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Zeus

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

One month later

The day has finally come when my cousins and I will meet with GordonBank's board of directors. From today onwards, the world will know that the Lykaios Kostanidis Trust , the company we created especially for this purpose, owns fifty-one percent of the century-old family company of those Gordon sons of bitches.

Christos arrived with Odin at my office an hour and a half earlier than necessary. He also asked my brothers to be present, as we needed to talk about something serious. I wonder if it has to do with our mother's past. Will I finally find out what my cousin has discovered? I know Odin uses unorthodox means when he wants to dig into someone's past, but what else could there be to her story that we don't know already?

I check the time, trying to guess whether there will be enough to take Madison to dinner. She's hungry and having cravings. Even though she was nervous when she discovered that our heir was on the way, she's already starting to adapt to the fact that she'll be a mother.

I know it was a shock for her. For me too, although I can't lie: I'm too happy. In my wife's case, however, she has plans to start university in a few months, and even though I believe that it's completely possible to reconcile motherhood and career, obviously some adjustments will have to be made.

My cousins' wives, Elina and Zoe, have come with Christos on this visit, and they’ve taken Madison on a shopping trip for our baby, whose first ultrasound will be conducted tomorrow. Madison tried to go out with her mother and the twins to buy clothes, but it was impossible because Soraya and Silas now walk everywhere, and Eleanor can't handle it.

"Hades just arrived," Dionysus says, showing the message from our brother on his phone.

"Soon, the suspense will come to an end. If we were poor, it could be that Odin had discovered a rich aunt who’d left us an inheritance, but that's not the case." Ares tries to joke because it's obvious that the matter is serious.

Hades enters minutes later and sits down in one of the armchairs. "Okay. I'm here, but I don't have much time."

"What do you know about your maternal family?" Christos asks.

"We lost contact. Our grandparents passed away shortly after our mother," I explain.

"I looked into the Gordons' past," Odin says, bluntly.

"Why?"

"Because you were about to destroy your own life due to a promise and I wanted to get that story straight beforehand, as some things didn't add up."

"What didn’t fit? Our mother and that bastard Adrian had been deceiving Dad their entire lives. End of story."

"It's not that simple. Did you guys know that Adrian Gordon had a boyfriend?"

"What?" we all ask almost at the same time.

"In fact, they were practically married, although they were very discreet. Celine is the result of a surrogate mother. Adrian never had a relationship with her mother, and if I had to make a guess, I would say that it was old Emerson Gordon who forced the situation in an attempt to get an heir, since I have no doubt that he would have known about his son's sexual preference and probably rejected him for it. But I'm getting ahead of myself." Odin pauses. "I looked into your mother's family, a cousin, actually, who moved back to Greece. She spoke to me via video call and allowed me to record everything. She told me a story that I don't think any of you know. Not even your father."

He takes out a laptop, and after a moment, a frozen image of a lady appears on the screen. "This is Lyra Angeloupolos, not only a cousin, but once your mother's best friend. She no longer lives here in the United States."

She has the same last name as our mother. After my father killed himself, my grandfather asked his four grandchildren that we stop introducing ourselves as Angeloupolos. We hated her, so we just forgot that we had a surname other than Kostanidis.

"Start the video, Odin," Christos says. "The sooner they know, the better."

In the first five minutes of the recording, the woman talks about her and my mother's childhood and adolescence, lost in memories. She even mentions that she was in love with my father but he only had eyes for our mother.

She talks about the rumor that there was a love triangle between the three best friends—Mom, Dad and Adrian—but that it was all just that, a rumor, because she suspected that Adrian “didn’t like girls,” as she put it.

Hades is the first to interrupt. "How is this possible?"

"Listen," my older cousin advises.

“When we were sixteen, Astra was raped.”

"What the hell?" I shout.

"Do you want to continue?" Odin asks.

"What I want is for you to tell me what the hell is going on, Odin!"

