Page 4 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

I don’t know if the club’s owner is here to watch over me tonight, his heavy gaze following me around the club. I’m not here for him.

I close my eyes and start swaying to the music, loosening my arms and hips trying to get out of my head for even a single moment.

When I'm not so tense, I’ll dance until I’m dizzy and pick someone to go home with, and by the time I leave their apartment without fanfare, I will feel much, much better.

My family is safe. My sisters are probably in bed now, wrapped in the arms of their spouses.

Angel and Artie are surely asleep beneath the Christmas tree with that old dog that owns us.

In the morning, Leo and my mom will make something delicious for breakfast, we will open presents, watch movies, sleep, and do a puzzle.

It will be just as it should be, and everyone will be safe.

So why can't I get my chest to stop squeezing in on itself?

There's a trembling about my limbs that won't settle, but I jump to the music anyways, as if sheer exertion of energy will cure me from the impenetrable dread that has snaked itself around my lungs.

A man and woman dance together near me, grinding indecently against each other. Her eyes are bright and mischievous when she catches mine lingering on their bodies, and after a few unmistakable glances, she beckons me toward them with a crook of a finger.

They're drunk, or almost drunk, entirely loose and warm.

This is perfect. They will be perfect.

I slide over to the pair and fall too easily between them, taking the woman’s place, my back against her front and her boyfriend facing me.

They're both tall, completely beautiful, and I’ve never seen them before in my life.

They want one thing from me, which I can most certainly give to them.

I reach one hand behind me and hold the woman’s neck while gripping the man’s shoulder.

He tries to yell their names into my ear, but I can’t hear them over the music and the still-rushing blood in my ears, and that's just as well. I don't need to know them. They don't need to know me.

One song bleeds into two, and by the end of that one, the woman is kissing me. She tastes tropical, pina colada if I had to guess, and as we kiss, the man's hands run down my sides.

They're perfect, I remind myself; nameless, young, harmless. Six months ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity to leave with them—a way to blow off steam, have some fun, and escape the weight of everything that lives in my mind.

They should be perfect, but this isn’t working . There's no escape now, no distraction. I find no loss to the sensation, there is only a pleasant, if sloppy, kiss on a dance floor, my skin too hot, pressed between two too-hot bodies, and the urgent, unending torture of my anxieties.

My thoughts race through an infinite supply of horrific images in my head—one of my family members dying, all of them dying, the gun to my sister’s temple last summer, my dad’s face as his heart stopped working?—

I recoil from the beautiful woman's mouth and pull away from the pair's embrace.

I don’t know what I need, but it’s not this, not here.

If they're disappointed, I don't give them a chance to convince me to stay before I push through the crowd toward somewhere, anywhere.

The lights are too much, the sound, the bodies—there's a sheen of sweat on my skin.

I might be dying.

Before I can reach the edge of the dance floor, I’m dizzy. My chest is heaving, I realize.

Breaths slice in and out of my lungs, and I need to get out, need to do something, anything, need to?—

“ Marianna ,” a deep voice says into my ear, a man, and even with the music, I hear him clearly.

One large hand wraps around my waist and pushes me forward, off the dance floor, down a hall, guiding me through the club as my vision tunnels until we reach a metal door he pushes open.

Cold air stings my skin as soon as we step outside, and I gulp breaths as if I’ve just surfaced from drowning. I think I might have been.

I take a few steps into the now-spinning alley, a dim yellow light above us, and promptly fall to my hands and knees.

“Breathe, Marianna,” the man says from above me, but he doesn't touch me again.

I cough, and heave, my chest so tight, my eyes stinging with unshed tears. I stare at the concrete that is so cold beneath my hands and knees, and then see his expensive dress shoes.

Massive feet , I think, even through the panic that racks my body.

This happens sometimes, the panic attacks.

They’ve been happening for years, more since my father’s death.

