A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

35. Vanessa

35

VANESSA

The surgery on Mary’s shoulder took three hours, and Nate sat with me to wait. We watched the sun rise through the window of the private waiting room, drank cups of tea and burnt coffee brought to us by hospital staff, and shared a dense bagel.

Rafael needed surgery too, but his was quick, and he was already recovering in a room on the sixth floor, two men stationed at his door just in case. I do not know who attacked us last night, and the worst thing is that, after months of shit like this, I don’t have even an idea who it could be.

I am completely out of depth and have no idea where to go from here.

The lockdown didn’t work. It got Mary and Nate shot. The ever-growing list of reasons I am not cut out for this is miles long at this point.

Leo is out doing his own investigation, but I don’t imagine he’ll find any evidence that points us in the direction of who it was. That would be too easy, and nothing about this has been easy since that first shipment went missing in April.

Nate has been good, a steady presence next to me through the night, but I know he’s spooked. Who wouldn’t be? He got shot, and that wasn’t even the first time he was almost killed because of me.

If he stays, it most certainly won’t be the last.

Mom arrives around six with Willa on her heels. Sean is at home with the kids, who are anxious to see their aunt Mary better.

“Any news?” Willa asks, though the news is the same as the last time Nate texted her forty minutes ago. Mary is stable, set to make a full recovery. We’ll be able to see her in an hour or so.

“You smell like an ashtray,” Willa says after another minute. “Go home. Mary will be discharged before the end of the day, and if she’s not, you can come back tonight.”

It takes another thirty minutes of her and my mother convincing me that they can handle things here before Nate and I walk out of the hospital the way we came, and despite my protests, he drives us home.

It’s a quiet ride. I can tell something it is eating at him and I’m too afraid to ask him what it is. I don’t want to hear him say that he was wrong, that he takes back what he said and could never be with me. Not when this is my life, and he will have to be afraid for the rest of forever that his life or mine will end with a bullet in one of our skulls.

I get it, I really do. I wouldn’t want this either if I were him. He deserves someone nice, a sweet thing who is good at gardening, has lots of recreational hobbies, someone who will be a good mother to the horde of children he wants to have. I can provide him none of this.

I cry silently, he grips my hand with the one not steering. I’m overdue for my semi-monthly stress cry, and now it all bubbles out of me in hot streams down my cheeks and neck.

All I have to offer him is pain, bloodshed, violence, a life of crime always maintaining our power on the top and sniffing out rats when threatened. I won’t be a good mother, not one who will do anything to protect their baby from the horrors of the world, I will have to show them these horrors firsthand and teach them how to fight the demons that crawl in the shadows. It’s not something I can escape.

He doesn’t leave my side when we get home, both of us stripping out of our dirty clothes before stepping into the shower together. I let myself cry a little more with the hot water streaming down my face, and he washes my hair with gentle fingers massaging my scalp before rinsing it and repeating the process with conditioner. He does the same with the soap, lathering up his hands and sweeping them over my body, not missing any place from behind my ears to my feet.

I help him and don’t pull away when his lips fall on mine, soft and sweet kisses on my lips before they travel down my neck. They feel like a plea or an apology, and I wonder if he knows the same truth that’s settling over me like a heavy curse:

This is the last I will have him.

I’d already decided as soon as I’d heard that gunshot when Mary called his name. I knew then I couldn’t do this to him, I couldn’t ask him to live this life. It’s not him who can’t do this, it’s me—I won’t let this man live in danger like this for me, it’s not fair.

I will not be the death of Nate Gilbert. I refuse to be the reason he doesn’t breathe on this Earth. It’s selfish, and I know he is an adult, old enough to make his own decisions, but he has no idea what it will be like.

He knows three months in my house, summer nights watching movies and swimming with us in a warm pool. He knows being with my family around the dinner table and practicing fighting in a basement. He doesn’t know what it will be like really, how it will feel to be married to someone who must be cold and ruthless every day of the year. He can’t imagine what it will feel like to know who I’ve killed, and to have to know his kids will kill too.

