Even though she was busy during the day with Angelina, and their nights were filled with passion that only seemed to grow the more they fed it, Gabriel knew what Eleni craved. Knew the sudden smile she pulled to her mouth when she saw him.
Knew that his inability to love her would one day pain her. Knew that he was forever waiting for the ax to fall on their relationship. Waiting for something to go wrong.
In every word and smile, there was a part of him that held back. That resisted every attempt Eleni made to get close to him. That measured their marriage still as a successful but convenient arrangement.
Andreas homed in on his hesitation and went for the kill. “All her life, Eleni has been pushed around by my father. By me and even Nikandros. By the stain of her birth. By my father’s condescending kindness toward her. By being neither daughter nor staff. I’m fixing all the damage he did to us, Gabe. Nikandros is back where he belongs. Eleni deserves to be given a choice in her life, for once. She needs to have a chance at happiness.”
Gabriel had never wanted to throttle a man before. Never had he wished that his heart had remained buried. Never had he wished that he’d never met the Princess of Drakon.
If he gave her the chance, would Eleni choose a life with him? Did it matter to him that she chose it, and was not forced into it?
He set his jaw tight. “I have a file on my desk, Andreas. I have the information you’re looking for. And you know why? Because Eleni begged me to help you. Because she worries about you and Nik and all of you.”
Every inch of Andreas’s face hardened, a dark light coming on in his eyes. Outwardly, he was still. But Gabriel knew the rage that was building up inside him. He would separate Gabriel’s limbs with his bare hands, but of course he calmed himself. Nothing remained of his hunger for that information except a gleam in his eyes.
Andreas’s self-control was legendary.
“You know where she is?” He couldn’t quite hide the quiver in his voice, however.
“Yes,” Gabriel replied. “I’ll give it to you if you make Spiros disappear. I don’t ever want to see him.”
Andreas rubbed a shaking hand against his eyes, a small betrayal of his inner state. “I can’t. You have no idea how tempted I am to play God. But no more. I will not be like the man who raised me. I will not play with other people’s lives.”
The hard laugh that fell from Gabriel’s mouth was hollow. “And the woman in the file?” Despite his determination to stay out of it, he felt a twinge of pity for her. Andreas Drakos was a determined, cold man, made in the mold of his father, King Theos, however much he fought it. “What do you think you’re going to do to her, Andreas?”
“She belongs to me, Gabriel. Keep the information. She could go to the ends of the earth, but I would still find her. My sister, however, deserves a choice. Deserves to choose for once how she wants to spend her life. Either you give it to her or I will.”
* * *
Studiously avoiding the silent bedroom, Gabriel went into the bathroom, stripped and took a much-needed shower. He dressed himself, wandered into the sitting room and poured himself a drink.
Andreas’s words went round and round in his head. The sight of the man she had once loved turned the scotch to ash on his tongue.
Did Andreas actually think he would give up his wife, just like that? Did he think he would let Eleni go to some blond fool who hadn’t had the guts to fight for her?
But could he live with Eleni knowing that he had forced this on her? Knowing that all she’d ever wanted of this marriage had been a child? Wouldn’t he forever wonder if she’d choose him again given a true choice?
He had no more clarity two hours later when the door opened to the suite and Eleni stood at the threshold. Gabriel had never imagined he’d see a sight that would shred him to powerless pieces as did the sight of his wife’s tears.
Pale and drawn out, she stared at him with unseeing eyes.
Tenderness filled Gabriel. “Black Shadow?”
She didn’t say anything, only nodded. But even in the dark, he could see the sheen of her eyes.
The depth of her pain unmanned him like nothing could. He never wanted to see it again. He opened his arms and she flew into them like she belonged there. Burrowed into him as though he was her everything.
And for the first time in his life, Gabriel wanted to mean something to a woman.
She was tiny, slender against his hard muscles. And yet, there was strength inside this woman.
Squeezing her against him, he left her not even a little space to avoid him. “Tell me about him,” he said, in his usual authoritative tone, realizing only after he had spoken that maybe she needed a gentle hand. But he had never been capable of gentleness.
