Page 80 of Seduced By Contract

"But Celine . . .”

"He was a single parent. It seems her mother wasn't interested in his fortune either."

"So you agreed to marry her."

"I agreed. I wanted to destroy them, and I would use any means to do it."

"You said you've never seen her?"

"Not in person, and I didn't plan on living in the same house after we got married."

"Did he know that?"

"Yes, he knew because I included it in the contract. He thought it was normal. He thought I wanted mistresses, or maybe that over time, I would make her my wife in more than just name. Who knows? For most families in our circle, appearances are what matter. Many couples don't even sleep in the same room."

"Were your parents like that?"

"No. To the whole world, they seemed absolutely in love."

Madison

CHAPTER FORTY

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know. I've thought about it a lot over the years, and an affair on my mother's part didn't make sense to me or my siblings, but who can really understand what goes on in people's minds? As for my father, I know he loved her, otherwise he wouldn't have done what he did."

My God, what a sad story.

"What were you planning to do with the bank?"

"Break it apart. Sell it piece by piece until the Gordon name disappeared from high society worldwide. That was the promise I made to my grandfather."

"That would affect the girl and that Emerson guy, not the man who the revenge should really be directed towards, and who was already dead, by the way."

"I've never been good at returning insults in kind, Madison. Revenge runs in my blood. I would use any means to retaliate. They destroyed my father with their betrayal. Do you have any idea what it feels like to have been deceived for years by your spouse and your best friend?"

I try to absorb everything he's telling me, and I feel sympathetic about his parents' deaths, but it doesn't change anything between us. "You asked me to listen, and I did. I'm sorry about what happened to your family, Zeus, but it doesn't change the fact that you lied to me from the beginning and that you're going to marry another woman."

"I haven't finished speaking yet. Like I said before, I didn't come here for your sympathy; I came so you would listen to me. If you still want to kick me out in the end, I'll go."

I nod and shift my gaze away, focusing on my feet. I hold my arms tightly around my knees, as if that can protect me from him, from us. From this love that, even after everything, still seems to overflow inside me.

"The deal I told you about happened shortly before we met. However, right after that, there were changes."

"What kind of changes?"

"I have two older cousins. They knew all about my revenge plans, especially about what I had committed to. Long before making the deal with old Gordon, they were buying GordonBank shares without my knowledge, through companies they owned, but that on the surface had no direct connection to either the Lykaioses or the Kostanidises."

"They were deceiving the patriarch."

"Exactly. On the day you and I returned from the Hamptons, when I had lunch with my brothers, they came clean. We were only one percent away from having the majority of the shares and, consequently, control of GordonBank in our hands."

"But wouldn't Mr. Gordon have more shares than you anyway?"

"No, he owned twenty-five percent, and that made him the majority shareholder in the beginning. In companies like ours, the number of shares is very diluted among various investors, or even smaller companies. What Odin and Christos did was agame of patience. They bought small lots until they reached what we needed. But as I said, we were missing one percent. Ares and I traveled to New Orleans to resolve that issue."

"And now you have the total?"

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