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Chapter One

Anax Ignatios had empires to run, rivals to decimate with his innate superiority, and whole worlds to claim.

His father had given him the great gift of being a useless brute who was terrible at all things paternal, so Anax had been faced with two choices in this life. He could have followed in the footsteps of the rest of the men in his family, all of them drunk, disorderly, and too free with their fists. Or he could do what he’d done instead—and rise.

Anax had risen so high, in fact, that he often thought that he was the stratosphere, as a fawning journalist had claimed once in an article.

He had made his first million by teaching himself how to trade his own securities and doing so brilliantly, taking no small amount of pleasure in beating the much-lauded financial wizards of New York, London, and Tokyo at their own games. These days he concentrated more on finding vile, bullying corporations, buying them out, and transforming them entirely.

Your little gift to the world, his sharp-mouthed sister, Vasiliki, had sniffed once. Not fewer corporations, just nicer ones. You can clearly hear the people sing.

Another gift to the world, but mostly to you, is that I allow you to work in these awful corporations of mine, he had pointed out. You are welcome, sister. Your gratitude is overwhelming.

There were some men in his position who would not tolerate a sister like his, with her innate disrespect that billowed like a flowing cloak behind her and swirled all around her every time she laid eyes on the brother who had literally saved her. From the rough neighborhood in Athens where they’d had to fight every day to stay alive. From the life she would have had there, like so many girls they’d known growing up, all toil and pain and darkness.

A life like the one they’d watched their own mother live.

Anax had not had the chance to rid the world of his overbearing monster of a father, though he had dreamed of little else when he was still too small to do anything about it. The old man had seen to his own end. Paraskevas Ignatios had finally gotten too drunk and too belligerent one night, at the wrong time and in the wrong company. He had started one of the fights he loved to throw himself into, all burly shoulders and that face of his marked with scars from innumerable brawls past.

It was out there in the nasty streets of one of Athens’s most dangerous neighborhoods that the old man had gotten his comeuppance. Not from his own son, to Anax’s sorrow.

Though on the rare occasions Anax concerned himself with thoughts regarding his soul, he could accept the possibility that this twist of fate had been the saving of his.

But that didn’t make him happy about it.

In response to being cruelly denied the one thing the teenage version of him had desired more than anything, Anax had made himself a force for good, if not in the whole world, then at least in his own, personal world. He had set his mother up in a house far from the slums where he had watched her weep, had patched up her injuries, and had fumed over her bruises—and his own helplessness back then. He had seen to his sister’s education—not a privilege he had ever enjoyed himself, not that she was appropriately grateful for her opportunities, to his mind. He had made it clear to the remaining reprobates who shared his blood that they should consider the relationship permanently severed unless and until they cleaned themselves up, which none of them had.

He had dedicated himself to changing his life for the better, but had also applied his time, energy, and ever-growing fortune to improve the lives of everyone he loved.

Anax doubted that he was a good man, but he tried to do good things. By any objective measure, surely, that should have mattered in the cosmic scheme of things.

And yet here he was.

In a cornfield. In a grand succession of cornfields, in fact—some shorn low and some weighed down heavily with snow.

In one of those American states that was almost entirely composed of vowels.

Tracking down an act of violation so extreme he wasn’t sure he would ever fully comprehend it. All he could do was hope against hope that this was one more lie the treacherous Delphine had told—

But he had to see for himself.

He had to make sure.

And if it was true, well. He knew what he needed to do.

The sins of his own father lived in his bones, his blood. He had never doubted this for a moment. Anax knew exactly how much he had wished to kill his own father with his own two hands.

He had never had the slightest intention of passing the Ignatios family legacy along. All those fists. All that pain. All the broken bodies and broken lives.

Yet here I am, he thought, while what little light there was flirted with the low horizon, as if even the sun itself found this part of the world too bitter and cold.

Anax scowled out at the fields that stretched out on either side, on into eternity. This was not the America he knew, all those grandiose coastal cities packed with people and possibility. This was a land of gigantic skies and gentle, undulating hills. There were far-off agricultural structures clustered together, reminding him somehow of medieval villages in places like Tuscany, huddled in on themselves in the cold of this December afternoon. With gleaming lights suggesting that there were yet people here, too.

Reminding him that, despite everything, it was Christmas Eve.

But all he saw was the face of his ex-lover.

