“A few days? I was thinking a few weeks.”
“Oh, agapi mou, if you let me have my way with you for that long, you won’t be able to leave the house. I’ll break you, and you’ll love it.”
“Promise?” She kisses my knuckles. “I’ve missed this. Sitting with you. Sparring with you.”
“You missed punching me in the face. I knew it. You’re only here to try to kick my ass.”
“Absolutely. And I won’t hold back this time.”
“You’d better not.”
“Seriously, Peter.” She touches my cheek. “I love you. Even if things get hard again, I’m not leaving. I decided something back in LA when I was wandering around feeling lost and confused and angry. I decided I’m not going back to my old life. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I found something new here with you and I feel like I became someone better than I ever thought I could be. Someone stronger. Am I completely nuts?”
“No, agapi mou, you aren’t nuts, and if you think I’d ever let you get away again, you must be crazy.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.”
“I made choices, just like you did,” I say quietly and glance at her as I drive. “Hard choices. Some of them still haunt me.” Like the look on my father’s face when I pulled the trigger, but I can’t say that out loud. Not yet. I’ll tell her eventually. She’s the only person I could ever tell. “But the only choice I regret is sending you back to the States. You were safe, and I could live with that, but every day, it was like missing pieces of my soul. And you know what else I figured out? I don’t need to be a Calimeris anymore. I don’t need to do what my family wants. I don’t need to be that man and define myself by the old ways. I can be something else, someone else. Someone stronger. I learned that from watching you.”
She chews her lip and wipes her eyes. “Fuck, Peter. Why’d I wait so long? I should’ve been back on the first flight.”
“You’re here now. Maybe you needed that time at home to figure this all out.”
“What do we do now?”
“Now we finish what we started and we do it together. Then after that?” I shrug a little and push down the accelerator. I can’t wait another second to get her into my bed. “We’ll find out. So long as it’s with you.”
Chapter28
Peter
The back room of Balaska’s personal restaurant in Athens is filled with polished wood, cut crystal glasses topped off with expensive whiskey, and a long oak table shining in the overhead lights. Reina sits with Gustave and two more Le Milieu soldiers, all of the French contingent smoking away, as Katarin chats with them in French. Balaska regales several of the smaller crime lords with stories from his early clubbing days while I sit at the far end of the group and hold Adrienne’s hand under the table.
Dinner was strangely quiet. It felt more like a gathering of old friends than a business meeting. For the last few weeks, I’ve been running around Crete and Athens, cleaning up the remnants of the Filo family along with Dieter and the Germans while Reina got Galaki and a few other pilots he managed to bribe into helping him set up and in the air. The first shipment of weed was dropped off this morning, and the first shipment of heroin should arrive in a few hours.
There’s a lot of celebrate.
“Everyone, please.” Balaska speaks English since that’s the common language. He slowly gets to his feet and holds his drink in the air. “It amazes me that we are all here. A few short weeks ago, some of the men at this table were my enemies.” He grins and nudges a portly crime lord with his elbow. “But now we all understand that what is best for one of us is best for all of us. There is a new way of life coming to Greece, and we are going to be the ones who define it.”
“Well said,” Katarin calls out.
Balaska laughs and holds his drink higher. “Here is to our partners, Monsieur Gustave and Madame Reina, and everyone else in their organization. Here is to my Greek friends and allies. But most of all, here is to the Americans who brought us all together, Peter and Adrienne. Cheers! Yassas!”
Everyone salutes us and drinks, and I feel a strange swelling pride.
When I was nothing more than Peter Calimeris, I never imagined I would have a crime lord toast me in front of highly important members of the international underworld. I never dreamed I’d be holding the woman of my dream’s hand under the table like a lovesick teenager. I never imagined I’d have happiness, or purpose, or meaning.
Before all this, I thought my life would end early in service to the family, like so many of my friends before me.
Now I see it doesn’t have to be that way.
They died and I hate my father for it. I won’t ever forgive my uncle for wasting all those lives with nothing to show for it. But I know the dead would want me to live now that I have the chance.
Truly, really live, and on my own terms.
But most of all, I am so proud of Adrienne for becoming the woman she is today.
Strong, fierce, and powerful.