So this had to be the second wife his mother had spoken of.
Resolve spurred him towards them, his long, gangling legs automatically taking him out into the open, where he could be seen. This wretched man, already married for the first time, with a young son, had seduced a servant in his employ and instantly dismissed her when she’d told him she was pregnant.
With him!
For that he would be made to pay!
He’d been seen; his intrusion had registered. Every nerve in Dimitri’s skinny body stretched and his mouth went dry. But his chin came up as the man who was his father walked towards him, leaving the woman who was his wife standing.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The voice carried the harshness of the despot he was, secure in his kingdom, the wealthy owner of cruise liners and swanky hotels. One hand, Dimitri noted, went to an inner jacket pocket. Did he carry a gun? he conjectured wildly. Did he mean to shoot the shabby peasant and claim self-defence? Or was he about to use some device to summon his security officers, have him tossed back over the wall with as much ceremony as the disposal of a bundle of unspeakable rubbish?
Refusing to let his tautened nerves get the better of him, he spoke, deploring the wretched highpitched squeak his breaking voice sometimes embarrassed him with. ‘I’m DimitriKyriakis, son of Eleni. Your son.’
Silence, thickening in the heat of the sun. His father’s hand slid back to his side. Empty.
A broad, stocky figure, black-suited, approached along a path that snaked from the villa. The woman began to move towards them. His father motioned them both back with an impatient arm movement. ‘An easy claim to make! And even easier to dismiss. What do you want with me?’
The handsome features were marred by what was doubtless a perpetual sneer. Dimitri reddened. He took insults from no one, but he had no pride where his mother’s wellbeing was concerned. She had worked her guts out to provide for them both, gone without food sometimes so that her son shouldn’t go hungry. Never complained.
He squared his bony shoulders. He was almost as tall as the older man. He willed his voice to remain steady. ‘You are Andreas Papadiamantis. Everyone knows how rich and powerful you are—all those fancy hotels and cruise liners. You have everything; my mother has nothing. Fifteen years ago Eleni Kyriakis worked here for you, as a domestic servant. You told her your marriage was finished. You seduced her. She was beautiful then and she was in love with you.’ His heart leaped when he saw the unmistakable flicker of recognition in his father’s eyes. He remembered her—remembered what had happened! It made what he had to say, ask, so much easier. ‘But she became pregnant, and when she told you you dismissed her. I guess you broke her heart.’
She hadn’t said as much, but Dimitri had sensed deep sadness when she spoke of what had happened all those years ago.
He met his father’s narrowed, contemptuous eyes and stated vehemently, ‘She doesn’t know I’m here, speaking to you. She would never ask for anything for herself. Ever. But I will. She is ill. Her heart is exhausted. She needs rest, decent food. I do what I can. At weekends and after school I work in the kitchens at one of your hotels here in Athens. It is some help, but it’s not enough.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All I ask is that you make her a small monthly allowance. Just enough to mean she doesn’t have to work to pay the rent and buy food.And only until I am able to provide for her myself. She needs to rest, to live without anxiety,’ he stressed, his voice cracking.
Rumoured to be one of the wealthiest men in Greece, Andreas Papadiamantis wouldn’t miss the outlay of a modest monthly allowance. He would probably spend more on an evening dining out with his beautiful second wife.
Refusing to let himself squirm under the relentless stare of his father’s hard black eyes, Dimitri blurted, ‘I want nothing for myself, and I will never ask anything else of you but this. A small allowance would mean little to you, but it would make the difference between life and an early death for my mother. Consult with her doctors if you don’t believe me!’
The man who was his father smiled then. A humourless twisting of his hard, handsome mouth. And his voice was harsh. ‘I don’t give in to blackmail—as smarter people than you have learned to their cost. Breathe one word of this to anyone else and I will squash you and your mother as if you were beetles beneath my feet. Even if your story is true, Eleni Kyriakis knew what she was doing when she opened her legs for me. And learn this and learn it well: dog eats dog in this world, and the weak go to the wall.’
An abrupt arm movement had the security guard advancing. He had hands like hams, Dimitri noted with the small part of his mind that wasn’t seething with impotent rage.
‘Spiro, see this person off my property.’ Not even looking at him, Andreas Papadiamantis turned and strolled back to the waiting woman, and Dimitri found himself ignominiously frogmarched to the main gates and tossed out onto the white dust of the road.
Hearing the gates clang shut, Dimitri hoisted himself back to his feet, his jaw set.
His mother had been insulted. He had been insulted. He hated the man who was his father. He would have his revenge. He brushed himself down and, his dark head held high, began the long trudge back to the city.
He would make his father pay for his callous insults. He would find a way.
His vow was strengthened when he discovered that there was to be no more work for him in the kitchens of his father’s hotel. The loss of his meagre pay was a spiteful act on his father’s part.
And the vow was set in impermeable stone when ten months later his mother died of a heart attack.
CHAPTER ONE
DIMITRI KYRIAKIS placed the unmarked buffcoloured envelope squarely in front of him on the gleaming expanse of the otherwise empty desktop and tried not to show his distaste as he dismissed the private investigator.
With the tips of his long fingers resting on the surface of the envelope he stared out of the huge floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, seeing nothing.
He had lived for thirty-six years, a driven man, with the last twenty-two of those years spent coldly and clinically exacting vengeance on the man who was his father for the way he’d flung unforgivable insults and flatly refused to help his gentle, loving mother when she’d needed financial help as much as she’d needed oxygen and he, her son, fourteen years old, had been impotent to provide it.
Years spent working, learning, planning, taking at first tentative steps and then giant strides towards his objective: the downfall of the arrogantly powerful Andreas Papadiamantis.
Already the Kyriakis fleet of eye-wateringly luxurious cruise liners had relegated his father’s dwindling fleet to scratching for the cut-price, downmarket, kiss-me-quick tourist business, and it was rumoured to be going out of business altogether.
And now his money men were working on the takeover of the last two of his father’s hotels. One in Paris, the other in London. The rest had been overshadowed by the Kyriakis chain, driven out of the top end of the market and eventually sold off at a loss.
But things had changed. His father had disappeared off the radar six months ago—none of the usual mentions in the press, no sightings at his head office in Athens—and the thought of the old lion crawling into his den to lick his wounds had been oddly unsettling to Dimitri. He needed his enemy to be in the ring, fighting.
