The car rolled to a stop and they stared out at the incredible stretch of sand and the ribbon of blue bisecting the horizon. It was as if he were looking at an optical illusion. Both far and near, impossibly wide yet completely attainable. It made him feel small, as if he were the tiniest speck of sand in the universe.
Summer got out of the car and he followed, watching her eyes grow round with awe and surprise. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she exclaimed as she pulled her coat around her, walking towards the path to the sea.
The wind whipped across his face as he followed her, drawn to her like the tide was to the land. The pulse of the sea had been like an echo of his heartbeat; it was the most constant thing in his life. To hear the crash of waves on a quiet day brought him peace. The same kind of peace, he realised now, that he’d felt in Summer’s company that night back in Greece.
As the pathway opened up to the beach, the stretch of sand before them was endless. They drew to a stop and unaccountably his fingers found hers, their palms touching and easing the tension in his chest for the first time since the day before. The sun was warm on his face, taking a little of the sting out of the wind’s bite, and he closed his eyes for just a moment.
Unbidden, the memory of his mother’s laugh came to him on the wind. The press of her lips to his cheek, the warming of his heart, something soft that he couldn’t quite place...and then it was gone. He breathed through the hurt, forcing himself forward towards the water. He felt Summer’s gaze on his skin and he resisted the urge to reach up and capture it, to hold it there.
‘You like the sea,’ she observed.
He nodded. ‘Lykos and I spent nearly every evening at the beach. We’d sneak out of the orphanage after lights out and just sit there. The sea, the stars... My father was a fisherman and being out there, I felt...’ he sighed ‘...connected, I suppose.’ He could feel her silent questions pressing against him and owed her that much at least. ‘I was five when they died. The earthquake, it was a six point zero,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Devastating. It killed over one hundred and forty people and injured thousands.’ He no longer saw the sea, the English horizon.
The sound of the tide became a roar, a rumble, the shift of the sand beneath his feet became a tremor. His heartbeat pounded in his ears. In his mind he put his arm out to the doorframe to brace himself. He was screaming for his mother, for his father. They were on the other side of the house. He was all alone and tears were blurring his vision, the whole room was shaking. Where were his parents? Then he saw him—his father, he was coming to get him, his mother following just behind. They were coming for him and they would all be okay. He wouldn’t be alone and...
Theron clenched his jaw against the hot press of tears against the backs of his eyes, refusing to let them fall. He focused on the sound of the waves, their gentle sweep across the sand somehow making it easier for him to speak the hurt of his past, as if it took his words and brought them back changed. ‘A ceiling beam came down on top of my father and caught my mother. She died later in hospital.’
‘Theron—’
He squeezed Summer’s hand gently. He knew. He felt her sympathy. ‘I was taken to an orphanage. Neither of my parents had family, so that was where I ended up. And where I met Lykos,’ Theron said, shaking his head, unable to help the smile pulling at his lips. ‘He was... I had lost my family, but I found a brother,’ he said, realising just how hard the last ten years had been without him. Even though it still felt as if Lykos was in his head sometimes.
‘But when I met him in Greece you seemed more like business acquaintances.’
‘We had a falling out,’ Theron stated.
‘Did it have something to do with my father?’ she asked.
Theron kept his features neutral, even though the mention of her father still twisted a knife. Theron should have called Kyros last night. He was torn between loyalty to the man who had been like a father to him and the woman who carried his child.
‘Yes,’ he said, finally answering her question about Lykos but reluctant to delve into it further.
‘How did you meet Kyros?’ Summer asked, as if sensing he wasn’t going to say any more.
‘He found us running scams on the streets. We were picking pockets, raising hell, the usual wayward stuff,’ he said, a smile pulling at his lips. They were some of the best memories he had. ‘Lykos had picked his pocket, but when he saw the photo in it he said we had to give it back.
‘The photo was of him and his wife dancing.’ It was only later, when Theron had met Althaia and realised how badly the multiple sclerosis had ravaged her body, that he’d realised the significance of the photo. Kyros eventually told him it was the last time they had danced. ‘He wanted to reward us for returning it to him. Lykos,’ he said, smiling broadly at the memory of the then fifteen-year-old’s audacity, ‘demanded one hundred euros. Kyros laughed, insisted that he wanted to give us something much more valuable than that.
‘He paid for our education at one of the most exclusive schools in Athens and promised us that if we graduated then we would come and work with him.’
Theron looked out at the endless sea, marvelling at what an incredible gift they’d been given—the opportunity to be more than a statistic, a failure. They hadn’t been stupid, even then he and Lykos had known. Life half on the streets, half in the orphanage, little education or hope even after that...it didn’t paint a pretty picture. For all that life had been fun with Lykos, it also had nights full of terror, days full of worry—where was the next beating going to come from, where was the next meal...? Life hadn’t existed past that.
‘We stayed at the orphanage, but went to a good school. It was a little rough at the beginning—a few kids trying it on—but Lykos put a stop to that immediately. It helped that he was a couple of years older and a hell of a lot bigger. Kyros putting us in that school got us off the streets, gave us an education we would never have had. On Sundays we’d go round to Kyros’s house for dinner. He’d ask us what we were learning, how our week had been, and he’d tell us about his business. We didn’t realise, but even then he was preparing us to work for him.’
‘And Althaia?’
Theron looked at Summer. Her hazel eyes had dimmed, the green clearer in them than ever. She’d lost some of the colour he liked seeing so much in her cheeks and for the first time he wondered how Summer would have felt about the woman her father had chosen to be with.
CHAPTER SIX
‘SHEJOINEDUSon the days when she could. Which wasn’t often,’ Theron said, squinting in the bright sunshine piercing the blue-grey sky that seemed to blanket everything. ‘The form of MS she had affects a small amount of people, but the symptoms were difficult and devastating. She was bed-bound for the last two years of her life and constantly battling infections and the slow deterioration of her body.’
Summer’s heart hurt for them all and what they’d been through. ‘What was she like?’ she asked, half wanting to know, half not.
‘She was...loving, kind.’ He shrugged. ‘As interested in us as Kyros was, but often distracted and in pain. Her diagnosis was progressive and it made things very hard for her. Hard for them both.’
Summer wondered if that was why Kyros had strayed—to have one moment outside of the impossible heartbreak he faced. She wondered whether her mother had known, and couldn’t quite work out how she felt about it, hating the idea that one thing in her mother’s past could change the way Summer saw her. She shook her head, her heart hurting.
‘So you both went to work for Kyros when you finished school?’ she asked, half changing the subject.