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HUNDRED TWENTY EIGHT
publish date:
2026-11-03 23:56:18
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Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY NINE
JUSTINAHe took a moment to absorb it. I watched the crease form between his eyebrows, then deepen as he worked through what I'd told him. Jack was clever. I should have remembered that, because clever people always found the door to a thing a few seconds before you were ready to let them in.His phone lit up on the table beside his elbow. A name flashed across the screen, too quickly and too small for me to read. He turned the phone facedown without so much as glancing at it.“Does he... Gregor... know?” he asked.“Yes.”The answer came too easily. I felt it settle beside the first truth, another piece of something I had no business handing over. Like a counterfeit bill slipped into a drawer beside the real thing, close enough to pass at a glance.“He knows Charis was his mother?”“He knows.” I picked at the edge of the bottle's label, scraping at the loose corner with my thumbnail. “He knows everything about that.”“Then...” Jack frowned, trying to fit the pieces together. “Sorry, I
Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY EIGHT
JUSTINAThe song playing softly through the speakers faded, replaced by a woman’s voice scraping over a bouzouki. I dragged both palms down my face. My cheeks were slick, my mascara had migrated somewhere beneath my eyes, and when I looked up, Jack was watching me.His hand hovered an inch above my shoulder, his fingers curled as though he had forgotten how to reach for someone. The beer in front of him sat untouched, condensation gathering beneath it in a dark ring on the wood. His expression had gone slack, all its usual ease stripped away. I had seen that look on strangers who walked in on something they were never meant to witness, the stunned helplessness of someone who had stumbled into a room where the air had already run out.The warmth in my head went out like a pilot light caught by a draft.I heard myself again. If only I were his mother.The words hung between us, impossible to take back. I could still feel the shape my mouth had made around them, the soft press of my lips
Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN
JUSTINA“You’re not.” I set my glass down hard enough to make the olives jump. “Don’t do either of those. Don’t you dare. You’d be useless at both, and you’d end up in a cell with nobody to sit with her.”His grin slid off. He looked at me properly then, and I looked back, and for a second we were two people who had both been standing in the same rain.“If I leave school though, I am fucked,” he said, quieter. “And so is my sister.”“Then don’t leave school.”“But I need to take care of her, and school is eating at that too. If I stay, I have to sacrifice something because there is not enough to go around. Where the fuck is the money?”“I don’t know.” My eyes stung, and I blinked until it passed. “I don’t know, Jack. I’m sitting here drinking tsipouro at one in the afternoon because I don’t know.”He nudged the bread basket an inch toward me. “Stop drinking and eat something.”“No.”“Have you even eaten? Have some bread.”“I had half a coffee at breakfast.” I took the glass again and
Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY SIX
JUSTINAI looked past him at the doors. A cab idled under the awning with its wipers going, the driver hunched over a cigarette he wasn’t allowed to light.“Do you want to go for a drink?”I heard it come out of me and could not believe it. Jack’s eyebrows climbed.“A drink?”“I know.” I pushed my hair back with a hand that wasn’t steady. “I don’t do it. Ever. But I can’t go back up there right now, and I can’t stand here, and you look like you could use one. I know for sure that I need one.”He studied me for the length of a breath. Then his shoulders came down, an inch, as if I had handed him something he had been about to ask me for.“I think that’s exactly what I need most right now.”“Good. Come on.”The cab smelled of smoke and cheap pine air freshener. Jack gave the driver the name of a place by the old tram depot, ten minutes off, and I sat with my forehead against the side window and watched the city drip past. Palm fronds lay along the gutters. A shopfront had lost its sign,
Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE
JUSTINAI took the stairs. The lift would have trapped me with strangers and a mirror, so I went down four flights with my palm skating along the rail, and every landing smelled like the one above it, of disinfectant, burnt coffee and wet wool. On the second landing I stopped and pressed my forehead to the painted wall. I waited for the shaking to run out through my knees.It stayed. It had moved in under my ribs, and it spoke in Nyssa’s voice. Be his mother.I wanted a drink.The thought arrived whole, like a bill I had been dodging for years, and I looked at it with something close to disgust. I did not drink. In Attica, I watched liquor collect the men on our stairwell, one at a time. Mr. Dimas from the third floor told the same joke every night until the night he stopped telling it. Boys passed a bottle around on the roof at fifteen and had nothing worth the name by twenty. I had built my whole life as the opposite of that. Multiple jobs, an education, a child in a coat the winter
Keeping a secret from the Greek Tycoon HUNDRED TWENTY FOUR
GREGOR"I know I press, and I know I pry, and I know I take a room and squeeze it until everyone in it stops breathing. I know there are days you are fed up with me, Gregor. I watch you put the phone down when my name comes up, and I pretend I do not.""That is not...""Let me finish." She raised one hand without turning. It trembled in the air. "I know all of that. But I would like to ask you something, and I would like the truth. Would you really abandon me, as your father did?"The air left my lungs in one piece."Oh, my God." I stepped closer, and my voice cracked on the second word. "Mother. Dad died.""I am aware.""He did not abandon any of us. If he could, he would be standing in that doorway right now.""I know." She turned around, slowly, and the smudge under her eye had spread. "I have always known. But knowing does not help at three in the morning."I opened my mouth, and nothing came.She lowered herself into the chair behind the desk, the one I had taken the morning we f
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