Freya Arsov sits on top of a world of diamonds and sports cars. Her father is a billionaire, head of a world-renown company, her mother, an esteemed lawyer. She attends the most prestigious boarding school in England. She has four amazing best frien...
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MATTHEW WOULD NEVER ADMIT IT, but he missed his home.
Nestled in the depthless forestry on the outskirts of London, Matthew's childhood home was vast and familiar. He stared, with aching remembrance, at the Greek statues that littered the gardens past the gate as he drove down the driveway.
His mother was a mythology enthusiast. She had managed to get his father to name their firstborn, his sister, Atalanta after the great warrior of myth. But Elias al Nassar drew the line at naming his son Erebus.
His mother had wanted to name him for the Greek god of darkness because when he had been born, his hair was the colour of pitch, she explained. Sometimes, Matthew would look back on that information and think that he should have been named Erebus. His heart had turned black over the years. Blacker than shadow. Blacker than death.
He pulled his car into the garage and stepped out, staring about at the shiny collection of cars his father had owned since he was a boy.
A lump formed in his throat, telling him he did not deserve to breathe here. Not here. This place was sacred and he was a dark creature who would raze it to the ground with his touch.
Not a speck of dust touched the cars, even though his father had been gone for two years. Atalanta ensured this. Each car had a name decided between his father and mother. It was a family tradition of sorts, to name cars. Matthew recalled his younger self sitting at the breakfast table as his mother and father playfully argued over names for his father's new Rolls Royce.
Matthew knew all their names, had branded them into his memory, a silent way of keeping his father alive.
They, like his sister, had been each granted names based on Greek mythology.
He was running his hand along a Bentley called Medea's cherry red top when a voice interrupted him. "Nice car."
Matthew paused. He hadn't realised anyone else was in the garage. Foolish errors like that would get him killed in his line of work. The idea of his dead body in his family home made him uncomfortably sick so he shoved it down. But the voice didn't belong to a jealous gang leader or a potential hitman. He knew that voice.
He turned and peered at Freya Arsov. She was standing by the entrance to the garage, as though she'd walked from her own house next door and meant to enter his through the garage. Matthew wracked his brain for when he'd seen her last but couldn't quite place it. Of course, he'd seen her on magazine covers and gossip articles everywhere. Some could call her a socialite. She looked different then, though, in the magazines.
In the golden light of the afternoon, her hair looked white gold and she wasn't wearing the extravagant ensembles she wore when featured on gossip articles, merely dark leggings and a grey jumper twice her size. Her blue-grey eyes traced Matthew's still warm car appreciatively.
