Page 79 of Sigma

“I see the rich, powerful, educated, sophisticated man you are, the shrewd, successful businessman, the man with a taste for the beautiful things of the world—and I see that in the end, he has fuckingnothingworth having, and he knows it.”

Another step, and now he’s stopped breathing, nostrils flared, brows drawn, jaw clenched so hard he’s about to crack a molar.

“You know what I see, Apollo? I see someone who just wants to be…seen. Someone who wants to be hugged. Held. You just don’t know what that looks like, and you know even less how to ask for it.”

One more step, and now I’m in his space, my breasts brushing his chest. I look up into his eyes.

“For all that you’re educated and sophisticated and worldly, Apollo, this whole kidnapping ploy was no more than a caveman clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her back to his cave. It was a Mongolian warrior raiding a camp and taking the woman he claimed as his wife and riding off with her.”

“You know nothing,” he whispers.

“You want to be seen,” I say, ignoring him, “but now that I see you, you don’t like it.” I shake my head. “Why me? I’ve asked myself a thousand times. Why me? Why go to the effort of kidnapping me so precisely, so carefully, so nonviolently? Why me?” I shrug. “I’m only guessing, now. But I think it’s because I’m the only person on this planet to whom you have any kind of a connection—through our parents. They are the thread that binds us. My mother, your mother—the story of what happened. Neither of us knows the whole thing. I don’t think I want to, honestly. And neither do you, if you’re being honest with yourself.”

He shakes his head and backs away from me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?”

“I know what happened.”

“Fine. Tell me what happened, then. Convince me.”

“She was busy. She was in charge of a lot of people.” He closes his eyes and turns away, hands going into his pockets. “She didn’t mean to have me. She never wanted or intended to be a mother.” His voice goes so soft I can barely hear it. “She said that to me, once. She was drunk, it was late. I was six. She didn’t think she could even have children. ‘I never wanted you, Apollo. You aren’t even supposed to exist. You are an accident.’”

“Jesus.”

He ignores me. “I did a DNA test, paid an investigator to find my father. The investigator narrowed it down to one of three men. All from Athens. I pieced together what happened to result in me. She essentially kept a harem of men. Poor, attractive nobodies. Men with no family, no future. Deadbeats, you Americans would call them. Drug addicts, losers, alcoholics. Men forgotten by everyone, with nothing to lose. She would give them a little…stipend, I suppose. And when she came to town for business, she would dress them up in suits and play pretend with them. My father was one such man. And my mother, she was not supposed to be able to have children. I found a medical record from her youth. She had a disease, a cancer, I think, in her childhood. She recovered and it never came back, but it was assumed she was infertile. There was, however, an accident. A fluke of statistics, and here I am.”

“Did you contact him?”

He strides to the open doorway of the orangery and stands in it. I follow him, stand behind him.

“No.” His hands are balled into tight fists in his pockets. Every line of his body is taut and tense. “He’s dead. Long dead. And I said it was narrowed down to one of three men, not that I knew which one it was. I could have done further research, found out. But of the three men who could be my father, one was a heroin addict and died of an overdose around the time I would have been conceived, making it unlikely to be him. The second was a killer and a rapist, and I refuse to believe I could be related to such filth. The third was merely a hopeless alcoholic who couldn’t stop drinking long enough to hold a job, and so relied on prostituting himself to my mother for income. If I am honest, it was most likely him.” A pause. “He drank himself to death before I was out of diapers.”

A silence.

“They were the very literal dregs off the bottom of the barrel. Not one of them saw his thirty-fifth birthday. There weren’t even funerals because not one person on this planet cared whether they lived or died.” He withdraws his hands from his pockets and grips the frame of the door, bracing himself to lean forward, head hanging; his voice is the rasping hiss of a blade across a whetstone. “It is from this I am descended. And my mother?” A harsh laugh. “She punished herself with those men, I believe. That, or she had such depraved sexual predilections that men such as they were the only ones she could find upon whom to entertain herself. I haven’t been able to bring myself to find out that particular truth.”

He turns, leans a shoulder against the door frame. Looks at me.

“My grandfather was a fucking monster.” His expression is opaque. Hard as stone. “The stories of him are legendary, and the multiplicity of the stories detailing the monstrosity of his nature is too convincing to be anything but the truth. He relished in the vilest of things—allowed his men to rape the women he trafficked in, allowed them to murder at a whim, so long as it could not be traced back to him. His guns were put into the hands of child soldiers, and his drugs in the veins of the same. His empire was built on blood. The money I was raised on? It’s blood money of the worst kind. It’s fairly soaked in the blood of innocents. But it spends all the same as clean money, no? So I spend it.”

Another long pause.

“And yes, my mother was just as bad, if not worse.” A venomous laugh. “When I began digging into who I was, I would come across people who put it together before I did.” His eyes go to mine. “There’s a phrase I heard, in regards to my mother. Some have nicknames, you know? Like, The Ghost, or The Jackal, or Ripper, or shit like that, yes? My mother had her version of it. I would ask after Gina Karahalios and they would all say the same thing. ‘Ah, that one. The mad bitch herself.’ The mad bitch. One man called her the mad bitch from hell. Another said she was the evilest creature he’d ever met, and this was a man serving multiple life sentences for some truly brutal murders—or rather, executions would be the more accurate term.”

“Yet when I told you what I’d been told about the situation which led to her death, you acted as if you didn’t know who she really was.”

He looks away. “She was my mother.” A shrug.

“We are more than our DNA, Apollo.”

His smirk is ugly—or as ugly as his perfect face can get. “You think so? And yet, here you are.”

“Yet here I am.” I pause. “Tell me about her.”

“I just did.”

“No, not Gina Karahalios. Your mother.”