So why on God’s depraved earth was he so fascinated by a night of sex with a virgin? He couldn’t fathom it.
Perhaps it was extra satisfying because he had taken her from Ajax. Because he’d robbed him of what he had been surely saving as a wedding night prize. Why else would he have left her untouched?
Just thinking about the man, being this close to him, made his stomach burn. If he hadn’t decided years ago that assassination was a bad plan, he would have been considering it now.
Well, he was imagining it, but he wouldn’t really do it.
He was a bastard—life had made him that way. But he wasn’t entirely cold-blooded. Unlike Ajax.
Unlike their father.
No matter his position now, Ajax had been there, just as Alex had been. A young teenager who had taken advantage of the excess on offer.
The women, like Alex’s mother, who would have done anything for their next fix. Who were slaves in every way. Victims. Living in poverty while surrounded by opulence. Kept on a leash of addiction, and in his mother’s case, a strange attachment to the master of the manor.
A twisted thing she’d called love. The kind of love that, when severed, had left her to bleed out onto the floor. A crimson stain in Alex’s memory that he could never wipe away.
Years and success wouldn’t change that. Wouldn’t bring her back. And yet Ajax stood at the top now, unaffected. With a family. A woman who had always appeared, to Alex, at least, to love him.
He looked unscathed, unspoiled. Ajax could pretend at respectability all he wanted but Alex knew the truth.
Because the truth was in him, too. But at least he never played as if he was anything other than a bastard. Ajax played as though he’d walked through it all and come out clean.
Alex knew he would never be clean.
He curled his fingers into fists and looked up at the house. There was a small group of people headed inside, led by a woman wearing black, which was clearly the uniform of the event staff.
He started in their direction, melting into the back of the group. Everyone was rapt, paying close attention to what the woman was saying about a fresco on the exterior wall that had been moved from an old church. Blah blah. He didn’t care.
Greece was old. Like that was news.
He’d spent nights in more crumbling ruins than he could count. He was a fan of mod cons. As long as they didn’t come at the price of living under the roof of a violent, sexually deviant psychopath.
Yeah, he’d preferred the ruins to that. He preferred the street to that. Starvation and cold and everything else that came with it.
He had run from that life. From all that it represented. He would not become a part of it.
He followed them into the house and as soon as they rounded the first corner, he separated from them and headed up the stairs. No one stopped him. Because he looked like he belonged. A right he’d earned, if only recently.
This was his world now. He was no longer someone who could be stepped on by the rich and powerful.
He was the rich and powerful. He went where he liked, he did what he liked.
“I have something to give the bride,” he said to a passing servant. “Where might I find her?”