Page 35 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

A sign of possessiveness that made everything inside her...dance.

He might as well have set off a bomb. Apostolis’s gaze went blank, then wide.

Then even darker.

Beside him, Jolie smiled.

“Dioni and I are married,” Alceu announced in his forbidding way. “We are expecting our son in a couple of months and I know you will both join us in celebrating this great joy.”

There was another deep, intense silence.

Dioni could hear her own heartbeat, like a drum. She could feel his hand on her neck and the way the heat of him coursed through her until she had to repress a shiver.

And for a moment, it was as if the four of them were frozen into place, as incapable of moving as if they were carved from ice. She might have thought she was if it weren’t for Alceu’s hand on her neck.

But then the ice shattered and everything got loud.

Her brother was shouting. Alceu was not shouting back, but he wasn’t backing down, either.

“All this time you were nothing more than a snake in the grass,” Apostolis threw at him, after a spate of furious and insulting Greek that Dioni hoped neither Alceu nor Jolie could follow. “I trusted you!”

“I have no excuse,” Alceu replied after a moment, sounding...if not preciselyunbothered, then certainly not bursting with the sort ofcertaintyabout the two of them she might have liked to hear in this moment. She tried to tell herself she was imagining it as he continued. “The fault is mine.”

Clearly she was not imagining it. That fatalistic tone of his that made everything in her curl up in a tight bristle.

Dioni turned to stare at him. And she was aware as she did that she was more upset with that cool, emotionless statement than with the yelling, suggesting she wasn’t quite right herself. She found she didn’t care. “The fault is yours? As if you did this by yourself?”

Both her husband and her brother ignored her, making that bristling, thorny thing inside her seem to sink its claws in deeper.

“You defiled her,” Apostolis went on, and that he was quieter did not make it any better to hear her brother say such a thing. As if she was unclean, which was a problem for him even though he wasn’t looking at her, but at Alceu. “I’ve spent my life taking care of her, and I thought you understood that. What it meant. Why I did it. And yet all the while, you were just as bad as your own—”

“He did not seduce me or take advantage of me in any way,” Dioni broke in, before he finished that sentence the way she feared he would. “Quite the opposite. If you cared that much about it, maybe you should have paid more attention to what was going on around you while you were pretending to hate Jolie at your wedding.”

“At my wedding,” her brother repeated, taking a step toward Alceu, looking even more murderous than before. “You stood up for me. You were my best man.”

Tension emanated out from Apostolis and an eruption seemed inevitable—but Alceu, again, only inclined his head. “There’s nothing I can say to explain away these facts, I am afraid.”

Apostolis stepped closer and Dioni moved forward as if she thought she could personally intercept him with her body.

Well. What she thought was that shewouldintercept him and he would have to toss her to the ground to get past her. She did not think that even now, even in this state, he would do that.

“What is the matter with you?” she demanded, loudly, of her hero. The brother she had looked up to, always, and had never had so much as a single harsh word for in all her life. Maybe later, when this moment was solved and lived through, she would mourn the loss of that innocence along with all the rest. “Can you hear yourself, Apostolis? This is your best friend. Your business partner. He is, and has always been, a good and honorable man who you yourself have always said you would trust with your life. And have.”

When Alceu made a noise beside her, she waved her hand at him, dismissively. “We are not entertaining your family’s obsession with making themselves out to be the most evil people who have ever eviled. We’re talking about reality.”

She looked back at her brother and pointed her finger at him. “Did I scream at you when you decided to marry my best friend?”

Apostolis looked as if she’d plunged a knife straight into his heart. She felt as if she had, and couldn’t say she enjoyed the sensation, but she didn’t back down.

“That’s completely different,” her brother protested.

“Completely,” came Jolie’s arch voice, then. Her husband turned to look at her as if she was holding a second knife, yet all she did was lift a shoulder, the very picture of elegant nonchalance. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that Dioni and I are the same age. You certainly do not treatmeas if I’m an infant.”

Jolie ignored Apostolis’s glare and moved forward to take Dioni’s hands in hers, gripping her tight. “Congratulations. I am delighted. So is he, or he will be, when he comes to terms with the idea that you have not been a seven-year-old girl in need of a hand to hold in quite some time.”

And it wasn’t until her friend hugged her, hard, that Dioni realized that she was long overdue for a big, long, messy sob. This, clearly, seemed like the very worst and very best moment to give in to that urge.

But she couldn’t hold it in. So she...let it out, heedlessly.

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