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Chapter One

Thanasis Zacharias walked into his father’s tasteless monstrosity of a villa that took over the entire north side of a relatively obscure island in the Aegean—as his equally tasteless monstrosity of a father had commanded—and saw a ghost.

Had he been anywhere else, he would have rushed to her. He would have crossed the marble floors, heedless and wild with the need to touch her. He would have got his hands upon her, immediately, to feel the warmth of her skin beneath his palms. He would have crushed his mouth to hers—anything to prove that it was truly her.

That she was alive. That this wasn’t yet another one of the dreams that had haunted him relentlessly for five long years. That she was really and truly here—

It was the here that was a problem.

What was his resurrected lost love doing here?

Thanasis had grown up in this villa. This was the place where he had learned entirely too much about his father’s delight in hurting others, causing pain and sorrow wherever he could, and lifelong commitment to his own selfish ego. It was, at best, a place of smoke and mirrors. Lies upon lies upon lies.

He had learned long ago to keep his reactions to himself, not to mention any inconvenient emotions that might present themselves at the worst possible moment.

The consequences for not doing so had always been dire.

Here, now, there was an impossible ghost standing there beneath the glittering light of the chandeliers in the villa’s great hall, and he did not dare approach her.

Not when he could not be certain how he would act.

Or what he would reveal.

Thanasis forced himself to look away from her, though it caused him actual, physical pain. He had to do it in stages, looking back to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, then going through entire stages of grief again to make himself tear his gaze away once more. He had to be careful. He had to monitor his stampeding heart and the blood surging through him, not to mention the expression he feared was on his face. The face he had only ever showed her—

He looked around, assessing the situation with the cool calculation that had made him such a success in business, despite his father’s appalling antics and reputation for drama.

No one had seen him enter. He had come late, deliberately. It was clear at a glance that he had missed nothing, just the usual chaos of a typical Zacharias family event. He could see three of his five half siblings from his place by the ostentatious marble arches in the entryway, though he had no doubt that the others were somewhere about. They always were. They circled like sharks, because that’s what they were. Forever jockeying for favor and position, when surely they should have known better by now.

Thanasis was the heir to all of this. This excessive bacchanal. This abominable offense against architectural and all the vanity cluttered within it. This enduring mess his father took such delight in making, knowing that one day he would simply leave it behind him, and better yet, in Thanasis’s lap.

Not for Pavlos Zacharias the questionable charms of actual parenting or maintaining healthy relationships with the children he’d fathered indiscriminately, all while remaining married to Thanasis’s mother. Not for him some sort of acknowledgment that he had created these lives that now depended so heavily on his own. Then again, he didn’t seem to care overmuch what sort of relationship he had with Thanasis, either, legitimate or not.

Pavlos delighted in torture. Not the rack or the stocks. No thumbscrews or bamboo beneath any fingernails. Those things took effort and Pavlos was too lazy. Why bother making that sort of effort when it was easier by far to simply behave like the depraved monster he was and watch the ripples of that behavior spread out before him?

That was why Thanasis could not trust his eyes. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost, stood here before him in the grand hall. Maybe it was simply a woman who looked like his lost, adored Saskia.

Obviously, he told himself sternly, it could not be anything else.

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Not here in this funhouse mirror of a place, where nothing was as it seemed, unless, that was, it seemed like hell.

He stayed where he was. He let himself look at her, then forced himself to look away. Again. When that was something he had never been any good at. That had not changed, no matter who this woman really was.

Thanasis could not allow his hunger to show on his face. He could not allow anyone here to see any hint of the things he actually felt inside. He could not allow them to imagine that he had any emotions at all, for that matter. Pavlos’s infamously depraved villa was a festering sore, not any kind of home, and anything found within it was a weapon.

He had learned that when he was still small.

Thanasis smelled what he was certain was a whiff of sulfur, and then there beside him was the half sibling he liked the least—a difficult distinction, but hers all the same. The venal and vain Marissa was a product of Pavlos’s widely publicized affair with a sharp-edged Parisian model who was as famous for her spitefulness as her cheekbones.

“I thought you no longer adhered to the old man’s commands,” Marissa said in that cut glass voice of hers, sharp and vicious. She did not bother to speak Greek, though they were both in Greece tonight. She preferred her native French and did not care at all if she was understood. The venom came through, loud and clear, no matter what language she used.

Thanasis allowed himself another glance at his beautiful ghost, currently standing across the hall with a wineglass clutched in her fingers, her head tilted slightly to one side, an expression he recognized on her face. A baffled sort of curiosity that, once, had been a precursor to laughter—

But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

What he recognized was a memory, nothing more, and this woman before him had nothing to do with it.

