Page 42 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MAXIM

I sit in a chair watching the slow rise and fall of my wife’s chest as she sleeps. Her lips are slightly parted, her still-damp hair strewn in a mess about her pillow.

It’s been three hours since Marianna called me. Three hours since my world tilted, since I raced through this city with infinite imaginings of her death playing behind my eyes.

She almost died. He almost had her .

Earlier, after Lev finished sterilizing, stitching, and bandaging Marianna’s forearm, she stood up only to immediately get dizzy and stumble back into the chair she’d just vacated. She then dry heaved into the trash can that held her bloody gauze.

Elise gave a startled yelp as I held Marianna’s stiff and shaking shoulders.

It wasn’t more than a minute of this before Marianna composed herself and wiped the saliva and bile from her mouth, sitting up straight in my arms. She was tired, despite the way her face tried to telegraph she was okay, and I felt her lean into my chest.

“I need to eat something,” she said, which is easier than what I was thinking which was—I don’t know, hospitalization? She looked to Elise. “Can I have one of the green juices? Maybe some toast?”

“Of course,” Elise said, her eyes still glassy from the trauma she just experienced herself.

“Thank you,” Marianna said, and then, finally, her brown eyes turned back to mine. I still held her against me and whatever she saw on my face made her sigh. “I think I have a stomach flu after all, but I’ll be fine.”

“Food, rest, and rehydration will help get her where she needs to be,” Lev said as he closed up his suitcase. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check in on the stitches, but the best thing you can do today, Marianna, is lie low.”

“Will do,” she said, already sipping on the bottle of green juice Elise brought her.

“Sasha, will you have Samuel drive Elise home, please?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

One by one they filed out of our home, our home which has been violated, intruded upon, proven unsafe for Marianna, and all the while I held her to me, her weight still resting against my chest while she finished her meager food.

She didn’t protest when I picked her up in my arms again, only rested her head on my shoulder; perhaps she was too tired to pretend she was well enough to walk.

In our room, I removed her blood-stained clothes and sat her down in the bathtub where she didn’t speak as I washed her. I was careful to avoid getting her bandaged arm wet, and then dried and dressed her in the long sleeve she always steals from my drawer.

She fell asleep within moments after I laid her down, exhaustion evident in the pallor of her skin.

I wanted to take us to the Orlov, but that doesn’t feel safe, either. I settled for posting more security around the building and Leo downstairs.

As I watch her now, I know it could’ve been so much worse. She’s alive and breathing— my fighter —and I have failed her.

How many times, and in how many ways will I fail her before one of us dies?

Because isn’t that just the way of this life?

Failing upwards until someone knocks you from your position?

The only way out is death; there is no witness protection for us, no escaping to a quiet island where we won’t be found, only her hands covered in blood alongside mine.

I let her sleep for a few hours while I handle today’s disaster to the best of my ability.

The men entered through the balcony; they were on the side of the building under the guise of cleaning the windows. The real window cleaners for the building are scheduled for tomorrow, so the day manager wasn’t surprised that they wanted to do the job a day early.

The security records note only that Elise entered in the morning, ventured briefly to the balcony to make a call, then came back inside to finish her meal preparations.

She had slid the padlock back when she stepped inside, but it hadn’t gone all the way, and this offered the single vulnerability that was needed to let the intruders into the apartment. One fucking lock.

They knocked Elise out, and it could’ve been much worse for her, but she got away with a bump on her head and a slight concussion that she’ll monitor tonight.

Sasha found a black backpack in the pantry with a crude handful of tools and knives along with zip ties and rope.

Ostensibly, they planned to restrain and torture Marianna—for what, I do not know.

She is sure that they would have killed her if she hadn’t killed them first.

They made the remarkable mistake of underestimating her, one I imagine whoever sent them will not repeat after today.

I’m staring into the fire crackling in the fireplace when she pads into my office yawning. The color in her face is livelier than it was when she went to sleep, and that’s a relief.

She surprises me by not lying out on the couch like she usually does, but instead nudging my knees apart and dropping into my lap, her head on my chest. She must be feeling really unwell to seek such closeness, but I wrap an arm around her waist and pull her closer still then take a deep inhale with my nose pressed into her hair.

I think this is for my benefit more than hers, but the way she sighs and rubs her face on my chest tells a different story.

“Vanessa says we can stay with her if you’d feel safer,” I say, though the thought stresses me nearly as much as the thought of staying here.

Marianna yawns again. “Seems like they were after me specifically, so no, thank you.”

I pull her closer, like she might disappear if I don’t hold onto her.

“I’m sorry you were scared,” she says. “Those men weren’t good fighters, only large.”

She doesn’t say what I know we’re both thinking. How one of them almost had her, and a ring of bruises has blossomed on her neck to prove it.

“You are a good fighter,” I agree. “I just wish you didn’t have to be.”

“Everyone should know how to take care of themselves,” Marianna says.

I say nothing, stewing in the anguish that’s been bubbling in my empty stomach and making my whole body tense.