Maybe she wanted a man who would trust without doubt, who could be romantic without ulterior motives in mind, a man who could give words to the tumult inside him. Maybe she wanted Spiros Kanellos back in her life. The thought was like acid, gouging into him.
“Black Shadow was the only gift, the only thing, really, that my father ever gave me. He cost Father some atrocious amount of money and he refused to let any rider tame him. Father had always been proud of my riding talent, my ease with horses. I was a natural since I was a toddler. It proved to him, I think, that I was truly his—that I belonged to the House of Drakos.” She spoke as if the fact was still in doubt. As if she had to justify her presence in the royal household again and again.
Was that why she worked so hard for her brothers? Did Eleni still doubt her place as a daughter of the House of Drakos?
Anger filled Gabriel and his arms tightened around her.
“The moment I saw Black Shadow—his coat gleaming, refusing to trust anyone, but needing a tender touch—I fell in love. I think it was mutual,” she said with a smile. “He developed a tumor—” her voice caught “—in his belly, and has been deteriorating for a while now. I went to check on him around dawn. I couldn’t sleep at all. It was as if he’d been waiting to say goodbye to me.”
He felt the sob build through her small frame. Vining her arms around him, she cried as if her heart was breaking.
Ice that he didn’t even know had built in his chest thawed. Gabriel ran his hands over her back, up and down, anxious to soothe her, to assuage her grief. Desperate to give her the world if she needed it.
“Shh, querida, he must have known how much you love him.”
She wiped her face on his shirt and mumbled an apology into his chest. His heart thundered under those questing fingers. Tonight, his mind was reeling, his emotions whirling.
“Eleni, why did you stay in Drakon all these years? Why not leave? Did you love the mad king so much?”
He felt steel return to her spine and smiled to himself. “Please don’t refer to him like that. His dementia was real and had far too many consequences.”
“What about your mother?” He asked the one question that had always bothered him.
“I don’t like to talk about her.”
He heard the defensiveness that she couldn’t quite hide.
He shrugged, keeping his tone casual, as unfamiliar as he was with painful emotions, even he could see that Eleni hid the pain beneath her acceptance of her position in the Royal household. “As Angelina grows up and asks me about her mother, should I lie and keep the memory she has intact? Or should I tell her the truth?”
A long sigh left her and she tentatively laid her head on his shoulder. He knew she understood what he meant. She understood that Angelina already believed, on some level, that her mother had never told Gabriel about her existence.
Painful or not, the little girl had to live with that fact for the rest of her life.
He didn’t know why he pushed Eleni, but he wanted her to share it with him. He wanted to know everything about his wife. He wanted to prove to himself that Eleni was better off with him and Angelina. That she had everything she’d ever need.
“My mother was Andreas’s nanny. The Queen apparently had been sick for a long time and she had an affair with Father for years. Things I learned in whispers and rumors from the palace staff. And when she had me, she signed over all rights over me to my father and walked away with a lump of cash. My father might have been controlling, maybe even mad, but he gave me a home. Andreas loved me, in his own way, when he could have hated me for what my mother did to his. Nikandros always told me I was the good one among us. My brothers and my father...they made me feel wanted.”
Gabriel searched her face, startled at how innocent she sounded. “How?”
“They needed me. They were always at odds with each other, all three of them, thanks to Father’s manipulations. And I was the buffer,” she said, as if she hadn’t made herself indispensable. As if she hadn’t sewn herself into the fabric of their lives.
Did it make her feel useful? Needed? Was that why she’d been so ready to marry him—because she could help with Angelina on one hand and Drakon on the other? The perfect solution for Eleni because her heart already belonged to another?
“In the end, it turned out only I could manage Father. I owe them so much. How could I just walk away? You asked me that night why I wanted to escape who I was.
“Drakon is in my blood as much as it is in Andreas’s and Nik’s. Even if Andreas found some poor man to marry me—and can you imagine who he would choose?—he wouldn’t have understood my attachment to Drakon. He would only marry me as a favor to one of my brothers, or as a business transaction. Even with his cruel taunts, I think my father did a good job of binding me to Drakon, as well as he did my brothers.”