An ex-lover he doubted he would recall much at all, had she not made certain that she was unforgettable to him for all the wrong reasons.

The sumptuously theatrical Delphine had not accepted it when he no longer took her calls. First she had tried to access him through his various offices, and had thrown fits when denied—repeatedly—by his security personnel. Then she had changed her approach, claiming to every media outlet she could locate that Anax had treated her appallingly. She had dined out on fabricated tales of his bad behavior for quite a few months.

When he had only enjoyed her company for only a month or so, and infrequently at that, and had never given her the slightest reason to believe that he saw her as anything but a pleasant diversion.

He was always scrupulously clear on that score. With every woman who ventured near.

Anax had seen too much of what his parents had called passion. He had watched it sour and curdle over the years. He had witnessed its slide into a misery almost beyond recounting, but neither his father nor mother had wished to leave because they had married in the church. Because marriage meant something, his mother would whisper fiercely. Because they had taken vows.

Though he rather thought his father had been more concerned with the more prosaic benefits of having his wife be little more than his servant, at his beck and call. Evgenia had provided the unworthy Paraskevas with food. She had kept the succession of ever seedier flats clean and something like homey. She knew better than to question him about where he went or what he did when he was out. And she’d learned fast not to fight back. Or even look at him funny.

It had not taken young Anax much to conclude that marriage was a curse, passion was a lie, and love was a good, hard, bitter laugh.

His father had never spoken of such things. It was his mother who spoke of love. Evgenia still did and had, in recent years, become more and more dedicated to the church that, to Anax’s way of thinking, kept its own foot as firmly on her neck as her husband always had.

He knew that he had not given Delphine any false hope concerning his attentions.

You are not the only person alive with admirers, Anax, she had hissed at him the last time they had come face-to-face with each other. The last time she had engineered such a meeting, that was. You might be surprised to learn that I have a great many admirers too.

He had not doubted it. She was perilously beautiful. Anax would not have noticed her otherwise.

But that particular night he had been trying to be his better self. Not the furious Ignatios male inside of him, who had wanted to snarl at her. Who had wanted to hurl out harsh words, because surely she deserved them after all the lies she’d told—

He hadn’t. He’d only inclined his head and murmured the dismissive, Endaxi.

Later, he would interrogate the host of that ball and his own security team. Later he would demand to know how she could possibly have found her way into the party when he had made it clear to the entire planet that she could not appear anywhere he was. That she could be neither invited nor welcomed to any event that invited or welcomed him.

This had not been a hard choice for anyone.

Delphine was a little-known hyphenate and had never been very good at any part of the many things she claimed to do. Acting. Modeling. Influencing.

Meanwhile Anax was…himself.

He had been pleased with himself for remaining polite. It had felt like growth.

You might as well end the tabloid games, he had said after a moment, when all she’d done was stare at him as if imparting some kind of subliminal message that way. Anax could have told her that such things did not work on him. Despite a great many attempts. I revel in a bad reputation. It matters to no one and, if I am honest, makes me sound much more interesting than I am.

Delphine had bared her teeth at him. It can always get worse, Anax. Always.

Anax had shrugged at that. Unlikely. But by all means, try.

He hadn’t thought much about her since. Nearly eighteen months had passed. There had been no more tabloid stories. Delphine had not made any surprise appearances. If he’d remembered her at all, it was only to assume that some other shiny thing had caught her attention and diverted it from him.

But then, two weeks ago, his head of security had come to him in his gleaming offices in Athens. It was a chilly December, cold for Greece yet bright. Anax had been enjoying a few rounds of intense negotiations that week, something he liked to keep his hand in despite the phalanx of attorneys he had at the ready.

A man had to make his own fun.

You have received a worrying letter, Stavros had told him grimly.

My understanding is that I receive a great number of worrying letters, Anax had replied mildly.

He’d closed his laptop and sat back in his chair. He had not been thinking about letters. He’d been thinking of the fiery actress who had indicated she would like to see more of him, which was a pity, as it meant he needed to extricate himself. He was wondering how worried he should be about Evgenia these days, as his mother’s devotion to her church schedule was taking up the bulk of her time when, surely, she should be resting her way through her later years. He was deliberately not responding to his sister’s latest spate of accusatory texts that would get anyone else fired.

Negotiations were a charming distraction from these things.

But his head of security continued to stand there before Anax’s admittedly extravagant desk, a slab of marble that could rival the Acropolis.

