Page 5 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MAXIM

The day after Christmas, two days after she demanded I marry her, Marianna Morelli calls my phone.

I’m eating breakfast, Eggs Benedict, at the Orlov hotel, sipping black tea and stewing about her so intently that I fear I’ve conjured her call.

I’ve been trying to convince myself that she really did say what I remember her saying, and in so doing, I’ve incited a phone call, and now she’s going to take it back.

She will tell me that it was a lapse in judgment due to a panic attack.

A momentary low point that led her to think that, for even a moment, she was desperate enough to marry me.

I told her yes, because in that instant, I had promised I would do anything to help her. She’d nodded, used the backs of her hands to wipe the tears from her cheeks, and then walked past me without saying goodbye.

I almost thought I dreamed the whole interaction.

“Marianna,” I answer in greeting before it can ring three times. There’s a moment of silence through the line, and then a throat clearing.

“Maxim,” she says.

“I hope you had a nice Christmas,” I say. It seems better than what I’ve been thinking, which is, Get on with it, don’t worry about my feelings, they won’t be hurt. Tell me I’m an old fuck and you’d never marry me in any universe. I’ll understand.

“Where are you?” she asks. I briefly worry that we established plans I’ve forgotten, but the concern is fleeting. I would remember.

“What’s wrong?” I demand more than ask.

“Your doorman says you’re not home,” she says, annoyed. “Says I’m not on your list, so I can’t come up and wait for you.”

I don’t understand these words; my mind translates them into Russian as if this will help. It does not.

She is at my apartment building, asking after me. She presumably wants to see me, and further, she wants to enter my home . Wants to wait there for my return.

I pull the phone away from my ear and send a text to the doorman that reads, “Do what she says, Jean.”

She’s waiting quietly when I put the phone back to my ear.

“I’m seven minutes away. Please, make yourself comfortable.” The drive is more like ten minutes, but I gave my driver, Samuel, the week off, and he’s much more careful than I am.

She hangs up, and I rush to the town car parked on the curb, leaving my meal half-eaten on the table with a hundred-dollar bill.

I’m impressed that Jean would be brave enough to say no to Marianna Morelli.

It’s his job, of course, but I don’t know that I could deny her, and I have a lot of practice saying no to intimidating individuals.

When I get to the building six and a half minutes later, Jean is flustered and fidgeting at his desk. He rushes around the side, apologizing profusely for his misstep.

“That’s quite alright, Jean,” I say as I stride toward the elevator. He takes rushed steps to keep up with my gait.

“It won’t happen again, I assure you, and—sir, are you smiling?”

“Hm?”

The elevator chimes before opening in front of us, and I waste no time stepping inside. “No, Jean. Happy holidays.”

A blur of my reflection reflects on the metal doors and damn if he’s not right.

I force my expression in check as the elevator climbs to the penthouse suite.

She’s here to call off the engagement. It’s probably the shortest-lived engagement in existence. She proposed marriage—well, demanded it, really—barely more than 24 hours ago, and now she’s here to tell me that she’s come to her senses.

So why am I so excited to see her here?

I resist the urge to call out to her when the door opens into the apartment’s foyer, instead stepping inside and looking first to the sitting room, which is empty.

I carry on to the kitchen and the wide living room.

She’s there, arms crossed over her chest, in a maroon sweater and a skirt that shows me too much of her thighs. Knee-high leather boots.

“Marianna,” I say, and she doesn’t turn around.

Doesn’t acknowledge that she heard me at all as she peers out the tall window to the city below.

I often stand like she does now and remind myself that by some farce of fate that this is my city—the one I own.

She and her sisters own Boston just as much as I do, though.

“Why do you call me that?” she asks. I stand to her right facing the glass. “Nobody calls me Marianna since he died.”

She doesn’t need to elaborate on the he in question.

Lorenzo Morelli was a formidable man, one whose soft spot for his daughters should have made him weak.

My father certainly believed it did. If it did, Lorenzo’s loving them certainly didn’t make them weak.

My father thought it a disgrace to teach your daughters to fight, to let them in on business, and he said as much to Lorenzo any chance they had the displeasure of meeting.

