1
Simon
“If you hurt her,the war you’ll face is something you’ll never recover from.”
I gave no reaction to Tyler Mykos’s threat, only staring into his black eyes. Though, the impulse to reach across the table and punch him in the face sat heavy in the back of my mind.
The fucker thought he held the cards when I was the one who could make or break this whole deal.
A deal worth over a billion fucking dollars.
A deal that came to the forefront because greedy assholes had decided it was time to fulfill an agreement created over a century ago in Greece.
“What, exactly, do you think I will do to her?” I asked.
The “her” we spoke of was my fiancée, a woman I’d never met, only seen a few pictures of, and had no intention of marrying, money be damned.
However, I wouldn’t let these dicks know it.
When a courier had delivered a message this morning with a request for a meeting with the heads of the Mykos Shipping empire, I’d known it would be an interesting day.
My would-be future in-laws and I weren’t the typical businessmen. We ran organizations, or let’s say, families, with generational histories. Ones tied by deals, feuds, marriages, and so forth from the times when everyone lived in Europe—Greece, specifically, in our case.
Moving to the United States had eased some of the old-world views, but not all of them. Especially when it came to running our enterprises.
If there was something to say about families like ours, we were traditionalist and patriarchal as fuck.
Hence the reason we were here. The first female born into the Mykos family in over one hundred years.
Olympia Nyx Mykos. My fucking fiancée.
I liked my life the way it was. Business was business, and personal was personal. Nothing comingled.
Then my idiot uncle had to open his fucking mouth, reminding the world the Mykoses had finally produced a female offspring, and it was my obligation to marry the girl in order to end the century-long feud.
And, of course, the feud was caused by the last Mykos female because she decided to run away with her bodyguard, or chauffeur, or whatever the hell he was, instead of marrying my great-grandfather.
Now here I was, sitting in one of the most exclusive suites of a boutique hotel in Manhattan, trying to get to the bottom of whatever these fuckers wanted from me.
“You have a reputation, Drakos.”
As if Tyler Mykos was all innocence and sunshine. Back in our college days, we’d shared a woman or two plenty of times.
Dickhead.
Tyler sat next to his father, Phillip Mykos, and his other three brothers, Evan, Damon, and Nico. He posed as Phillip’s second, but everyone knew the truth. The eldest of the Mykos brothers was the power behind the Mykos shipping and syndicate empire. Nothing happened without his say-so, and this meeting was every inch Tyler’s way of conducting business.
No formal offices of any kind, only private suites in high-end hotels, with five-star service while negotiating business terms.
They thought this little show of power could intimidate me. They’d better get their shit together. When one was raised under the thumb of a son-of-a-bitch grandfather like Giorgos “Gio” Astros Drakos, it was rare that anything could frighten a man.
“Why don’t you enlighten me on this reputation, Mykos.”
“Your preference for convenient women who give you no trouble.”
Oh yes, I knew all about my bride. No one would describe her as convenient. She was known as the Mykos Hellion for having a tongue as sharp as the blades she was reported to pull on people who stepped on her wrong side.
Though some of the shit I’d heard about her seemed so off the wall, it wouldn’t surprise me if these assholes planted the information to keep people away from her.