The Secret Beneath the Veil

Yet Viveka had slipped in like a ninja, taking him unawares. On the face of it, that made her his enemy. He had to treat her with exactly as much detachment as he would any other foe.

But this twist of hunger in his gut demanded an answering response from her. It wasn’t just ego. It was craving. A weight on a scale that demanded an equal weight on the other side to balance it out.

The porter returned, poured their wine, and they both sipped. When they were alone again, Mikolas said, “You were right. Grigor wants you.”

Viveka paled beneath her already stiff expression. “And you want the merger.”

“My grandfather does. I have promised to complete it for him.”

She bit her bottom lip so mercilessly it disappeared. “Why?” she demanded. “I mean, why is this merger so important to him?”

“Why does it matter?” he countered.

“Well, what is it you’re really trying to accomplish? Surely there are other companies that could give you what you want. Why does it have to be Grigor’s?”

She might be impulsive and a complete pain in the backside, but she was perceptive. It didn’t have to be Grigor’s company. He was fully aware of that. However.

“Finding another suitable company would take time we don’t have.”

“A man with your riches can’t buy as much as he needs?” she asked with an ingenuous blink.

She was a like a baby who insisted on trying to catch the tiger’s tail and stuff it in her mouth. Not stupid, but cheerfully ignorant of the true danger she was in. He couldn’t afford to be lenient.

“My grandfather is ill. I had to call him to tell him the merger has been delayed. That was disappointment he didn’t need.”

She almost threw an askance look at him, but seemed to read his expression and sobered, getting the message that beneath his civilized exterior lurked a heartless mercenary.

Not that he enjoyed scaring her. He usually treated women like delicate flowers. After sleeping in cold alleys that stank of urine, after being tortured at the hands of degenerate, pitiless men, he’d developed an insatiable appetite for luxury and warmth and the sweet side of life. He especially enjoyed soft kittens who liked to be stroked until they purred next to him in bed.

But if a woman dared to cross him, as with any man, he ensured she understood her mistake and would never dream of doing so again.

“I owe my grandfather a great deal.” He waved at their surroundings. “This.”

“I presumed it was stolen,” she said with a haughty toss of her head.

“No.” He was as blunt as a mallet. “The money was made from smuggling profits, but the boat was purchased legally.”

She snapped her head around.

He shrugged, not apologizing for what he came from. “For decades, if something crossed the border or the seas for a thousand miles, legal or illegal, my grandfather—and my father when he was alive—received a cut.”

He had her attention. She wasn’t saucy now. She was wary. Wondering why he was telling her this.

“Desperate men do desperate things. I know this because I was quite desperate when I began trading on my father’s name to survive the streets of Athens.”

Their chilled soup arrived. He was hungry, but neither of them moved to pick up their spoons.

“Why were you on the streets?”

“My mother died. Heart failure, or so I was told. I was sent to an orphanage. I hated it.” It had been a palace, in retrospect, but he didn’t think about that. “I ran away. My mother had told me my father’s name. I knew what he was reputed to be. The way my mother had talked, as if his enemies would hunt me down and use me against him if they found me... I thought she was trying to scare me into staying out of trouble. I didn’t,” he confided drily. “Boys of twelve are not known for their good judgment.”

He smoothed his eyebrow where a scar was barely visible, but he could still feel where the tip of a blade had dragged very deliberately across it, opening the skin while a threat of worse—losing his eye—was voiced.

“I watched and learned from other street gangs and mostly stuck to robbing criminals because they don’t go to the police. As long as I was faster and smarter, I survived. Threatening my father’s wrath worked well in the beginning, but without a television or computer, I missed the news that he had been stabbed. I was caught in my lie.”