She tried to digest this latest revelation, one she’d never heard, as a matter of fact. He tossed it out so glibly, she was surprised she never had. He clearly seemed to think the fact they weren’t blood-related made it okay to treat her as he had.
Paul Stavros, the man she had known as her father, was a faint, warm memory—of calm brilliance and affectionate acceptance—but no clearer than her memory of her mother. She perhaps should have felt more surprise that she was not his biological daughter, if Freddie was even telling the truth. But she didn’t. She was so weary of this whole Greek tragedy.
“Why were you so anxious to get rid of her, then?” Evan asked.
“Because it didn’t matter. My weakling of a brother left his whole fortune to his wife and if she died, then to his so-called daughter. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t really his or not.”
There was another reason that Freddie was so anxious to get rid of her as well, although she wondered if he would dare to voice it. Sometimes she wondered if he even knew. He’d never acknowledged that he did.
But she knew the truth. She had seen what he had put in her mother’s tea that day. And for that reason alone, she was a threat to him.
“So you weren’t raping your niece. Just your stepdaughter. Nice.”
“He never raped me,” she said quietly. “He just beat me to a pulp. He left the actual sex to one of my ‘bodyguards’.”
She remembered the cold, brutal insertion of a penis into her vagina those few times, usually no more than an unzipping of a man’s suit pants and a shoving of her skirt up, with the crotch of her panties pushed aside. The dry painful process. The violation.
It wasn’t even the same thing as the lovemaking she had shared with Evan.
And after those first few times, Freddie didn’t force her to do it anymore. It didn’t hurt enough apparently and she didn’t struggle enough for his tastes. If she could have taken all his punishment that way, perhaps she could have avoided it. But as careful as one tries to be, it is nearly impossible not to show a reaction to broken ribs or internal injuries. So those Freddie continued to mete out with regularity and, thank God, left the sexual part out.
“What were you trying to do anyway, Uncle Freddie?” she asked him. “Beat me to death? Because you could have really gone about it so much more simply.”
“Ah, but where would be the fun in that?”
Freddie whipped his head around at the lilting Greek accent Andrea recognized even before the speaker herself came into the light.
“Frannie!” Stavros said. “See! I was right. Athena was alive.”
The implication chilled her. Deep down, after all the pain and betrayal she had experienced in her life, she still held on to the hope that some people had not been part of it. And Francesca Stavros was one of those. A lush and full beauty, Aunt Frannie had always seemed so full of life and love. Athena had never wanted to believe she had known about any of this, about how Freddie had treated her, niece or not. But she supposed she should have known better when the woman had not taken her up on her anonymous offer to help her to escape Freddie. She had seen pictures of her aunt in the society columns over the years, always expensively dressed and coiffed, diamonds everywhere.
And now here Aunt Frannie was, her jet-black hair swept up elegantly and her soft citrus perfume wafting around her, leisurely stepping into the scene of an about-to-be double homicide.
“Yes, right again, Freddie.”
The gunmen fell back as she approached the bed and in a Judas-like moment, leaned over to kiss Andrea lightly on her cheek, taking her hand and bringing it up to her own soft cheek.
“Athena. As beautiful as your name, as ever, my dear. And the spitting image of your mother.” She glanced back at Freddie. “Isn’t she?”
He grunted. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here, Frannie.”
“Nonsense. I couldn’t have Athena here in Greece, almost home, and not come by to say hello.”
The gunmen in the background traded identical looks of confusion and Evan wasn’t far behind. Andrea blinked rapidly. She’d always felt safer when Francesca was around, even though it hadn’t made much sense at the time. Frannie was Freddie’s mistress when he married Angelica Stavros and his wife when Angelica died, and if stereotypes had held, Athena should have hated her.
But Frannie had never played the part of evil stepmother or the other woman. Only ten years or so her senior, she had been the one to give Athena a much-needed hug at her mother’s funeral, the one to take her to buy tampons when she unexpectedly got her period in true mortifying fashion during the wake, the one to encourage her to make her peace with her parents’ deaths, and to make friends at school and…and…to just be a girl sometimes.