She pushes off of me to look at my face, and I won’t meet her eyes, though I feel them on me. “Are you...angry with me?” she asks.

“Not with you,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to defend yourself in our home.”

“I didn’t have a choice, it was me or them, would you have rather I?—”

“No,” I say so definitively, and so loudly that she recoils. “Of course not. You almost—” I cut off and shake my head. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

Her eyes narrow and I know that in this I have somehow said the wrong thing again. Common practice for us. Her posture stiffens and she crawls off of my lap to stand. I feel the loss like a punch to my gut.

Doesn’t she see how I’m dying here? How this is my fault for putting her in danger at all?

“Do you resent me?” she asks.

“Never.”

“All I’ve brought you is frustration.”

The crackling fireplace to her left is no match for the flame consuming me. I lean forward, elbows on my knees.

“How could I resent you? When it is me who cannot keep you from this? In our own home, Marianna.” My face cracks, and I feel a welling behind my eyes that I haven’t in so long. Like the anguish in me is seeking release through my tear ducts.

My throat burns and I swallow the lump there.

Marianna blinks, her posture changing from defensive to concerned. “I never expected a different life. I am under no illusions of safety.”

“But don’t you see that it destroys me? How much I hate the cruelty and the games we all must play?

The posturing, and the killing? And that for all I’ve done to get where I am, it hasn’t been enough to keep you safe,” I speak so loud, I feel like more beast than man.

There are hot tears welling beneath my eyes, and if my father were here he would beat me for them.

I curse him, that man, whose inheritance was only blood and hurt.

“I hate that I cannot give you a quiet life, and if not quiet, then one that is secure. You should not have to fight, or be attacked in your own home, you have yoked yourself to a broken man in a world that, obviously, will never truly be safe for a child.”

I want her to be angry with me, to blame me, to understand that despite it being she who asked me to marry her, I feel that I’ve somehow tricked her into this, maybe by manifestation alone.

I thought of her too much, craved to know her too often, and the universe took pity on me, forcing her into my path when she was vulnerable.

And I couldn’t protect her .

I’ve failed Marianna. I almost lost her, the margin of error was wafer thin, ninety seconds later and she could have been dead. It would have killed me, losing her.

She’s in more danger now than she ever was before, a new target on her back that I was naive to think I could keep her from. She married me for protection, for her, for her family, and I have proven many times now that I cannot adequately protect her. Useless, useless man.

“You should’ve picked someone else.”

“Oh, Maxim.” Her voice is more gentle than I deserve. I cover my eyes with my hand for a long moment and scrape it down my face. When I open my eyes again, she’s watching me with her lower lip pulled between her teeth. I want to reach up and release it, but I won’t touch her.

She opens her mouth but then presses her lips together, stopping whatever she was about to share. I look down to her hands, where she spins her wedding ring on her finger.

“When I realized there was someone in the house, I could have done a lot of things,” Marianna says. She’s looking down at me, so serious, any trace of confusion or anger gone from her expression. “I think a few months ago I might’ve just tried to deal with it myself.”

The idea of this makes me feel ill, but I don’t look away.

“I would’ve died, I know that.” She bites her lip again and comes to sit to my left. For a silent moment, she watches the fire. “I could’ve called anyone, I didn’t even know if you were nearby.”

It was damn lucky I was. I had a meeting with Colton Tenneson at the Orlov. He tried to convince me to sell the hotel to him again. I hated sitting through it, but am grateful for it now.

“I called you , Maxim, because I knew that no matter where you were in this city, you would come.”

“Of course I would,” I whisper. I want so badly to touch her, to kiss every part of her, to make her see how deeply I feel for her, even if she will never reciprocate.

“I know.” She meets my stare, her eyes completely capturing me. “That’s what you’re not getting. I trust you, I knew you would come.”

“And if I was late?”

“You weren’t, Maxim.”

“But—”

She cuts me off with her mouth on mine, a tender press of her lips that renders me speechless. Marianna pulls away, and holds my stare.

“You got here. I feel safe with you. I trust you.”

I exhale a sharp breath and kiss her again, longer this time, but just as gentle. It’s not a kiss for sex or to bring her down from a thought spiral; it’s comforting and warm and so intimate it makes my heart feel like a fragile thing.

The weight of my affections for her are so heavy, it’s as if my sternum will break beneath the weight of them. Being with Marianna always feels this way to me, heady and consuming and like loving her will burn up my very organs. It might.

I lift my palm to her neck, sliding my fingers into her hair. I kiss her nose and both cheeks.

“I adore you, Marianna,” I say, and pull her forehead against mine.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“Am I ever?”

“Constantly,” she says, laughing. Closing her eyes tightly, she sighs. “You shouldn’t.”

“I do.” I see the guilt she carries, the unspoken “I can never love you back” on her tongue.

“I know,” she says instead. When she tries to pull away, I wrap my arm around her and haul her back up to me, pulling her again into my lap. We watch the fire burn together, our breaths synchronizing until hers slows further, asleep and alive with her head on my shoulder.