When my grandfather, Pappous Gio, had died in a helicopter crash a little over ten years ago, he’d left me a shipping conglomerate and territory poised for a hostile takeover. At twenty-three, I’d taken up the reins and, with the help of a few key allies, had fixed the mess my grandfather had created.
Today, Drakos Shipping stood strong enough to take on the Mykos empire, even if its patriarch believed otherwise.
“Tell me, what is it you think I will do to your precious Olympia if I marry her?”
“Her name is Nyx. Call her Olympia, and you’re likely to get a blade to the throat,” Evan, the youngest of the Mykoses, interjected with a tinge of humor rarely heard out of any of the brothers in public.
Deciding to rephrase the question, I asked, “Why are you so determined to keep me from marrying her?”
“Our world isn’t right for her,” Phillip answered. “She needs her freedom. You’re not the man for her.”
I studied the old man I’d viewed as a cold, calculating bastard my whole life. So many times, I’d wondered if he even had a heart. Especially when stories reached me of his detached, almost surgical means of information extraction from those who crossed him. He ran his empire with an iron fist, or the better words were “honed blade,” and he’d taught his children all of his methods.
Well, more than likely the brothers were the ones who’d taught Olympia—correction,Nyx—her noted skills with knives. I highly doubted Phillip, with his overprotectiveness of his daughter’s happiness, would want her doing anything in such an unrefined realm.
The fact he was showing this side of himself to me said his daughter truly meant a hell of a lot more to him than just a bargaining chip for alliances.
Might as well let him know they were off the hook. It would make the next year a hell of a lot easier.
“On that, we are in agreement. As she isn’t the woman for me.”
“Then you accept our terms.”
“I have one term to add.”
All five of the Mykos men narrowed identical gazes and waited.
“I want your backing when I take out the one who killed my parents and orchestrated my grandfather’s helicopter crash.”
“So, you figured it out, did you?” Phillip asked with a slight nod. “It’s a hard lesson to learn who to trust.”
“I figured it out years ago. I needed to put the chips into play.”
“Is that so? Giving him enough rope to hang himself?”
“Exactly.”
“I always knew you were more like Ky than Gio. It must have pissed your grandfather off to hell and back to know he couldn’t beat his errant son out of you.”
His words felt like a punch to the gut, knowing how wrong they were.
I was my grandfather’s creation. Everything he couldn’t get from my father, Kyros, he’d molded into me, sometimes with a belt or fist.
My father was the second son, the one who shouldn’t have inherited the empire but had because his brother had died in a territory war. He had been the son who’d shunned responsibility and married a woman of his choice instead of his dead brother’s fiancée to keep a family alliance. The son Pappous couldn’t control. When my parents had been killed in a car crash, my grandfather got a do-over—me.
I gave no reaction to Mykos’s statement and instead asked, “So, do I have your support?”
“Yes,” Tyler answered for Phillip. “We don’t like traitors in our midst, especially when they’re family. You follow our terms, we follow yours.”
I nodded. “In a little over one year’s time, I will break the marriage contract, we will split the trust, and you will hand over the port. Then, when I call on your backing, you will show up to take out the trash.”
“Excellent.” Tyler lifted a glass of wine to his lips, took a deep swallow, and then said, “One more thing.”
I waited.
“No one outside of the people in this room will know about this arrangement.” The order in Tyler’s tone grated on my last nerve.
“What about Nyx?”