He pauses the recording.

I pace from one side of the room to the other, completely enraged, without even a clue as to where this is going.

"I don't know how to tell you this in any other way than in the exact words that this woman told me: your mother was raped when she was a teenager, and everything leads us to believe that it was old Gordon who did it."

"Fuck!"

"Jesus Christ!"

"Shit!"

I don't even know which of us is saying what, but we are equally horrified.

"Listen to him until the end," Christos advises one more time.

We sit down again.

"According to this cousin,” Odin continues, “her parents didn't believe her, or perhaps they preferred not to believe her. Your mother was sixteen years old and had already had sexual relations with your father. Your grandparents knew that if she went to the police, in addition to the obvious scandal, they would discover that she was no longer “pure,” to use Lyra's words. Which, combined with the possible rape, they thought would send their family name into the gutter.”

"Did they betray her? Did they cover up the crime?" The pieces are starting to come together in my head, even though there are still a lot of gaps. The picture that emerges is from a horror film.

"Yes, they betrayed her by not supporting her story, so no charges were ever made,” Odin explains. “It seems that your mother, even though she was a minor at the time, had been drinking the night she was raped, which meant she didn't remember exactly what had happened. But she woke up sore in Gordon's house basement. There were only father and son at home, and knowing what we know now about Adrian, we only have the old man left.”

"Bastard. I'm going to kill him,” Hades says.

"There’s much more," Christos adds. "Without the support of her family, your mother hid the violence she suffered for many years, even from your father. Only her parents, Adrian, and Lyra knew about it."

"Wait. There are pieces missing from this story," Dionysus says. "Dad didn't know that Adrian was gay ?"

"No, according to Lyra. In fact, even she was just suspicious. It was only confirmed on the day he and your mother died, and you will soon find out why," Christos says.

"Okay. Please continue."

"To summarize, Adrian knew that it was his father who’d raped your mother, but he kept it a secret because he feared the old man's wrath. According to what his boyfriend told us, he could no longer live with the guilt and confronted his father, threatening him. You were all grown up—Zeus, a grown man. It was only weeks before your father died. I think that was the beginning of the end. Days later, your mother's cousin, Lyra, received a phone call in which Astra said that she could finally face the man who’d raped her because Adrian had confessed to her that it had been his father, Emerson Gordon. What neither she nor Adrian had any idea about was that, at that point, the old man already had a plan to cover his own tracks. If the secret came out, it would be the end of the Gordon family. So, as soon as Adrian confronted him days before, he started planning how to keep the truth from getting out.”

"Did he kill his own son?" Dionysus asks.

"We'll never know, but what are the chances that, after leaving an argument with the old man, your mother and Adrian died in a car accident?"

"But the story is not yet complete,” I say. “Our father left a letter saying that he had taken his own life because mother had run away with her lover, Adrian."

Odin returns to the laptop, but this time, he skips forward in the recording of Lyra. When he hits play, we hear the woman speak again.

“I know you'll never forgive me, but I was sick and I had lost all my assets in a bad marriage. When Emerson Gordon called me and asked me to tell Thadeas, your father, that Astra and Adrian were having an affair and died because they were running away together, I did. He gave me three million dollars. Astra was already dead, and I swear to God I never imagined Thadeas would kill himself...”

I'm not listening anymore. I leave the room and enter the attached bathroom.

Someone knocks on the door, and I hear screams.

It takes me a while to realize that the roars of pain are coming from me.

My father and mother were killed because of a web of lies, betrayal, and greed.

She was betrayed by all those who were supposed to love her.

The door opens, and my brothers enter.

"Get out," I growl.

"No."

"Get the fuck out. I want to be alone."

"No," they repeat.

They hug me, and I accept it because somehow I know that our pain is the same.

"I want him to suffer. I want him to die the same way our father did." I look at my brothers. "I want to watch him die."

"I can fix this for you," Odin says.