Because this woman was not Saskia. Saskia was dead.

It had taken him every moment of the past five years to be able to accept that simple statement of fact.

He couldn’t allow himself to linger, not even with a gaze from across a great hall. Not with this ghoul at his elbow, more than prepared to leap on him like a carrion crow.

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Hoping he would give her the opportunity, more like.

“I accepted my father’s invitation, if that is what you mean,” he replied. With a certain cool neutrality that he had perfected over the years, because it drove every member of his family into paroxysms of temper and rage.

Marissa sneered. “I keep waiting for him to announce that he’s changed his will. Perhaps then you wouldn’t be quite so high and mighty, eh?”

Normally, Thanasis played this game when he was here. If he had allowed himself to be enticed or ordered back to the villa, there was no point attempting to avoid the unpleasantness as he otherwise preferred to do from afar. He allowed these conversations. He leaned into them. And he was not averse to crossing a sword or two when he encountered his father’s by-blows.

But everything was different tonight.

Because she was here, whoever she was.

And until he knew who she actually was—or, more importantly, who she wasn’t—he found he had no stomach at all for the games he usually lowered himself to play in this place.

“I cannot understand how you have reached your thirties without understanding that he will never do anything of the kind,” he told his venomous half sister, impatiently. “I do not want to be his heir, and therefore, he will make certain that I am. You, by contrast, have debased yourself for the whole of your life in the hopes that he will give it all to you instead, and so he never will. It is really that simple, Marissa, and I have no idea why you cannot grasp it.”

She bared her teeth at him and he broke away, too aware that he could not afford to let her or anyone else here goad him into revealing things he shouldn’t.

Not that he had. Not yet. But he didn’t like that it felt precarious.

He had always hated his father. This was a natural consequence of watching how the old man treated Thanasis’s stoic, heartbroken, stubborn-to-her-own-detriment mother. When she’d died, when Thanasis was in his twenties, he hadn’t known whether to cheer her escape or mourn her passing. And the vile old man had bloomed in the face of his son and heir’s disgust, entertaining himself by dragging Thanasis into the family business no matter how he’d tried to break away.

Those dreams had crumbled after university, when Thanasis had finally understood that no matter what he did or where he went, his name went with him and the specter of his father hung over him like the sword of Damocles. He had been forced to surrender to the inevitable, and so he had—but he had done it on his own terms.

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It had taken him years to demonstrate that there were two Zacharias shipping concerns under the same corporate name. One catered entirely to his father’s whims, grudges, reversals, and lies. The other was Thanasis’s domain.

Pavlos made headlines. Thanasis made deals. And one day, he would wash his hands entirely of the problems his father made for him.

He dreamed of that day all the time.

The only other thing he ever dreamed about appeared to be standing here, in this very same room, with music wrapping itself around her and light finding her as she breathed, but he told himself—again—that this was impossible. This woman resembled his Saskia, that was all. He needed to stop imagining it could be otherwise.

He had spent years trying to imagine her back to life.

If it was possible, he would have done it already.

The usual twisted, vacuous socialites flooded about as he moved along the outskirts of the crowd, knowing better than to get in his way. The paparazzi, forever being fed stories by his bitter half siblings, called Thanasis the boardroom bully. Or the real Zacharias monster. They took great pleasure in shredding him apart in their pages.

But if the goal was to isolate or shame him, it didn’t work, because he was entirely too competent at his job.

All his half siblings’ efforts had brought him was entirely too much female attention, little as he wanted it. The idea of a demanding man with too much money on his hands was apparently catnip to some. Yet though they flocked to him, they rarely stayed near him. He cut through small talk like a blade. He was too intense, too certain, too opposed to the usual nonsense.

And most importantly, he had yet to get over Saskia.

In this world where everything was brightly colored, airy, and insubstantial until it drew blood, Thanasis—according to his father—dressed like an undertaker. Always all in black, he carved his way through parties like a hearse.

These frilly, frivolous people fluttered around him like he was the king of the underworld himself.

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Sometimes he even enjoyed it, but not tonight.

Thanasis didn’t trust himself to drink, not when what he really wanted was to take a whole bottle of whatever was on offer and toss it back. Not when he generally allowed these people to think he was drearily sober, because it made them hate him more.

And certainly not when he couldn’t be certain how he would react if alcohol hit all the yearning and need and cruel hope inside him.

He skirted the edges of the vapid crush, listening to them bray and shriek, and got a different vantage point of this woman before him who could not possibly exist.

