CHAPTER TWELVE
STAVROS NIKOLIDES WAS DEAD.
Alexios Kyriakos balled his hands into fists as he read the online news report. The man his father had looked up to and trusted like no other, the man who had subsequently betrayed him and left him broken and shattered, had suffered a massive heart attack while partying on his yacht, his life snuffed out between a magnum of champagne and his bikini-clad mistress.
Dead.
It should be enough.
He stood, unable to digest the news sitting down, the muscles in his long legs itching for action, and carrying him to the wall of glass that looked out across the city of Athens to the Acropolis where the ruins of the Parthenon baked under a relentlessly hot Greek sun.
The gods had exacted their revenge.
It should be enough.
Except that it wasn’t.
Instead Alexios felt cheated. Denied the opportunity to yank Stavros’s diamond-encrusted life out from beneath him. Denied the opportunity to balance the scales on his own terms, when vengeance had been so damned close he could taste it.
Where was the revenge he’d promised his father on his deathbed? Where was the levelling of the score he’d worked towards these last ten years? He’d never once begged the gods to solve his problems. He’d stood on his own two feet and looked after himself from day one. Why now had they intervened and stolen the vengeance he had worked so hard for?
He stared up at the mount, teeming with sweltering tourists, as if the answer lay there, amidst the ruins of the Parthenon and the Temple of Athena Nike. And a switch flicked in his head.
Athena.
He strode back to the desk, scrolling down the report, pausing when he came to the two photographs. One grainy file shot of her in a string bikini draped on a yacht anchored off the Amalfi Coast, the other of her wearing dark glasses and a pinched expression as she pushed past the cameras and microphones jostling for a picture and a reaction outside the hospital morgue where her father’s body had been taken.
Athena Nikolides. Twenty-seven-year-old product of Stavros’s short-lived marriage to an Australian model turned actress, and now no doubt heiress to a fortune—a fortune her father had stolen from anyone and everyone he could steal from.
Athena Nikolides.
With her mother’s stunning looks and her father’s ill-gotten fortune.
There was his revenge.
ATHENA SAT NUMBLY in a café in Thera, barely registering the coffee she’d ordered set before her, let alone the sprawling sea-filled caldera of Santorini far below or the way its surface sparkled like jewels under a September sun that still packed a punch.
It was the three cruise ships that lay anchored that held her gaze, or, rather, their tenders, busy like bees ferrying passengers back to their vessels after a day riding donkeys up the steep steps and wandering the cobbled steps of the towns clinging to the cliff’s edge. Idly she watched the tiny boats come and go, their movements vaguely therapeutic.
She took a long breath of the clean salt air, and let it out slowly, feeling the tension in her shoulders and neck dissipate with the steady rhythm of their to-ing and fro-ing, easing the dull ache in her head she’d had ever since leaving the sterile steel and concrete offices of her father’s lawyers in Athens.
It was the shock, she knew. The shock, and the strain of trying to follow a legal conversation delivered in rapid-fire Greek, that had made her head spin. Her conversational skills might have been enough to get her through her university studies, but they were no match for the full-on onslaught of legalese she’d had to interpret, and the certainty that she must have got it wrong.
It wasn’t until she’d held up one hand and appealed to them that she didn’t understand, that nothing made sense, that one of them had taken pity on her, and uttered the words in English. ‘It’s quite simple, Athena, your father left it all to you. Everything he owned. Every last euro.’
And even delivered in English, that had made the least sense of all.
She shook her head, just as she’d shaken her head then, still battling to come to terms with a morning that defied logic and had left her reeling.
She’d entered the offices confused about why she’d even been summoned, only to exit it one hour later baffled, because suddenly she was one of the richest women in Greece. The estranged father who’d disinherited her when she was in her teens had left it all to her, his fortune, a home in Athens, a super-yacht complete with helicopter, and then the jewel in the crown, the Aegean island of Argos.
Every last bit of his fortune left to her.
And she’d had no idea.
She tossed back her coffee as a string of donkeys led by a man with a leathered face clip-clopped lethargically by, the animals worn out from ferrying cruise-ship passengers up and down the cobbled path to the crater’s edge. It was impossible not to feel for the creatures, but there was good reason Santorini attracted so many visitors. The stark beauty of the ring of islands and its seemingly bottomless blue crater, the dark looming cliffs of ancient volcanic ash with their white buildings around the crater’s rim like icing on a cake. Along with the famous sunsets.
Athena loved it for all those reasons and more, for its rich ancient history and for the elemental power of the weather, the wind so wild at times, it threatened to hurl you from the crater’s edge. As she felt now. Tossed by the winds of fortune.
She’d been so right to come.
She felt real here. Humbled.
Besides, where else would she go?
Back to Melbourne where she’d grown up after her parents had divorced, where all her school friends were, or to the tiny dot of a village from where her father had come, that she remembered only one time visiting as a child? She could go to either, but she would be known. Friends in Melbourne. Family in the village to welcome their long-lost relative. Her aunts and uncles and cousins many times removed. There would be hugs and tears and concern for how she was coping, and that would be lovely, but there would
