Captive in Greece

CHAPTER FIVE

Earlier that evening, before her message ever reached his phone—

Neither of them spoke in the cab.

Vera sat with her hands folded in her lap, eyes fixed on the window, watching Miami slide past in its late-afternoon gold. Beside her, Adrian hunched his shoulders up around his ears—the same posture he'd had since he was fourteen, bracing for something he already knew was coming.

She let the silence sit until they were inside the apartment, door closed, bags down.

Then she turned to him.

"Sit down, Adrian."

He sat.

She didn't sit across from him the way she usually did. She stood, arms folded, because she needed the height of it. Needed to not be looking up at him while she said what she had to say.

"You stole from his company," she said. "Sixty-two thousand dollars, Adrian. Do you understand what that number means? Do you understand what could have happened to you?"

"I know." His voice was small.

"You could have come to me."

"And told you what?" Something rose in him, defensive, raw. "That I was behind on fees you'd already half killed yourself trying to cover? You've been picking up extra shifts for months, Vera. I watched you do the math at the kitchen table at two in the morning. I wasn't going to add to that."

"So instead you committed a crime."

"I thought I could fix it before anyone noticed." He looked at his hands. "I was wrong. I know I was wrong. I've known it every day since."

Vera looked at her brother—twenty-one years old, the same stubborn jaw their father had, the same instinct to carry weight quietly rather than hand it to someone else—and felt the anger in her chest shift into something else. Not gone. Just no longer the only thing there.

She understood it. That was the terrible part. She understood it completely, because she'd spent seven years doing exactly the same thing—carrying things alone so no one else had to.

She sat down across from him.

"I'm not done being angry with you," she said. "But I understand why you did it. That doesn't make it right."

"I know."

"I mean it, Adrian. Never again. You come to me. Whatever it is."

"I promise."

She believed him.

— * —

"What happens now?" he asked, quieter. "Did he— are the charges—"

"Handled," she said. "I'm going to be working for him for a month. To pay it off."

It came out steadier than she felt. She'd decided in the cab that this was the version he would get—not a lie exactly, just an edited shape of the truth. Working for him. Paying it off. A month away. All of it technically accurate, in the way that mattered least.

Adrian frowned. "Working for him how?"

"I don't have the details yet," she said, which was also technically true. "It's in Greece. A month. I'll be back before you know it."

He studied her for a moment—too long, the way he did when something didn't fully add up and he was deciding whether to push. She held still and let her face give him nothing.

"Okay," he said finally.

Relief moved through her, quiet and a little guilty.

"I'm sorry, Vera," he said again, and this time his voice cracked slightly on it. "For all of it. The money, the fact that you have to do this now because of me—"

"Adrian." She reached across and took his hand, the way she had when he was fourteen and the world had just taken both their parents in the space of an afternoon. "We're going to be okay. We always have been."

He nodded, and for a moment he looked exactly like the boy she'd raised rather than the young man he'd become.

Then the doorbell rang.

— * —

Vera opened it to find Bernice standing there with sunglasses pushed up into her hair and a small gift bag dangling from one wrist, the particular glow of someone who'd spent the last several days doing absolutely nothing productive and enjoying every second of it.

"Surprise," Bernice said, and swept her into a hug before Vera could fully process that her best friend was, in fact, standing in her doorway uninvited and unannounced.

"You didn't tell me you were coming."

"I didn't tell myself I was coming until about four hours ago," Bernice said, stepping past her into the apartment like she owned a piece of it, which, emotionally, she did. "My flight landed an hour ago. Turks and Caicos was beautiful. The man was beautiful. I missed your face and came straight here instead of going home first."

Adrian appeared in the hallway. "Hey, Bernice."

"Adrian." She squinted at him. "Did you get taller, or am I just getting shorter from stress?"

"Probably the stress."

"Rude. But probably accurate."

She dug into the gift bag and produced a small box, tossing it to him. "Duty-free. Don't ask what it cost, just say thank you."

He caught it. "Thank you."

"That's all I wanted."

He laughed, properly, for the first time since the office, and ducked back toward his room with the box under his arm. "I'll be in here. Pretend I don't exist for a while."

"Always do," Bernice called after him.