Saskia. Her name was a song inside of him. Saskia, whose lovely, perfect body had never been found. He had grudgingly come to accept that she had died in that train derailment, because surely no one could hide for five whole years. Not from a man like him with so many resources at his fingertips.

He had monitored her bank. Her credit cards. She’d never returned to the flat he’d set up for her in London and he knew she had nowhere else to go. She had been an orphan, in London for her studies and focusing on art history, of all pointless things. She had been quick and bright, intense and in love, and he had never wished to be parted from her. Then, after a night he wished he could do over again—oh, how he had wished it a thousand times—she had boarded that train in the morning and he’d never seen her again.

He’d been left with nothing.

And Thanasis had quickly discovered that without this woman he had hid away from the world, he was a stranger to himself.

It was possible that he had become used to that stranger. Or anyway, he’d learned to accept him, because it wasn’t as if he had another option.

But here, tonight, he was staring at her doppelgänger.

And he felt very much like the him he had lost that terrible day…

He cautioned himself against too much hope. He had acquainted himself with all the various stages of grief and then some, more than once, and nothing had changed the truth. There was no reason to suppose that would change now, either. Everyone had a twin, wasn’t that what they said? Everyone had a double.

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Thanasis told himself that this woman here tonight resembled the woman he’d lost, that was all. She wasn’t—she couldn’t be his Saskia. Just someone who looked so much like her that it was almost as if she had come back from the dead.

Obviously, that was impossible.

Obviously.

Still, he maneuvered himself closer. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, though she stood in a loose group of guests. She wore a pretty dress and a smile on her face and looked as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing from the people standing around her. Given that those people included Pavlos himself and Thanasis’s half brother, Johannes—who could best be described as two-faced and vengeful, and that on a good day—this was not a surprise.

She didn’t look like Saskia, Thanasis assured himself. Or rather, she looked different than his Saskia. Older, perhaps.

She wore her hair differently, longer now, tumbling down her back in glossy waves that made his fingers ache with the memory of running a shorter version of those thick waves between them.

He knew how she would smell, like bergamot and flowers, and he only realized he’d clenched his hands into fists when his knuckles began to ache.

This woman, who could not possibly be Saskia because Saskia was dead, had the same perfect oval of a face. The same clever, dancing eyes like steeped tea run through with the brightest sunshine. She had the same delicate nose and the same high cheekbones, both of which he had traced again and again with his fingers. His mouth.

And that was her mouth, just as he remembered it. A sensual affair that made her look as if she was pouting when all she was doing was thinking. That mouth that he had felt all over his body, then lush and hot on his cock.

God help him, but he could feel himself stirring even here. In this squalid place where sex was merely one more commodity.

He stared at her so hard that it must have disturbed the air around her, because she looked up. And he braced himself, waiting for that clash of recognition when her gaze met his. That punch of understanding and electricity that had changed his life completely when he’d encountered her by chance in the Tate Modern in Central London.

But though she looked at him, and held his gaze, he saw nothing in the dark brown depths of hers save the mildest interest.

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As if he really was nothing but a stranger.

This only proved that she wasn’t Saskia, he assured himself—but everything in him rejected it.

Emphatically.

Thanasis could feel it like a blow, a kind of terrible seizure rolling through him and churning him up, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.

He gritted his teeth. And it took him a lot longer than it should have to make sure that no matter what devastating implosions were happening inside him—and there were too many to count tonight—his face betrayed nothing.

When there was movement beside him again, he found the sly and ever chemically impaired Telemachus beside him, another half brother. This one so dissolute that it was never clear if he knew who Thanasis was or if he thought that he was involved in some sort of extended drug-addled experience in his own otherwise empty head.

“Have to admit it,” Telemachus slurred at Thanasis as if picking up a conversation. “The old goat always has always had good taste in women.”

“I’m aware of only one woman who fits that description,” Thanasis replied frigidly. “My sainted mother, may she rest in peace. The one and only wife he ever took.”

“My mother was a whore,” Telemachus said cheerfully, as if in agreement. “She’d have been the first to admit it if she was still alive. Not just admit it, but defend it. That doesn’t change the fact that she was beautiful.”

“I have asked you repeatedly not to speak to me in public,” Thanasis reminded Telemachus, who likely forgot that again the moment he said it. He moved away, growing more impatient with each step.

Though impatient for what, he could not have said.

He was too aware of the ghost of Saskia, there in the center of this room, as if this entire party was about her. For him, of course, it was.

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Thanasis could not manage to think past it. He could not make any sense of it.

