One Night to Risk It All

“Don’t text them until our plane is about to leave. And why am I insane?”

“Because everything is insane!” She exploded. “And you want me to marry you. I am not marrying you. I don’t know you. I don’t like you, either.”

“How can you dislike me if you don’t know me?”

“Fine. I don’t know you very well, and what I do know about you, I don’t like.”

“You like my body.”

“And if you were only a body, maybe that would matter. But there is, unfortunately, a personality beneath those hard muscles and it freaking blows.”

“Does it?”

“You’re a liar. You’re hell-bent on ruining my fiancé’s life, and I don’t even know why, and you used me to get revenge on him.”

“And then didn’t do anything about it.”

“You came today.”

“Yeah, so I might have done something. But I wasn’t going to come to the wedding so I wasn’t planning on doing anything anymore. It’s just...it’s just that then I ended up coming. And it was a good thing I did.”

“It was not.”

“You would have married him then?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

“Why do you hate him, incidentally? It seems like this might be really important to my future.” She looked down at her hands and noticed they were shaking.

“As I told you, Ajax Kouros is a created name. A created identity. Hell, mine is, too, for the most part. Christofides is anyway. I was never called by a last name at all.”

“How is that possible?”

“I was the son of a woman who couldn’t remember her real name. Or if she did, she chose never to use it. ‘Meli’ was all she ever called herself. Honey. I think it was a double entendre of some kind. We lived in Ajax’s father’s compound. The infamous Nikola Kouklakis.”

“What?”

“I suppose you’ve heard of him.”

“The depth of that trafficking ring was...horrendous. When it was broken up a few years ago...”

“Yes, it was shocking. So many people. So many lives ruined. My mother wasn’t one who was kidnapped. She was seduced. By the drugs. By the money. By love of some kind. We lived in the compound. As did Ajax. I remember seeing him and thinking he was quite something with his suits. The cars. But I learned very quickly to be afraid of him, because he was the big boss’s son. Because what if he saw me causing trouble?”

“Alex...I don’t... This can’t be.”

“What? You think I goad him for fun? I goad him because I don’t think he deserves any of what he has, not while so many of us live with the lasting wounds of where his fortune came from.”

“But he didn’t earn any of it from...anywhere bad. He came to my family when he was a boy. He got work with my father. He built up from nothing.”