We took pains to authenticate this letter before bringing it to your attention, sir, he had said. It would have given me great pleasure to be able to dismiss it.

And then, with great deliberation, Stavros had laid it all out.

Step by violating step.

Anax found his hands in fists, there in the back of the hardy SUV that was whisking him from the airfield they’d landed in to…wherever they were headed. A tiny village, by all accounts. His assistants had showed him endless maps, but he hadn’t taken it in.

He still couldn’t take it in.

The past two weeks had been a blur, but one part was monstrously, unequivocally clear.

Delphine had disappeared from Anax’s view, but not from his life. She had not moved on at all. What she had done instead was enact her vile plot.

What he could not understand was how that shallow woman, who he barely knew and who had certainly never known anything substantive about him aside from his body and net worth, had managed to come up with the one weapon that would actually hurt him.

Maybe he would never understand.

Beside him, his personal assistant—her actual title was executive assistant, but Vasiliki preferred to be called his chief of staff—shifted in her seat. She tapped his arm and widened her eyes in the direction of his fists.

She didn’t have to tell him to unclench his fists. They had grown up in the same house. They had been subject to the same rages, the same tantrums, the same bursts of shouting and sudden attacks.

Anax threatened to fire her at least three times a week, but he never would. His sister was invaluable. She was an excellent executive assistant. She could take on that role anywhere and would likely take over the company. But here, with him, she also acted as his barometer.

The Paraskevas test, they called it.

And he was failing it.

He let his fingers uncurl.

“We are nearly there,” she said, looking out the window, her expression unreadable.

He felt a rage in him he had always sworn would never grow there within him. Never. “Good.”

But there was nothing good about this. It was a tragedy in real time and once again, he could not stop it. He could not end it. He could only deal with the fallout.

Delphine had gone to America. Anax’s men had pieced together her movements after she’d landed in New York and as best they could understand, she had infiltrated the bar at a medical conference outside Manhattan. That she had fully intended to seduce one of the doctors was clear, but in case there had been any doubt, Anax’s team had found the old footage the hotel kept for its own security purposes.

The doctor in question was a highly regarded fertility specialist in a clinic in another one of those places that sounded fake to Anax’s ears. He was also married. That had likely been another requirement for Delphine, who had showed up at the man’s place of business after the very steamy week she’d spent with him.

They had records of that, too.

Her threats to the man could only be imagined.

The rest they’d had to figure out backwards, based on the contents of the letter she’d sent.

I warned you this would get worse, Delphine had written. Congratulations, Daddy. Too bad the child of the mighty Anax Ignatios will be little more than a grubby little peasant farmer in the middle of nowhere. I can’t wait until the tabloids find out.

When his security team caught up with her earlier this week, Delphine had been living it up in St. Barts. She had been only too happy to spitefully tell them exactly what she’d done—though she’d coyly pretended it was a book she’d read, so as not to overtly implicate herself. A story about a terrible man and a woman who had taught him a lesson by helping herself to the contents of a condom they’d used, preserving it, and then having her married fertility doctor impregnate a nobody with it.

I asked her why she would do such a detestable thing, Stavros had told Anax. And she said, I am afraid, that she did it because she could. Because that was what you have always done.

The injustice of that had burned in him. It still did.

When pressed, Stavros had also admitted that Delphine had laughed uproariously and had then toasted Anax in absentia. Shoe’s on the other foot now, isn’t it?

Though she had used more profanity.

It would be difficult to prove what she’d done, his lawyers had told him. It was easier to make sure her married lover never worked again. Anax had started there.

And now there was this.

He was going to meet the woman who was pregnant with child.

A woman he had never met, carrying the child he had never wanted.

He felt entirely too much about both of those things. So much that he had worried on the flight here that he might very well decimate the Paraskevas test altogether with the great, driving force of his fury.

Anax would break the whole of America in half if he could.

But that makes you no better than him, he reminded himself curtly.

And he was willing to be many things in this life, but never his father. He had planned to make sure he was never any kind of father at all, but Delphine had destroyed that.

Anax had seen the paperwork with his own eyes. He had read it and reread it. But the DNA matched his.

“Tell me again what I can expect,” he said now, making himself lean back in his seat. He could not relax. That was an impossibility. But he could pretend.

And pretending almost felt like action.

That his sister did not snap at him that she had told him these details a hundred times already—and he knew she had—was a clear indication that she was having trouble getting her head around this, too.

