Page 1 of Greek’s Christmas Heir

CHAPTER ONE

ANAXIGNATIOSHADempires 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 hewasthe 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, justnicerones. 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 knewexactlyhow 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.

---