Page 106 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

But he had given up on bedtime stories like that long ago.

And he had known the truth about Jolie from the first. He would be a weak man indeed if a pretty face changed his mind. He would be no better than his father.

He landed in Paris in a foul mood that the rain did not improve.

He met Alceu in one of the properties he kept in Paris, a town house a short walk from the Musée d’Orsay, and found his friend a curious reflection of his own odd frame of mind.

“You seem agitated,” he told Alceu after they concluded the business that they’d ostensibly met to discuss.

“I am never agitated,” his friend replied at once, making it clear enough to Apostolis that he was not quite himself. “You are the one who has the steam coming out of his ear. Is that not the phrase?”

As if Alceu did not know the damned phrase, fluent as he was in every language he encountered. But he did like to pretend otherwise for his own entertainment, and who was Apostolis to stand between his friend and his fun?

“What I cannot abide,” Apostolis said instead, “is a liar who cannot determine that the time has come to stop spinning her stories.”

But he regretted saying it instantly, because something in him...balked.

Rationally, it didn’t make any sense. This was his oldest friend in the world. When he’d had no one, when his father had disowned him and made it clear that he was not permitted to come home, Alceu had been like a brother to him. Like more than a brother. They had forged their way through the world together. They had always, always stood tall at one another’s backs.

He had always considered Alceu closer to him than his actual family.

All the same, something in him considered it the deepest kind of betrayal that he’d said even something so opaque about Jolie.

He understood in that moment that if she unburdened herself in a similar way to a friend of hers—or worse, his sister—even if she kept what she said as devoid of details, he would feel it like a knife in the gut.

And he could not say that he cared much for the way that realization made him feel, now that it was too late. Now that he’d said the thing he shouldn’t have said. Maybe he’d needed to say such a thing to understand that things really had changed between him and Jolie, despite his protestations.

But sheisa liar,a voice in him insisted.

Because the alternative was untenable.

Perhaps it was lucky that his friend seemed entirely preoccupied with the view of Paris outside his windows. A view that Alceu had seen before. Too many times to count.

“You seem unduly interested in the city tonight,” Apostolis pointed out. “You must have developed a love for Paris that I did not think you possessed.”

His friend did not turn back to face him. “I live at the top of a mountain. My nearest neighbors are trees. Sometimes it amazes me that so many people live like this. And on purpose.”

Somehow, Apostolis didn’t think that was it, though he knew better than to push. Alceu was less flexible than the mountain he lived on. “My sister said something similar.” He laughed, remembering his last call with Dioni, who had managed to sound even more flighty andDionion what had sounded like the busiest street in Manhattan than before. “Did I not tell you that she has taken himself off to New York City, of all places, for the duration.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Apostolis thought that Alceu seemed...even stiffer and more forbidding than usual, then. “I too was amazed that the little mouse would take herself off to the big city. I thought perhaps, one day, she might spend some time in Athens, I suppose, as many do. But New York?” He shrugged. “Yet as she tells it, it is as if she has never known home until now.”

Alceu let out a laugh, then, and the sound made Apostolis frown. It was too bitter. It was...

But he never finished that thought, because Alceu turned around and was looking directly at him again, and his eyes were dark. And his voice was terse when he spoke. “As far as liars go, at a certain point it is better to choose to believe a lie if it leads to peace.”

Apostolis blinked at that most unexpected statement from a man he would never have described aspeacefulbut Alceu was already moving, heading for the door as if responding to an alarm only he could hear.

“I beg your pardon, but I must go,” Alceu bit off in that frozen way of his. “I forgot that there are some calls I must make.”

And he shut the door behind him when he went in a manner that Apostolis thought boded ill for whoever it was he needed to call.

But he did not brood any further over his friend’s behavior—or the odd thing he’d said aboutpeace—once he’d gone. He moved over to the window himself and looked out at the scene that had so captivated Alceu. Paris at night, gleaming in the rain.

Yet he didn’t see it. All he could think about was Jolie.

Jolie kneeling before him, whispering,what if.

---