If he doesn’t get hurt or killed, he will get resentful, and I can’t take that, I won’t.

So, yes, I am selfish. I let him kiss up and down my body and carry me, still dripping from the shower to the bed, and there I let him make love to me until I cry, and then I let him hold me, because it’s the last time. Just tonight. I will sleep, and pretend the world hasn’t stopped spinning, and when the sun sets tonight, I will be engaged to someone else.

I’ll lose my nerve if I wait—he will wear me down with sweet kisses and proclamations of love repeated like a prayer in my ear.

It has to be tonight.

Mary is fine, stitched up and ready to go home, but the doctors want her to stay for another day, so despite her protestations and the number of texts demanding that I “just tell them to let me go,” she will come home tomorrow morning.

We didn’t have long to sleep this morning before I had to be on the site talking with city commissioners with Willa, who’d come straight from the hospital.

The day was a mess of paperwork, phone calls, and trying to figure out who the hell shot my sister and destroyed a project costing several million dollars and months of work.

We have no leads.

I would’ve kept working into the evening, but Nate and my mother ganged up on me and forced me out of the library.

They made me wash my face, and mom even put an eye mask on me before tucking me into bed, all before nine.

I pretended to sleep, slowed my breathing enough to make it look like I was relaxed, but my mind was still circling the drain, spiraling downwards and around one truth: I am not powerful enough to protect everyone I love.

It’s the rudest of awakenings, one I haven’t let myself fully believe all summer. Even with the shipments missing, and the attacks, I thought I could handle it.

I cannot.

Dad, you picked the wrong daughter.

I can’t imagine what he would do in this situation, but a large part of me believes that he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

He was beloved, revered, and feared. I am liked well enough by some and loathed by others. It’s not just because I’m a woman either. I’m too business focused, always trying to expand our company dealings and power in the city, not fostering my community enough.

Dad was notoriously a father, not just of us three, but of everyone in the Family. I am not as loving, or paternal. I am an unmarried 28-year-old who killed her first fiancé and has been interviewing marriage candidates like a twisted reality TV show.

I need to pivot.

Once I’m certain Nate is asleep beside me, I lay a kiss on his cheek, a light one to not wake him, and then I crawl out of the bed. I don’t want him to hear me rifling through my closet, so I borrow some of Mary’s clothes, a pair of black jeans that look more like capris on me and a tight T-shirt. It’ll have to do.

We haven’t talked about yesterday, but I know it’s been eating him up. He’s been quiet all day, helping where he can, but he’s shaken. He’s trying to find a good time to tell me that he can’t do this, can’t be with me, not when it costs so much. I can see in his eyes, he’s tortured.

When I get to Maxim’s club, it’s well-past midnight but the music is still thudding outside.

The bouncer lets me in without asking my name and it’s a nice touch, a point for Maxim in this asinine game I’ve been playing, rating him against someone nothing like him, someone who I like infinitely more.

The club is spacious and electric, a lowered dance floor with standing tables and lounging booths on the raised areas against every wall. There’s a long bar elevated on a platform to one side and a stage across the room where a live DJ plays. The club is packed, dancing bodies pressing against each other in the thrall of neon drinks and punching music. I’m underdressed—or overdressed if we’re talking about the sheer amount of fabric on my body.

I go unnoticed by patrons, all of them too distracted with the joy of their evenings, who they will meet, what they will do. A woman in a sharp suit finds me before I can venture into the club farther and leads me with a light smile to a glass staircase.

She leads me wordlessly to a table in the VIP area with a full view of the main floor where I find Maxim sitting alone with a glass of scotch. He’s less buttoned up than yesterday, a tailored black shirt with the top three buttons undone and sleeves rolled over his forearms. His hair is mussed too like he’s ran his hands through it too many times tonight. This is the look I expected from him, dark and powerful. Lethal. He’s a broader version of Cillian with darker features.

He watches me respectfully, like he’s pleased to see me but not surprised that I’m here.