Usually I can manage it, I could now if I could just get my damn breathing normal, but everything is so much, my thoughts spiraling down and down and down, a dozen horrific what-ifs for every self-assurance that I’m alright, I’m okay, I’m alive, I’m fine.

He drops to his knees in front of me wearing dress slacks that cost no less than three hundred dollars.

The backs of his hands enter my line of sight, his palms pressing against the concrete, and my eyes trace up large, tattooed forearms, then broad shoulders until I see his eyes on mine.

He's mirroring me, hands and knees in an alleyway, with eyes so full of concern I can't look away.

Maxim Orlov.

Part of me wants to feel embarrassed that the head of the Russian mob is seeing me this way, weak and vulnerable, but I have only the unbridled panic of inevitabilities coursing through my body.

They will die, they will all die, and if they don't die first, then I will die and then who will protect them?

“Close your mouth. Breathe,” Maxim demands.

I do as he says, shutting my mouth and inhaling fast, shaking breaths through my nose.

"In your nose, out through your mouth. Yes, like that, good. Longer now, slow them down.”

“I can’t—” I hiccup and hot tears fall onto the backs of my hand from my chin.

“It’s okay,” he shushes me, “don’t try to speak, just look here.” His fingers push my chin up and he points to his eyes. “Breathe with me, I know you can.”

I am increasingly certain that I will never feel comfortable nor stable again; this is the thing that’s going to kill me. I’m going to die on Christmas Eve in front of Maxim Orlov and it’ll probably start a fucking war between our families, and I won’t be there to protect them.

“Marianna,” he says again. I blink, forcing myself to focus on his eyes, forcing myself to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, attempting to match him.

His eyes are blue. I never noticed, never had reason to look at his face for long, and never this close.

It’s uncanny, this blue, almost unnatural. Nothing frosty about them, I think they could be purple in the right light.

My thoughts slow by degrees as I look at him, this along with the racing of my heart beats and breaths. The cold concrete begins to sting my palms, or maybe they’ve been stinging, but I’ve just now begun to feel it.

“Tell me what you need,” he says, voice steady. Has it always been so low? So firm?

My mind flips through all the things I need, a slideshow of the faces I need kept safe. My sisters, my mother, my cousin, the babies—God, two more babies .

How does Vanessa carry the weight of us? How did my father? No wonder his heart gave out, I?—

“Marianna,” Maxim says again, and I blink, forcing myself to focus on his eyes.

The debilitating truth escapes me in a rush. “I can't keep them all safe.”

He doesn't miss a beat. “Tell me what I can do.”

Vanessa was going to marry him. It was to be a political marriage—certainly not one of love, not when her heart belonged so clearly to Nate—allying herself with the head of the second largest mob family in the city.

It would have reassured our clan that the Morelli dynasty was secured, but it also would have come with something much more valuable to me: more eyes, more guns, another prayer that we could keep us all in one piece.

I knew he was wrong for her, but she believed Maxim could protect us and I agreed. He was ready to tie himself to us then. . .

I must look bad, panting in the frigid night like this, because he adds, “Anything,” and there’s pleading in his voice now.

I cannot fathom Maxim Orlov begging, but I couldn’t imagine him kneeling in an alley, either, so I suppose the man is full of surprises.

“How old are you?” I ask. He looks confused by the inquiry. He has black hair that’s just graying at the temples, a sharp nose and even sharper jaw.

He still looks quite young. Looking at him is no hardship.

“Thirty-eight.”

Twelve years.

He can’t think of me as a child, can he? I’m closer to thirty than twenty.

“Marry me,” I say, surprising us both.

“What?” he asks.

On the street at the end of the alley, a car honks. The winter air swims with our visible breaths between us.

I take a deep breath and set my shoulders before I gracelessly rise from the ground, wipe off my knees and palms, then look down at him. He doesn’t move, seemingly frozen there, eyes studying me.

I steel myself, and meet his gaze. I step closer, as unfamiliar with looking down at him as he probably is with looking up at anyone.

“I need you to marry me,” I tell him.