“Marianna suits you.” It’s the single most beautiful name I have ever heard, rolling over the syllables in my mind. “I never thought Shadow quite fit you,” I say of the silly nickname most of the city referred to her as when her father was alive.

She looks up at me, eyebrows raised. “You knew of me?”

Lorenzo used to bring Marianna around with him when she wasn’t at school. I remember her trailing the man around town to meetings not fit for a teenager, looking as fearsome and composed as him.

“You were hard to miss.” When she was a teen, her near-constant presence around her father confounded me. I resented him at first for putting any child in danger, but especially a young girl. As she got older, though, she proved not to need his protection.

She was his shadow, but by the time she was eighteen, her kill count was the speculation and gossip of low-level gangsters around Boston. It was rumored she’d killed nearly twenty men before she turned twenty herself, her reputation preceding her and making her all the more a notorious mystery.

“The nickname would indicate otherwise,” she says.

“Which is why it never suited you. People don’t often think about a man’s shadow, much less fear it.”

She hums, like I’ve made a good point, then lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “Fear, maybe, but I’m not the Morelli people think about.”

I do not correct her, though I have the impulse to laugh at how wrong she is. Vanessa may be the boss of the Morelli family, and the first female boss to grace these streets, but Marianna is possibly the most clever enforcer in the state, if not the entire East Coast.

She looks away from the tall window and meets my eyes. She’s much shorter than I am, even with her tall boots, and at this distance, she has to tilt her chin up to look at me directly.

“I came to warn you away from me,” she says, getting right to it.

I blink down at her, unsure of her meaning. She doesn’t apologize for coming unannounced, at least. A relief because I would give away too much telling her that I don’t mind.

“Before you say you’ll do it, you have to know what you’re agreeing to.” Her eyes are lighter with the sun shining onto her face, the warmest brown. Mahogany.

“Tell me. Then I’ll decide,” I say. It’s not as if anything she could say would make me change my mind.

I am reminded of a summer night on a rooftop with her sister last summer, when Vanessa Morelli proposed to me herself and explained the arrangement in no unclear terms: a loveless alliance, a business deal with rings.

But Vanessa had been lovesick, shattering her own heart by asking me to marry her when she loved someone else. Marianna looks intense, almost nervous.

I could almost laugh that history is repeating itself with a different Morelli sister, one I fear I would never say no to.

“Vanessa is smart,” she starts. “She’s reasonable, good at parties, and personable. I am . . . well, my family says I can be a bit of a liability. I have a short temper sometimes, and I can be rude.”

I nod, imagining her sisters saying these things about her, likely out of love or gentle correction in social situations. Perhaps these suggestions are well-meaning, or jokes, but I see the weight Marianna carries from them, these so-called truths she thinks she’s learned about herself.

“I am violent, off-putting, and sometimes deeply unkind. By no means am I suitable to be a wife, and I’m especially not fit to be a mother.”

“Would you like some tea?” I ask, halting her string of self-assessment.

“I—yes, please,” she says with a breath, and follows directly behind me while I lead her to the kitchen where I click on the kettle.

She continues like I hadn’t interrupted her.

“People think I would be a bad parent, and I believe them. It’s not that I’m bad with kids, I’m just not maternal , I think. ”

I’ve never heard so many words strung together from her, this list growing longer for reasons she.

. . what? She thinks these are enough to make me wish to deny her?

If this is the case, I’m not as transparent as Sasha made me fear.

Her short temper is the least of my concerns when she could commit heinous crimes in front of me, and I would look the other way—help her dispose of the bodies.

They’d deserve it, she wouldn’t even have to convince me.

“You’re a good aunt, no?” I ask.

“That’s different.” She dismisses me with a wave. “I am emotionally distant, combative, and impulsive,” she lists off while leaning back against the granite counter.

I retrieve two mugs before mirroring her on the counter across from her.

“This is quite the list,” I say.

“Oh, there’s more.” She crosses her arms over her chest and looks up like she’s rehearsing the items to share.

“I don’t sleep well, I’m overly confident, and I am somewhat destructive—but only because I believe that I really can get out of any bad situation with brute force and by being smarter than most people I meet. ”