‘So why didn’t they let you go?’ Anna demanded.
‘They needed time; they would need me to follow the court case through, until they had enough proof to bring down the real perpetrator. The Americans take financial crime very seriously and they didn’t want to risk him escaping their justice again.’
Anna took all this in with wide-eyed shock. If he hadn’t experienced the whole sorry mess himself, he could almost have felt sorry for her.
‘What did you do, while you were in there?’
At first nothing came to his mind, a blank wall protecting him from that time. Initially he’d thought his innocence would protect him. Not from the other prisoners, but from his own mind. ‘Not much, is the answer to that question. I read.’ He shrugged as if it were nothing, as if he hadn’t spent hours, days, climbing the walls...nursing a secret fear that he’d never get out, that the FBI had lied to him. That he’d spend the rest of his days there. ‘It’s funny what your mind will do to you when you have no control over your day, your time. I spent time in the gym, trying to work off some of the energy that I suddenly had. And when I couldn’t escape my body, I escaped into my mind. I... I thought about you,’ he finally admitted. Hours and hours, losing himself in that night they’d had together. Holding the memory of her as a beacon against the darkness that had sometimes seemed to overwhelm him.
‘What did you think about me?’ Anna was almost too scared to ask.
‘I could show you if you want,’ he taunted, the gleam turning his eyes darker than burned caramel. But she refused to let him distract her.
‘Later perhaps,’ she replied, softening the rejection with a smile. She knew there was more. It wasn’t just that this proud, powerful man had been caged like an animal. She sensed, somehow, that it wasn’t the imprisonment that had really hurt. She needed to go deeper, poke deeper; he needed her to.
‘And when you got out?’
The taunt dropped from his eyes, his gaze once again out to the silent night sky, whilst inside a storm raged within him.
‘Everything was both the same and different. I had initially fooled myself into thinking that it had been some high-level executive stealing from the company. My father had promised that he would provide the FBI with all the help they needed, and when the FBI first came to tell me they had identified the criminal I was relieved. I was actually fool enough to think that my father and brother had saved me. That all the time during my childhood, when I felt on the outside looking in, when I felt...when I was made to feel like an imposition, like an imposter...it all disappeared. For just a moment, I felt that I had family and that they had put aside their feelings and somehow found proof that had saved me from imprisonment. I felt love for them, the tendrils of connection... And when the FBI revealed that it was Manos I was struck dumb.’ It was as if an axe had come down on the roots of his foundations.
Even though Anna had known the outcome, that it had been Manos’s betrayal that had put him in prison, she felt the echo of his first moment of shock cut through her like a knife.
‘I had been betrayed by a man who shared my blood. Not just betrayed, for that implies some kind of implicit wrongdoing on my part. He actively laid paperwork that set me up.’
She could see the pain of that hurt, she knew that pain, had borne
it every day with her mother. But Dimitri’s actions, although poorly motivated, had enabled her mother to find the help she so very much needed. And now Anna wondered if she could help Dimitri heal some of that pain, those hurts...that betrayal.
‘Ma’s drinking...it was hard. Each time she would promise to stop, and I would go through the stages of grief, denial, anger. Each time it was harder and harder to forgive, because each time it felt like a greater betrayal. Each time it was a betrayal. But it seems that the rehab centre is working for her. She’ll be coming out soon and she’s really trying this time. And I want to thank you for that. I wouldn’t have been able to provide her with that kind of help.’
He was watching her, wary. She had to tread lightly and feared that, even if she did, he could see what she was coming around to. He was like a panther, sleek, powerful, ready for fight or flight.
‘And that’s why this time it’s important for me to be able to forgive. Her drinking is a disease. It’s not something she can help; it’s not a choice.’
He turned away from her, back to the skyline of Kavala.
‘Manos had a choice. It wasn’t a disease. He chose to steal money, chose to set me up.’
Pressing down the hurt she’d felt as he turned away from her, she once more placed a hand on his arm. ‘I could imagine that your brother might have felt inadequate next to you. Clearly your childhood with your father was difficult...but is it the same now?’
Dimitri frowned. ‘He’s been...different, recently,’ he reluctantly acknowledged.
‘Relationships aren’t static things, always staying one particular way. If there is hope for you and your father, could there be hope for you and Manos? I’m not saying that Manos is nice or even worth your sympathy—not at all. But sometimes when someone acts unnecessarily horribly towards another person, it’s not about that other person, but about them. Which means that he might be at least worth your understanding.’
Anna’s heart was in her mouth. She hoped, so much, that her words were getting through to him. Because he carried too much. He held too much within him, bottled up. It needed to be released if they were ever to have a chance.
Her chest ached and she resisted the urge to rub away the pain. But it wasn’t the same kind of pain that hurt and lashed out. It was the kind of ache that grew and grew until it overshadowed everything. It was huge and terrifying, because in that moment she realised that she loved him.
The Dimitri who had spent one wild night with her in Ireland. The Dimitri who had been wrongfully imprisoned and so much more damaged by his half-brother’s betrayal... The Dimitri who had forced her into marriage, and the one who had also opened her eyes to her own strength, her own desires and needs. The Dimitri who, she realised, had never really known comfort and understanding from the very people he should have first received it from.
This time, she allowed her body to take over. Casting all thought aside, she let her heart guide her hands and her actions. She wanted, needed, to show him as much as she could that she did love him, that she could and would give him that comfort, that support. She might not yet be able to put it into words, and even had she been able to she wasn’t sure that Dimitri was ready to hear them, but this...she could do.
She took his hands, still clenched around the balustrade, in her own, gently releasing the iron grip he had on the stone. She pressed his palms against the bare skin beneath the V of the silk folds of the dress, allowing him to feel the beat of her heart. She reached up to him, to his jaw, relishing the feel of the stubble shadowing the harsh lines of his face.
Dark eyes, full of suspicion and surprise, watched her every move.
‘Anna—’