“The mother’s name is Constance Jones,” Vasiliki said, her Greek accent making that very American-sounding name seem almost exotic. “She has always lived in this same village. Her family has been in the area for generations. They were farmers, though her grandfather sold off all the farmland before she was born and she was raised in the town, such as it is. This is all in the paperwork she filled out for the clinic.”

The paperwork that Delphine had pored over while blackmailing her lover, looking for what she thought Anax would consider the mother most below him. A woman who bore no resemblance whatever to the great beauties that he had been seen with all his life. A woman of no status and precious little means.

She likely hoped his child would be raised in squalor.

“Constance Jones is thirty years old,” Vasiliki was saying. “She has worked in the parish church since she graduated from high school. Her parents died when she was sixteen, and she lived with her grandparents. Her grandfather died when she was twenty-five, her grandmother died a little over a year ago. She is single. Never been married. Our people dug deep and there is nothing to suggest she has ever had any sort of relationship with a man.”

“Marvelous,” Anax muttered, and he could not tell if he was being sardonic or not.

“And apparently,” Vasiliki continued, “her pregnancy is a bit of a scandal.”

Anax tried to imagine what that would look like in a place like this, as the car made its way into the town that nestled on either side of what was likely a creek of some kind in warmer weather. Not that it was much of a town, to his mind. A petrol station nearer the motorway. A few buildings scattered here and there. A water tower was the only thing that created some drama against the horizon.

What was a scandal when there were no tabloids to amplify it all and create narratives from thin air?

Here, too, there were Christmas lights everywhere. He kept forgetting what day it was.

Vasiliki was looking at her mobile. “The other car drove to the woman’s house, but it’s empty. They think that everyone is at church.”

“Wonderful,” Anax said bitterly. “As our sainted mother always says, I am likely to bring the place down in flames around me should I dare to enter. Let’s find out.”

His sister only raised a brow at him. But it didn’t matter, because there was only one church in this tiny town, set next to a tidy graveyard that looked old and faintly spooky beneath the bare-limbed trees. They were there in no time.

And this was no time to become whimsical.

Anax got out of the SUV and braced himself against the profound punch of the cold, made worse by the wind. From inside the church, he could hear quite a lot of animated singing. He looked over at his sister as she came to stand beside him, her cheeks already red from the cold, as neither one of them was used to weather like this.

Vasiliki nodded, and together they walked up to the church’s double doors, then let themselves inside.

The place was bright and blazingly hot, an instant furnace. The temperature difference was so extreme it took Anax a moment to make sense of what he was seeing.

The little church was packed full. There were a surprising amount of people stuffed into the pews. There were children running in the aisles. There was also, unless he was mistaken or having a quiet stroke, livestock near the altar.

“Oh, no!” cried a boy from the front.

Anax squinted at him. He looked no more than ten, though he was swaddled in a voluminous beard and appeared to be wearing a dress.

“There’s no room in the inn!”

The boy turned with great, grand gestures, and Anax’s gaze followed him, like a reflex.

Then he froze.

Because he understood then that he was witnessing some kind of living, breathing nativity scene.

The boy was clearly meant to be Joseph. And the Mary in question that Anax could now behold with his own eyes was not only old enough to be the boy’s mother, she was actually pregnant.

Hugely, heavily, distractingly pregnant.

So pregnant it was almost hard to notice that she was also far lovelier, with a glow about her, than he had ever imagined the Virgin Mother to be.

The kind of pregnant a woman would be if she had gotten pregnant on the precise date and time that the clinic’s paperwork had said the woman carrying his child had. Or if she had been subjected to the sort of divine intervention the character she was playing had been, but he rather doubted that.

Anax imagined that it was unlikely that there were two such enormously pregnant women wandering around this tiny speck of a town that wasn’t on most of the maps he’d looked at.

That meant, first, that it was real. It was happening. Delphine had enacted this revenge in the form of a brand-new human that was soon to be born. Very soon, by all appearances.

And that the woman playing Mary, Mother of God, to a church made over into a stable yard in the wilds of the American Midwest on Christmas Eve, was none other than the very Constance Jones he had come here to meet.

The woman who looked as if she was about to have his child right then and there on a bale of hay, next to a goat.

But Anax could not allow that to happen. Not even in service of a nativity scene on Christmas Eve.

Because he intended to marry her first.

End of excerpt