“Stop it,” she said, hating the way he was painting her as small and vindictive. He didn’t understand how shattering it was to have your perceptions exploded like this. How much like grief it was to lose the man you loved not to an accident, but to duplicity. She rocked herself off the sofa and onto her feet. “Why are you defending him? What do you expect me to do? Lie down and let him wipe his feet on me the way our mother did? He abused my trust!”
“But he didn’t abuse you. Did he?” It was a real question, one with a rare thread of uncertainty woven into his tone.
“Of course not,” she muttered, instantly repelled by even the suggestion. Why? What did she care what other people thought of Gid—that man?
“You make it sound like you wouldn’t have stood for it, but we all hung around for it,” Theo pointed out bluntly.
She didn’t answer. There was nothing to say to that ugly truth. If she could see her toes, she knew they’d have been curled into the carpet.
“I was scared for you, you know,” Theo said gruffly. “When you married him. We didn’t know him, who he was, what he was capable of. I watched him like a hawk, and I would have stepped in if he’d made one wrong move, but he didn’t. And you...” He narrowed his eyes. “You changed. It took me a while to figure out what was different, but you weren’t scared anymore. Were you?”
Adara swallowed, thinking back to those first weeks and months of marriage, when she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Gradually she’d begun to trust that the even temper her husband showed her was real. If the ground was icy, he steadied her. If a cab was coming, he drew her back.
And she remembered very clearly the last time her father had touched her in anger, a few weeks after her wedding. She’d been trying to explain why the engineer needed to make changes to a drawing and he’d batted the pencil from her hand, clipping her wrist with his knuckles.
Mere seconds later, Gideon had walked into the room, arriving to take her home.
Her father had changed before her eyes, remaining as blustery as always, but becoming slightly subdued, eyeing her uneasily as she retrieved her pencil and subtly massaged her wrist.
She hadn’t said a word, of course, merely confirmed with her father that they were finished for the day before she’d left with Gideon, but she’d realized she had a champion in her husband, passive and ignorant though he was to his role. As long as she had him, she had protection. Her father had never got physical with her again.
That sense of security had become precious to her. That’s why she’d been so devastated when she had thought Lexi had snatched him from her, and now the hurt was even worse, when she knew his shielding tenderness had never existed at all.
“It was in his best interest to keep me happy,” she said, voice husky and cold. “I was the facade that made him look real.”
“Maybe,” Theo agreed, twisting the knife that seemed lodged in her own heart. “In the beginning. But... Adara, I would have done everything I could to help you through this pregnancy regardless of any threats from Gideon. You’re my sister. I know what this baby means to you. But the way he spoke to me when he called, that was not just a father speaking. He was worried about both of you. Protective. I’ve always had a healthy respect for him, but I was intimidated that day. There was no way I was going to be the weak link that caused anything to happen to you or this baby.”
“Welcome to my world where you buy the snake oil and convince yourself it works,” she scoffed.
He stopped his pacing to stare accusingly at her. “You fooled me, you know. Both of you. I looked at how happy you two were in the last few months and I was hopeful. I thought finally one of us was shaking off our childhood and making a proper life for herself. You made me start to believe it was possible, and now—”
“He lied, Theo.”
“Maybe he had reason to,” he challenged and moved to retrieve an envelope from the pocket of his raincoat. He dropped it on the coffee table in front of her. “That’s from Nic. He asked me to come through on my way back from Tokyo and bring it to you. I didn’t read it, but Nic pointed out that he changed his own name to escape his childhood so he shouldn’t have judged Gideon for doing it. Maybe you shouldn’t, either.”
“He didn’t convince Nic he’d married him, did he? He didn’t sleep with Nic and make him believe in a fantasy!” He hadn’t resuscitated Nic’s heart back to life only to crush it under his boot heel. She could never, ever forget that.
“He didn’t take over the hotels the way he could have,” Theo challenged. “If anything, he kept us afloat until now, when we’re finally undoing the damage our father did. He could have robbed us blind the minute the will was read. We all owe him for not doing that. I haven’t slept,” Theo added gruffly. “Call me later if you want any clarification on that balance sheet for Paris.”
He left her staring at the envelope that seemed less snake oil and more snake, coiled in a basket and ready to strike the moment she disturbed the contents.
Throw it in the incinerator, she thought. Theo didn’t know what he was talking about. The difference here was that their mother had loved and lied while Gideon had purely lied. He didn’t love her. That final, odd comment he’d made about his ability to love not being in question had been a last-ditch effort to cling to the life he had built no matter what he had to do.
Thinking of their child growing up in the same hostile atmosphere she’d known made her stomach turn, though. She didn’t want to wield her sense of betrayal like a weapon, damaging everyone close to her.
Maybe if she understood why he’d done it, she’d hate him less. Theo was right about Gideon always being connected to her, no matter how awkward that would be. She would have to rise above her bitterness and learn to be civil to him.
Lowering to the sofa, she opened the envelope and shook out the printed screen shots of clippings and police reports and email chains. Through the next hours she combed through the pieces Nic had gathered, fitting them into a cracked, bleak image of a baby born from a girl abused by her stepfather. The girl’s mother had thrown her out when she became pregnant. A ragtag community of dockworkers, social services and street people had tried to help the adolescent keep herself and her beloved son clothed and fed.
It seemed Gideon had been truthful about one thing: his mother had possessed a strong maternal instinct. Delphi had been urged more than once to put him up for adoption, but was on record as stating no one could love him as much as she did. While not always successful at keeping
a roof over their heads, she’d done all a girl of her age could, working every low-end, unsavory job possible without resorting to selling drugs or sex.
Sadly, a nasty element working the docks had decided she didn’t have to accept money for her body. It could be taken anyway. Adara cried as she read how the young woman had met such a violent end. She cried even harder, thinking of a young boy seeing his mother like that, beaten and raped and left to die.
Blowing her nose, she moved on to the account of Delphi’s friends from low places doing the improbable: going to the police and demanding a search for Delphi’s son. Here Nic had done the legwork on a trail that the police had let go cold. Taking the thin thread of Delphi’s last name, he had tied it to a crew list from a freighter ship dated years later. The name Vozaras was there too, but the first name was Kristor.
A side story took off on a tangent about smuggling, but nothing had been proven. The only charges considered had been for underage labor and somehow that had been dropped.