Page 53 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MARY

Willa is exceptionally persuasive, which is maybe what makes her such a damn good lawyer.

I had to spend a night in jail after half of the cops in Boston found me with a gun pointed in the direction of a dead Colton Tenneson.

I would still be in said cell if Willa hadn’t called in fifteen favors to get me in front of a judge before lunch the next day.

The cops wanted to get me on murder, but my story spoke more to kidnapping and self-defense—especially with my husband in surgery at the hospital. Willa made a case for me, and apparently Nikolai’s testimony helped a great deal. At least my refraining from killing him had been good for something.

At some point in this long night, Nessa’s government agent friend got her shit together and took over the investigation from the local police, barging in and waving her badge around.

Agent Louisa Portillo and her partner asked me a long list of questions about my involvement with Tenneson, the events of the night, and my knowledge of what he planned.

I told them what I could, and most of it was the truth.

I said that I hadn’t heard from Maxim and was able to track his phone to the old factory, where, as soon as I arrived, Sasha was shot and I was apprehended by Elise.

I told them that Maxim was already cut up when I got there, that Colton Tenneson held a gun to my head until Maxim promised to comply with their demands, and that Tenneson swore to kill us once he got what he needed from Maxim.

They let me have a few quiet hours to myself in the cell and even brought breakfast before Willa returned.

She escorted me to a courthouse where we stood in front of a female judge who ruled that I could go free until the trial—a nonnegotiable, since I shot a man point blank in front of a dozen cops.

Reasonable enough.

When I was finally free to go with a murder trial looming over my head, Leo took me home.

I had no sleep and no shower, and came to learn that Maxim almost had a damn aneurysm when he found out the police were holding me.

Willa, once again the most persuasive person on the planet, was able to get an unconscious Maxim transported to the penthouse where she promised our private physicians would look after him.

I showered, ate the food Nate brought for me, took more of my sister’s nausea medicine, and promptly knocked the hell out next to Maxim and the cat. Nate, Vanessa, Leo, and my mom hung around presumably the entire day, because when I wake again, I hear the chatter of their voices downstairs.

I rub my eyes and groan, stretching out before looking up at Maxim who is already awake, watching me with that steady intent he has. His hair is a mess, his jaw unshaven, and there are bandages covering the many wounds that I know will leave scars once they heal.

He will be just as handsome, even then.

“Hi,” I say, when a long minute of studying him passes without a word spoken.

“Hi,” he echoes.

The last words I’d spoken to him were my hurried proclamations of love. I was so afraid he would die, and if not him, then me, and I wanted to protect him but I needed him to know where I stood more. It’s where I still stand.

I like to think that when my father died, he knew where I stood, knew I cherished him.

We were playing cards when he had a heart attack, and even through his anguish, he told me I was a good girl, told me he loved me between his pained breaths, thanked me for always helping him while I screamed out for anyone in the house to come help him.

I performed chest compression for thirty-seven minutes while waiting for the ambulance. He never regained consciousness.

“Don’t cry,” Maxim soothes, wrapping his arm around me and pulling me closer to him. I didn’t think I was crying, but when I wipe my cheeks, sure enough they’re wet. “You’re alive.”

“ You’re alive,” I say. “You looked like death when I took you out of that car.”

“I felt like it.”

“I love you,” I say again, because maybe he didn’t hear it last time, and if he were to die today I would need, more than anything, for him to know. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’ve been loving you, it was impossible to stop.”

Maxim smiles, his eyes sparkling, and pushes my curls behind my ear.

“I know,” he said, the same way I did the last time he told me. “I’ve known, Marianna.”

“I haven’t made it easy for you. Not once since demanding you marry me have I been lovely or accommodating, or even very nice,” I tell him. I remember the speech I’d prepared for him in December, the laundry list of reasons he shouldn’t want to marry me.

“I think you’re nice,” he says and I shush him.

“Let me say this. I know I am hard to love, hard to be around sometimes, but please don’t stop loving me. Please stay when I’m rude and off-putting and impulsive.”

“Darling—”

“No, listen. Maxim, you are the most excellent man I have ever known. You are thoughtful and smart and more understanding and patient than anyone would ever expect from you. You are so thoroughly good that you make me want to be better, kinder, less murderous every day. You are too good for this world of organized crime and blood and sabotage, but you do it anyway because you don’t have a choice, and I’m so unbelievably selfish because even if you did have a way out, I would beg you to stay with me. ”

Maxim’s thumbs wipe under my eyes, and I babble on.

“I know I’m not. . .easy. I know that. And I used to think you’d be better off with someone like Elise, or like who we thought Elise was, but the truth is, I would do terrible things to keep you.

I’d kill fifteen Colton Tennesons, I’d rob a bank, or I’d promise to never kill again. I’d get a desk job.”

Maxim laughs at this last one, and I do too.

He pulls me to him and kisses me so sweetly before cradling my face in both hands so I can look nowhere but at him.

“Nothing has ever been so simple as loving you,” he says. “Nothing is so natural or inevitable. There’s nothing about you that’s hard to love, not a single thing, Marianna.”

I don’t know how to believe his words, but he seems to believe them, which is enough.

“You are so treasured, not just by me, but by everyone who you let in. Your sister’s children worship you, your family adores you. You are so full of light, I didn’t stand a chance.”

“I’m a shadow of a person,” I whisper and he kisses me again.

“You have never been a shadow.”

As we kiss and smile and laugh and kiss some more, I decide that maybe there’s not a limit to how much love one person can hold.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if it comes with more stress, more hurt. Maybe love expands your very capacity to love more until it’s all you are.

I think I’d like to believe that.