He could feel his father looking at him, but he didn’t move toward the old man. He refused to give him the satisfaction.

You must come to the villa, Pavlos had told him, hijacking a business call to make this demand.

I need to do no such thing, and won’t, Thanasis had replied, mildly enough.

It had been years since he’d darkened the marble arches of the villa with his presence. He preferred to avoid it altogether. Refusing to return to the island meant he only had to interact with his father in Athens, where they could keep it in the office and talk some semblance of business, though he kept that to a minimum too.

Handling his father was much easier from afar.

Pavlos stayed in Greece, flitting in and out of the office in Athens as it suited his sense of importance. Thanasis remained in London, where he could run the business with the focused ruthlessness that had made him a billionaire in his own right before the age of thirty.

As the years passed, fewer and far between were these visits home. If he had his way, he would see to it that there was no crossover between Pavlos’s vanity projects and the actual concerns of the shipping business that had been in the family for generations, but that Thanasis had turned into a multinational conglomerate.

You must come, Pavlos had said merrily, sounding wholly undeterred, as ever. I have an announcement to make of supreme importance.

Are you terminally ill? Thanasis had asked dryly.

Pavlos had laughed. You wish, my boy. Soon enough, all this will be your problem to solve. But in the meantime, I require your presence at the villa.

If I refuse this invitation, will you finally cut me out of your will? Thanasis asked.

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But the old man only laughed again, and rang off.

If Thanasis had thought that Pavlos really would disinherit him, he might have stayed back in London the way he’d wanted to do. But everything with his father came down to weighing the options. Deciding what was worse at any given time—or what would become worse in the future if ignored—and acting accordingly.

At the end of the day, it cost him relatively little to turn up, appear to dance attendance on the old man’s whims, gather what intelligence he could, and then leave.

Not that there was ever much intelligence on display, of course.

Now, fully in his glory and with all of his children in attendance, Pavlos tapped his glass with one of the signet rings he wore on his thick fingers. He kept going until he claimed the attention of everyone in the room.

It was perhaps more true than Thanasis wanted to admit that his father had excellent taste in women. But what they saw in Pavlos in return was his wealth. His power. His status and fame. A woman who dated Pavlos Zacharias could be certain she would find herself infamous almost at once. Some of his mistresses had parlayed that notoriety into something resembling a career, depending on a person’s definition of that term, but one thing remained certain.

Not a single one of them could possibly have dated the old man for his looks. Not in decades, anyway.

Because Pavlos had once been tall and commanding. Thanasis had seen the pictures. But he was not a handsome man. All of his features were bold and arresting, and he had been called exciting and powerful in his heyday. Those same bold and arresting features coupled with a lifetime of dissolution and excess, however, meant that these days he resembled nothing so much as a goblin.

Something Thanasis had told him once, though it had done nothing but make the old man howl with laughter.

Jealous, are you? Pavlos had asked when he stopped laughing. A goblin I might be, my boy, and yet still the whole world finds me magnetic beyond reason.

You pronounced rich incorrectly, Thanasis had replied in his usual dry way, but that had only made his father laugh more.

Someday you will understand that these things are the same, the old man had said. Or you will be poor and forgotten.

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Thanasis liked to think that he would be neither, thank you.

Pavlos, ever attuned to the shifting sands of attention and admiration, waited until everyone was staring at him. He smiled broadly. He looked beside him, and took the hand of Saskia’s ghost.

His Saskia’s ghost, Thanasis thought.

And something inside him…detonated.

He had kept her hidden away from any and all prying eyes, his Saskia. He had protected her when she was his. He had kept her a secret from everyone who knew him, the paparazzi, the world. She had come to think that he was ashamed of her, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What he had never wanted was this. His corrosive father anywhere near her—

But he shook himself.

Saskia was dead. This woman was an imitation, not the real thing.

And still, he didn’t like his father touching her. It crawled all over him like something sick.

“I have invited everyone here to celebrate with me,” Pavlos boomed out, smiling fatuously in all directions. “I have asked this beautiful woman, my lovely and innocent Selwen, to marry me. Better yet, she has accepted.”

He beamed at Saskia. Thanasis thought he might actually have died himself.

But Pavlos wasn’t done. “And she has graciously accepted,” he continued. “And who can say, perhaps she will be the making of me. Isn’t that wonderful?”

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The crowd burst into the expected applause. The band began to play something saccharine.

And Thanasis stared at the ghost of his lost mistress and vowed, then and there, that she would marry his degenerate of a father—apparition or no—over his dead body.

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