kitchen, jacket gone, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and stopped just inside when he saw the two of them at the counter.

Maria went silent instantly, turning back to the stove with the particular briskness of someone who had simply remembered she had something boiling.

Vera looked between them—Maria’s sudden, deliberate focus on the pot, Alexandros’s gaze moving from Vera to Maria and back again, something unreadable settling over his face—and felt the words Maria had just spoken hang unfinished in the air between all three of them.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

Mild.

Too mild.

“Not at all,” Maria said, to the pot.

Vera said nothing.

But the surprise of it stayed with her—that a man who gave away so little of himself, who answered every personal question with deflection or silence, had apparently let no one else this close.

Not once.

Not ever.

Until her.