Page 183 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
“Because I would give you this. It would be nothing for me to fund all these things. And you refuse?”
“I didn’trefuse. I did not think it appropriate to ask. You have already given me too much. Our goals may be the same, but I will not ask for more when you have already given me so much.”
He made a dismissive kind of noise and turned away from her, both things that stoked her anger hotter.
“I have integrity,” she told him, fisting a hand to her heart. “I have pride. You will not dismiss these things.”
“Pride,” he spat, whirling to face her. “You have stubbornness.”
“There are some things in life that…it matters to earn them. Not just have them handed to you. Just because youcoulddo something doesn’t mean I want you to. You have no right to be angry about this.”
“No, of course not.” Each word was an icy dagger.
She did not understand his extreme reaction to this.
Or she wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t heard him speak of his mother last night. His frustration and disgust over her refusal of his help. She blinked at her own realization. Was it so simple? Such an easy corollary? Maybe, maybe not. But it was the defense she needed.
“I am not your mother,” she told him very softly, with clear, precise control.
His head snapped back like she’d punched him. The fury turned into something else. Something that had her own ebbing away, because…
“No, but you women are all the same, are you not?” he said, vicious and cold.
“You women,”she repeated, shock and fury twining in her system a dangerous concoction. “Here are your true colors then. Lumping women together because they do not ask how high when you demand they jump.”
“Ah, so here it is. What you really think of me.”
“What I really think of you?” She furiously blinked back the tears in her eyes. “Ithoughtyou understood. I thought…”I thought you loved me.Foolish girl that she was. No matter how she’d tried to talk herself out of it, she’d really thought there was something real here. Or could be.
Instead, she was just another possession in a powerful man’s quest for more. And when she didn’t shine in the precise right way, she was relegated to…something else. Something subhuman. A pawn.
“I will be gone the next two days,” he said, his anger and fury tamped down into something icy and sharp. “You should be gone when I return.”
Gone. It ripped through her, the implications of that. Gone. He wanted her gone.
She would not cry, because she’d known, hadn’t she? No amount of soft feelings or talk of enjoyment or marriage or giving her the world could change the very simple fact that this was the basic truth of life.
Love was not real. Pain, suffering and selfishness were real.Thiswas never meant to be real, and it was her fault for mixing it up enough to be hurt by that.
“What of my father?” She tried to keep the squeak out of her voice, but her throat seemed to be closing up. That was why she was even here in the first place.
“I have the necessary leads. I’ll snuff him out. He’ll pay. You have no need for me, Ariadne. You have made this clear. So I have no need for you.”
Which wasn’t fair. “No, I havenot. You have decided that not wanting you to warp this one thing that is mine, that I have built myself, that is who I am, is some kind of refusal. You have decided that it means all women are your mother. That isyourchoice, not anything I made clear.”
She could see she wasn’t getting through to him. He was angry and stubborn and…wrong. Justwrong. And she could not fix that for him. She felt weak for letting a tear fall, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Still, when she delivered her parting shot, she was proud of how icy and distanced her tone felt.
She took the ring off her finger, placed it firmly on the desk between them and met his gaze. “Seek therapy, Zervou,” she said, then whirled on her heel and stalked out of the room.
She didn’t fully cry until she left the premises.
And then she was afraid she might never stop.
Chapter Fifteen
He had seethed. He had instructed his staff what to do. Eradicate any and all evidence Ariadne Malis had ever been in his estate. In hislife. His security detail would still watch after her, from afar, until her father was behind bars, but he would have nothing to do with her.
Nothing.
