Prologue

His fingers began to cramp. He forced himself to loosen his grip on the steering wheel, to ease his foot back on the accelerator. Too dangerous to call the attention of the police, he told himself.

It would be daylight soon; he'd need a place to pull over, someplace to lay low during the sunny hours ahead. If only he could've taken a flight, it would've been so much faster, but that was too dangerous, as well. Better to travel by car under the cover of night, and hide in the day.

Gregorios Nikodemos Pavli wondered once again how she'd react to seeing his face after all these years of thinking him dead. Did she still wonder what had happened to him? Did she care anymore? He tried to remember how his wife looked the last time he saw her. She'd waved to him as he left that day, a smile on her succulent lips. She'd tied her blond hair back from her lovely, oval face and her blue eyes had sparkled in the morning sun.

He remembered thinking he was a lucky man, he'd had it all — a tall, reedy wife who loved him, their future shining in her eyes, a home to be proud of. He'd had it all and lost it in the blink of an eye, on the whim of fate.

Digging his thumb and forefinger momentarily into his tired eyes, he tried to clear his mind and focus on the road ahead. Only one more night after this and he would be home, at long last.

Home, he thought. It wasn't really his home anymore, though. The Fates had seen to that. In all the years he'd been gone, he thought only of returning, of wrapping his arms around his wife and picking up the pieces of his life. Even as he envisioned his sweet Camille, he knew that it would not be that easy. If he were lucky, he would be able to get her safely away in time. She had a mind of her own and had, undoubtedly, gone on with her life.

There would be a fight, if he knew his Camille, a fight that would make all their past disagreements look like minor tiffs by comparison. Since the day they'd met, their relationship had been stormy, each fight ending in the passionate forgiveness of the marriage bed. Will she forgive me this time?

The horizon showed a faint glow, signaling the approach of day. He pulled out the map that nestled folded between the seat and the console, switching on the small lamp to read by. The exit's next, then left, he thought. He'd find a campground soon, lay his tired head down and dream of her.

He wondered if she would still be attracted to him. They'd both been young when they'd married; he had been twenty-one and she nineteen. They couldn't wait to start a family, as so many young couples do. In her, he had found the joy that he had lost only four years before when his parents had been killed in an accident. They'd been gloriously happy, but then things had gone wrong, tearing him from his world, and thrusting him into one not of his own making.

Camille had been so beautiful, and he had little doubt that she still was. Her hair had been the color of sun-dried wheat and her eyes as blue as the sky on a warm, spring day. Her skin was golden and supple, like dewy silk to the touch. Her body had been one that could give a dead man a hard-on, with full breasts and a small waist that led to the soft curve of her hips. Were her lips still as red? Were her eyes still as bright?