Page 39 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MAXIM

In the weeks since the wedding, I’ve spent much more time at home than I ever have. When I used to spend most evenings in my office above the club, I now try to be wherever she is. Some nights, though, it can’t be helped. Last week, for instance, when she had to patch me up. Tonight, too.

The elevator whirs as it brings me to the apartment, stopping with a soft ding when I get to the penthouse floor.

When it opens into the apartment, I see that most of the lights are off save for the one in the kitchen. There’s movement, too, like pans being picked up and moved, deliberate clanging around as if someone decided to organize at two in the morning.

When I reach the kitchen’s entryway, I don’t see her, but I hear her soft murmuring.

I walk farther in until I find my wife on the ground, wearing one of my sweatshirts and a pair of shorts, quickly removing glass bowls and serving dishes from the cabinet and depositing them on the tile.

She has a sheen of sweat on her face and neck, the sleeves of the sweater rolled up her forearms, and a frantic look in her eyes.

“Marianna,” I say and she yelps, recoiling so hard that she thuds her head on the counter’s bottom ledge.

I curse and step over the kitchen supplies, trying not to step on them or her limbs, and kneel beside her.

“You scared me,” she says. I replace her hand with mine, lightly rubbing the spot on her skull. I don’t feel a bump, but her eyes still have a panicked quality about them.

“What are you doing down here?” I ask. She gulps and looks away from me. I touch her cheek and tilt her head back toward mine, but she’s reluctant to meet my gaze. “What happened?”

“I—” She rubs a hand over her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose hard. I don’t know what comfort she needs, but she is out of sorts, so I stroke my thumb lightly across her cheek.

She shakes her head and pulls back from me, scooting a few inches away. Her hands shake.

“Marianna,” I say, a plea for her to not suffer alone.

She takes a heavy breath and lets it out through her mouth. “You’ll think it’s stupid. You weren’t supposed to come home yet.”

I drop from my knees to sit fully on the ground, my back against the cupboard across from her. I’m too large to sit comfortably in a space as tight as this one, but I bend my legs in front of me and rest my elbows atop my knees as I wait for her to go on.

“Did you know about the bombs?” she asks after we sit in silence for a couple minutes.

Something about it is familiar, but I can’t recall exactly how.

“When Cillian took Ness, he’d planted dozens of these little explosives, about the size of a quarter, all over the place.

The dining room, the gym, our bedrooms, the office, our cars, on Leo’s motorcycle.

They were hooked up to a remote detonator so he could set them off any time if he wanted. ”

I recall something Vanessa had mentioned in passing after Cillian’s death.

A couple weeks when she and her family needed to stay at one of the Orlov hotels.

She didn’t give details, and I didn’t press, just gave her the rooms they needed.

We’ll be dealing with Cillian’s mess for a while, she’d said.

“We found and disarmed all of the ones hooked up to his list, but these things are tricky. If one is close enough to another, it doesn’t need to be hooked up to the detonator to go off, so long as the first one did.”

Mary squeezes each of her fingertips on one hand, then uses that hand to squeeze the fingertips on the other.

She does this twice before she goes on. “There were a hundred and forty bombs between Vanessa’s house and Willa’s.

We looked for days, and just when we’d thought we’d found them all, there would be another tucked behind a headboard, or beneath the silverware holder in the kitchen. ”

She flexes her fingers, before sliding her hands beneath her thighs to keep from fiddling with them more. I stay silent, waiting to hear more about this living nightmare.

“This went on for weeks. We thought we got them all, would think it was clear, but I kept dreaming about it, these damn dreams,” she mutters.

“So I would wake up and look some place else. Every night for weeks, I was picking apart rooms in the house looking for these fucking bombs. They’re weapons that we imported here . ”

“Did you find more?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Mostly no.” She bites her lower lip and I’m overwhelmed with how very beautiful she is. Happy or anguished, laughing or fighting, she is so beautiful it makes me ache. “Twice I did, though, and that was worse.”

I put my palm on her knee.

“I know there aren’t any here, like, I know , but I woke up and you weren’t here and I couldn’t help thinking about what if, you know?”

My stomach twists imagining her anguish. How long has she been at this? Her mind racing over possibilities she knew weren’t probable but not able to let up on them?

She squeezes her eyes shut. “I think something is really wrong with me.”

“Why?” I ask, fighting my impulse to pull her to me and mutter assurances that she’s perfect as she is.

She very well may be perfect as she is, to me this is true, but this is a rare moment when she’s so freely speaking these hidden parts of her mind I crave to know, and I’m desperate for her to continue.

She releases her lower lip from between her teeth.

