Page 39 of Twins to Tame Him

Sebastian, as he usually did when he finished a huge piece like that, felt inadequate, small, torn apart, feeling none of the succor he thought he would have once he finished. He felt like that child again, wondering what he’d done to deserve this fate and wishing he could change it, even though it was the dream he’d once held closest to his heart.

He had set out to win Laila over to his way. He’d even found her naive and easy in one sense because she was so...fair and logical to begin with. She wanted nothing but their sons’ happiness and honest desire between them. She just wanted a place for herself and he’d been happy to give it. But he’d never dreamed of her...falling in love with him, much less declaring it like this, or coming up with a fresh set of demands.

Even saying that made him want to roar and howl in a way he hadn’t done since he had been a teenager who had constantly wished he was like his brother.

It had taken all his willpower to let her sister take strips off Laila right in front of him. And then that taunt and Laila’s silence in the wake of it.

The bold, brave way she’d held his gaze.

He still didn’t know what to make of it. Only that it terrified him to his soul, that he felt...that same sense of powerlessness he’d felt as a kid with his father in the face of her love. Like he didn’t deserve it and didn’t know what to do with it.

He thrust a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

She smiled, and it was fragile and heartbreakingly beautiful. “Why were you so determined to ruin Guido?” she said, surprising him yet again. “Please, I deserve to know. I demand to know.”

And he knew that she was hacking away at all the shields he hid behind, tearing away all the blinders and smokescreens he used to keep the world at bay. She was going to bring him to his knees if he wasn’t there already and there was nothing he could do to stop her.

“He used to be Mama’s chauffeur. One summer, he helped her run away without raising Konstantin’s doubts one bit. I wanted to know where she went.”

“After all these years?” she said, tears in her eyes.

“I have never stopped wanting to make sure she was okay,” he said with a shrug. Not that he had understood that compulsion, either. Like with everything else about his head, he had simply given in. At some point, it had become less about any attachment he’d still felt for Mama and more a reason to continue in the aimless way he’d adapted his life to be.

“But Guido wouldn’t tell you?”

“No. Not even when I had the deed to his small house in my control.”

“And now? Do you still want to find her?”

He blew out a breath. “I will not say no. But the choke hold has lessened. Alexandros told me recently that she had planned to take me with her when she fled. That she’d packed my passport and my medication in her little bag, that somehow Konstantin might have upset her plan at the last minute, and she had to flee instantly.”

“And leave Alexandros behind to your father? Rip you, too, from him? That’s extraordinarily cruel,” she said, and he could see the rage she was working hard to temper.

“I agree,” he said, remembering the bleakness in his twin’s face when he had revealed that piece of the past that had tormented him for so long. “I think he thought it would bring me solace after all these years to know that she wanted me with her. I was more attached to her from the beginning and... I wouldn’t stop looking for her.”

“But it didn’t work out like Alexandros thought it would,” she said, so damned perceptive.

“Other than ripping him apart for God knows how long with guilt that he’d hidden it from me, no.”

“Did you tell him that you would have never abandoned him?”

It felt like the punches kept coming, like he was already on his knees, but she wouldn’t leave him until he was bloody and broken. “So sure of me, Laila?”

“I know you, Sebastian. Better than anyone else in the world. Maybe even better than Alexandros.”

That piece of truth moved through him like a bullet, ricocheting through the chambers of his chest. And he was beginning to understand why he felt hunted. “I did tell him that I’d have never left him. And in the end, Mama chose her freedom over me, too. I never blamed her for being weak in the face of Konstantin’s will.”

One lone tear followed the strong cheek down to her chin. Strangely, her tears on his behalf didn’t bother Sebastian one bit. Because she understood exactly how he felt? Because she could see who he was beyond all that he had endured?

He felt a cold chill and a hot flare at the very pit of his being. It was the freedom he’d chased all his life—to be seen as he was—and yet denied himself because he’d been determined to be far from the shadow of the past. He’d bound himself in the shackles of the Skalas name as much as Alexandros had done, just in a different way. He hadn’t outrun the name at all.

He had almost lost the chance to know about his sons. And now, when he had them within reach, within his home, within his heart, it was not enough. The means had become the end...and suddenly, Sebastian Skalas, one of the most renowned, brilliant artists of their time, a near mythical man who could alchemize emotion into colors, who could pin down the world into one blank canvas in all its glory and its disgrace, didn’t know if he was enough. If he could withstand the love of this woman, if he could stand under its shadow and not freeze to ice, if he could ever...return it without conditions and contracts and...the crippling fear that he would lose it all. That something within him—some rot that his father had planted—wouldn’t push her away.

“After seeing you with the boys...” he continued, determined to get it all out, because she was hollowing him out anyway, “I knew Alexandros was not wrong in being angry with Mama all these years, in blaming her as much as he did Konstantin for our ruined childhoods. A few hours after that first night, I knew how it could be. How it should be.”

She took a grasping, watery breath as if she were the one living through the past.

“And yet, you’re here,” she said, walking toward him, “making glorious art and loving your sons right from the first minute and being a man in your own right, and being this extraordinarily kind man. I...” She smiled weakly through the tears and straightened her shoulders. “I know what I want for my third wish.”

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