His door clicked shut.

Only then did Bernice turn back to Vera, taking in her face properly for the first time. The teasing dropped out of her expression entirely.

"Okay. What happened. You have a face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have the face. Sit. Talk."

— * —

They sat on the sofa, knees angled toward each other the way they'd been doing since they were nineteen.

Vera told her about the diner, the call, the building, the office, the sixty-two thousand dollars. Bernice listened with her hand pressed to her mouth, eyes widening further with every sentence. When Vera reached the proposition itself, Bernice made a small, strangled sound and said nothing at all, which for Bernice was practically a religious silence.

Then Vera said: "Do you remember your cousin's engagement party? Four years ago."

Bernice blinked, thrown by the turn. "Okay—yes? What about it?"

"You were so wrapped up in everything that night. The speeches. Your aunt's drama. Finding Drew's missing cufflinks twenty minutes before the toast. You barely had time to breathe, let alone keep track of me."

"I remember it being chaos. Go on."

"There was a man there," Vera said. "He came up to me out of nowhere. We danced. I don't know—something about him just—" She shook her head. "I felt something I'd never felt before."

Bernice's eyebrows climbed. "And you never said anything?"

"You were busy. I didn't think it mattered at the time." Vera exhaled. "Anyway. We left the party. Went to his hotel room. Things got—far enough. And then I panicked and ran."

"You ran."

"I ran. Got in a cab. Never told you his name because I never actually learned it—not the full version. Just 'Xandros.'"

Bernice stared at her, the pieces visibly assembling behind her eyes.

"That was him," Vera said quietly. "Alexandros Demetriou. The man from four years ago is the same man who just offered me a month in Greece."

Bernice pressed both hands to her heart. "I am wounded," she said. "Genuinely. We've told each other everything since we were nineteen years old and you sat on this for four years."

"I didn't know it would ever be relevant again."

"It is currently the most relevant thing that's happened to either of us." Bernice shook her head slowly, then sobered. "Okay—but Vera. You should have told me about Adrian's fees. Before any of this. I could have helped. You know I would have helped."

"I know."

"You always do this. You carry things alone until they become emergencies."

"I know, Bernice."

— * —

Bernice was quiet for a moment, her expression shifting into something more careful.

"Vera." Her voice had lost its earlier brightness. "You know what he's like, don't you?"

"I know what happened in his office today. That's the extent of my knowledge."

Bernice exhaled. “People talk, Vera. He doesn’t keep anyone for long. A week. Two, if you’re lucky.”

Vera said nothing.

“I don’t want you going into this and coming out the other side hurt over a man who was never going to stay,” Bernice said quietly. “I mean that. This isn’t just me teasing you anymore.”

The sincerity in her voice settled heavier in the room than anything else she’d said all evening.

“I can cover what’s left,” Bernice added. “We figure out a payment plan together. I help where I can. And you don’t get on a plane to Greece with a man who clearly still has some kind of hold over you. You don’t have to do this, Vera. There is a version of this where you stay home, and none of this touches you.”

The offer hung between them, real and simple and tempting in the way safety always is.

Vera looked down at her hands.

She thought about Adrian. About the debt. About the decision she had already made in the cab without fully admitting it to herself.

“But,” Bernice said after a beat, watching her carefully, “if the feeling is mutual—and from the way you’re sitting there right now, I think it might be—then maybe the question isn’t whether you should go. It’s whether you can go with your eyes open. Knowing what he is. Knowing it might end the way these things usually end.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring,” Vera said quietly.

“I’m not trying to reassure you,” Bernice replied. “I’m trying to make sure you don’t walk into this blind.”

She reached over and took Vera’s hand.

“So tell me honestly,” she said. “Do you want to go?”

Vera didn’t answer immediately.

The silence stretched.

She thought about the kiss in his office. The way her body had reacted before her mind could stop it. The way she had been thinking about him ever since, against her better judgement.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said finally.

It was the truest thing she had said all day.

Bernice watched her for a long moment, her grip still warm around Vera’s hand.

“I think you do,” she said softly. “I think you’re just not ready to admit it yet.”

Vera said nothing.

But some decisions don’t need to be spoken aloud to be made.