“My thoughts get so loud. Like even if I know they’re absurd or disturbing, I can’t ignore them.

Logically I know there are no bombs here, but then I think what if there are?

And if I didn’t look and they went off when you or Sasha or Elise was in here, that would be my fault for not warning you and not looking, and maybe I should’ve listened to this anxiety.

” Marianna’s shoulders slump further and she rubs her forehead.

“I don’t know. I’m just. . . It makes me so tired. ”

She is the most capable creature I’ve encountered.

Marianna is so strong and relentless, it doesn’t matter how small she is, she demands respect in every room she enters.

The Morelli Shadow . I watched her take out a man two times her size and kill someone who threatened her family without flinching.

And here she is, quietly confessing to me the hauntings of her heart, the chaos in her mind. She is so, unbearably wonderful. All of her broken pieces held together by sheer will and her unending love for her family.

And she’s mine.

“I’ll look with you, if you’d like,” I say, and her gaze jumps from the ground to mine. “Only tonight, to show you that we’re safe here. Sasha would help too, if we call him.”

Marianna’s eyes well with tears and she squeezes them tight before they can spill over. She shakes her head.

“Thank you, but let’s just—” She takes a shuddering breath. “Can we try something else?”

“Anything.”

She steels herself a moment longer, then moves her legs, my hand sliding down her calf as she maneuvers to kneeling next to me. After a few more adjustments, she’s right next to me, her face a breath away from mine.

I don’t stop myself from brushing the stray tear that spills onto her cheek.

“Close your eyes,” she says, and I do. She could ask anything of me and I would do it.

Her lips brush over mine, so light, but I feel it like a shock.

I keep completely still until her lips return, this time firm as they press against mine, and I’m there to meet her. She deepens the kiss and a breath escapes me, my hands moving on their own accord to pull her across my lap as her hands hold my face so tight while she kisses and kisses me.

I don’t know if there are words in English or Russian that can describe the feeling of her hot lips against mine, her heavy breath in my mouth, her fingers sliding through my hair.

Maybe in Italian she has the right phrase or word for this, or a different language neither of us know.

I only hope the memory of this feeling courses through me as I die, like my life flashing before my eyes, but instead just this.

Kissing Marianna through every nerve ending.

I will keep my hair long if she promises to always run her fingers through it like she does now, I’ll never leave her side if it means she might kiss me like this again.

Marianna, Marianna, Marianna .

She slides her knee over my lap until she’s straddling my waist. The space is too short to extend my legs out straight, and the bend in them forces her closer to my chest.

My hand slides beneath the sweater she wears, and her soft skin is searing against my palm. I trail up her body, fingers roaming up the bumps of her spine, her ribs, stopping at the star-like scar on her back where the bullet tore through her skin.

I hold the back of her neck and pull her closer, as close as she can possibly be and still be kissing me.

My heart aches thinking of her alone searching her family’s home and garage for little bombs, searching our kitchen because I wasn’t here to hold her, or help her look. She has so much care in that heart, that big, walled-off heart she pretends is hard.

Marianna breaks our kiss, her lower lip lightly caught between my teeth. When I open my eyes, her lips are slightly swollen, her chin and the skin around her mouth red, scratched from my stubble.

“That worked, thank you.”

My forehead scrunches before I remember what she’d said about wanting to try something.

Right.

I have no idea what the purpose was if not to make all of my thoughts and brain cells move down to my dick, but I manage to jerk my head in a nod. I try (and fail) to keep my eyes off of her mouth.

“You’re welcome,” I whisper, voice hoarse.

Her hands still sit atop my shoulders, and she kisses my cheek before standing and offering me a hand up. I take it, not actually using her weight to pull me up. Though, after how much weight I’ve seen her sling in the gym, I know she probably could.

“Let’s leave these,” I say, and nod to the assortment of pans on the floor. “Task for tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she agrees. She doesn’t drop my hand as I lead her out of the kitchen and up to bed where Greta is already asleep in a tight ball.

In bed, I study the slope of Marianna’s nose, her eyelashes, her neck.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Marianna says, though her eyes are closed.

“Like what.”

“Like you really, really like me.”

“I do,” I whisper. “Really, really.”

“You shouldn’t,” she reminds me. She doesn’t have to add her usual refrain: I’ll never love you back.

“I know,” I say and pull her across the bed and against my chest. She sighs, but this time, it’s content.

Her words cut less than they used to, less now that I know she worries about me, that she frets for me at all. She may not love me, may never love me, but her care means more than she’ll ever know.

For now, this is enough. Nights in a shared bed, mornings in a shared car, dinner together, catching her drifting to sleep on the couch and placing a blanket on top of her.

Any bit she will give me.