Page 51 of Vows of Revenge

‘Yes. I intend to acquire Cosmo’s freight and logistics business,’ he said. ‘So I don’t want him selling to your father—’

She cut across him. ‘You knew Cosmo Palandrou would be here this evening, didn’t you?’ Her voice was still empty. ‘You wanted to turn up with me—didn’t you? So that he would see us together. So my father would see us...see us and know—’ She broke off.

That same closed, stark look was in Damos’s face.

‘Yes,’ he said. His hand tightened on her arm. ‘Kassia, all I wanted was for your father and Cosmo to know about us. Then your father’s scheme would collapse on the spot and we could just walk away. I never thought your father would react like that! Would say such things to his own daughter!’

The vile words her father had thrown at her were still slicing through her, each one drawing blood.

‘My father does not take opposition well,’ she heard herself say, her tone expressionless. ‘And his temper,’ she said, ‘is very short.’

But that wheel in her head was still moving forward, slowly and agonisingly. Taking her to a place she did not want to go. A place she would have given all she possessed not to be taken to. But those words that her father had hurled at her, so vile and ugly, were taking her there.

She heard them again now, incising across her consciousness as if with sharpest knife.

‘Do you really think Damos Kallinikos would have looked twice at you if you hadn’t been my daughter? He’s used you—’

Carefully, very carefully, she lifted Damos’s hand off her arm and took a step back. The air felt thick, like the toxic air of a distant planet. The planet that she was now on. A million light years from all she had known. Had thought she knew...

‘Tell me something,’ she said, and she thought there was something wrong with her voice, as well as with the air she was breathing. It was starting to suffocate her. ‘When did decide you wanted Cosmo’s company? And when did you learn of my father’s charming plans for me?’ She stopped, trying to take another breath, but the toxic air was in her throat now, and it was suffocating her.

She forced herself on. Forced herself to ask the final question. The question she would have given everything not to ask, but must.Must...

‘Was it before you showed up at the dig?’

He did not answer. His face had closed.

She let her eyes rest on him. On Damos. On the man who was not Damos. Not the man she’d just spent the three most wonderful weeks of her life with. Three weeks which had transformed her life. Transformedher...

Into a fool...a gullible, cretinous idiot.

Her father’s vicious, excoriating, scathing castigation rang pitilessly in her ears. And more words too.

‘Whore! Slut—shameless slut!’

She wanted to silence them, but it was impossible...impossible. Oh, dear God. To think she had wanted her father to see that she was no longer the crushed, dowdy daughter he’d always condemned her as being! To think that she’d thought her glamorous new look would achieve that...her fabulous transformation into a woman that any man might desire...

That Damos might desire.

A cry rose up in her from very deep, excoriating her.

Fool—oh, fool! It was never about you—never. Not for a single moment! It was only about—

‘You knew,’ she said, never taking her eyes from him though each word was like a scalpel on her skin. ‘You knew that Cosmo Palandrou would not want to...to marry me if I had already—’ She swallowed, and it was as if that scalpel was peeling the skin from inside her throat. ‘If I had already, as my father so succinctly put it,“warmed your bed...”’

She fell silent. What else was there to say? What else could ever be said?

Except the word that fell from Damos’s lips now.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She turned away.

She felt her arm seized, heard words breaking from Damos.

‘Kassia—listen...listen to me!Please!It wasn’t...isn’t...’

She gave another cry, yanking her arm free, plunging down a path on feet that were stumbling, desperate.

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