“Nice club,” I say, but I don’t sit down. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“My first project with Morelli Construction,” he says, which I already knew. It was an olive branch after his father passed, when Maxim made it clear that the blood between us didn’t need to be spoiled. “Something to drink?”

“Is there somewhere quieter we can go?” I say instead.

Maxim stands; Willa was right, he really is a huge man. He’s bigger than Leo, which is a genetic feat. He leads me through the second floor towards an elevator that brings us up and out to the roof. We can still hear the music, but barely.

“I heard about your project,” Maxim says after we look quietly over the city for a few moments.

“Was it you?” I ask.

Maxim sighs, shakes his head. I believe him. I knew it wasn’t, there was something personal about last night’s attack. Hitting us where we were down, then going for Nate and Mary.

“I will be clear, and I expect the same from you,” I start, and when he inclines his head, I go on. “I will not guarantee love. I cannot.”

He leans on the rail and turns towards me. In this position he is almost the same height as me.

“Nathaniel,” he says.

I give him the same honesty I expect from him. “Yes.” My voice doesn’t wobble nor crack. “But I will be loyal to you, and I would expect the same in exactness.”

“You do not choose him?”

“I choose for him to live.”

Maxim does not question this, and I am grateful. He runs a hand across his jaw, the shadow of a beard beneath his palm.

“I agree to those terms,” he says. “Are you very cruel?”

I give the question the thought it deserves. Beneath us, a couple emerges from the dive bar across the street, giggling and hanging all over one another.

“Some would say I am,” I say. “Though I would prefer fair.”

He looks to understand the sentiment.

“Are you? Cruel?”

He considers this as his eyes travel over the skyline, a sea of lights twinkling beyond.

“My father taught me to be very cruel. Exacting.” He examines his hands, the backs of which are marred with smooth scars on his flesh. “But my mother was different. She was forced into a marriage with a horrible man who tortured her relentlessly, lacked control in every area of her life, but she held her own rebellions. Tiny ones, in our rooms at night where she taught us to be kind.

“So yes, I have been all manner of cruel in this life, enough for ten lifetimes. But I do prefer to be kind.”

Good enough. Better than most, even. “What do you seek to gain?”

“Same as you. An heir and more bodies to protect them, and if not love, then companionship. Someone smarter than me who will tell me when I’m being an asshole.”

Two months ago, this would have been music to my ears. He is everything I wanted in a match. But now the words only serve to remind me what the arrangement will not be and who it will not be with.

Same as you .

If Nate can live a peaceful life, I will have gained much more from the arrangement.

“Someone has been after me,” I say. If he knows who it is, his lack of reaction is compelling acting.

“The rat Mary mentioned. At the gala.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve been trying to handle it, but last night went too far. They hurt my family.”

This catches Maxim’s attention, a part of the story he didn’t hear. We pay out the ass for discreet hospital staff, and it’s good to know that’s paid off.

“Mary,” I say, “My little sister. She was shot.”

“Is she—” Maxim’s eyes are wild at the news, just a flash, but enough to confirm my suspicions.

“She’s fine,” I give him a wry look. “Maxim, I will never ask again but tell me now if you’re in love with her.”

Maxim says nothing for a time, which I take to be answer enough. Mary does not make herself easy to care for. This news would be refreshing if the situation wasn’t what it is.

“She’s come into my club before,” he explains, and this surprises me. Mary is the last person I would ever expect to come to a club alone, but she is a creature of many secrets, always skulking off into the night. To go clubbing, apparently. “She fascinates me, is all. It will pass.”

I don’t believe it will, but if he marries me, the object of his fascination will torment him forever. Mine will move to Connecticut. Not sure which of us is worse off.

“You can never have her if you’re with me.” I am sorry to say it.

“Of course,” he agrees. “It’s not something to worry about.”

I can sense his finality in this. Even if the discussion at hand wasn’t about our potential marriage, I wonder if he would see Mary as a viable option. She’s the blade of the family, honed to a fine point and sharp edge; she doesn’t go out of her way to be liked. In another life I might’ve enjoyed seeing this man, a decade older than her and double her size, try to win her. But we aren’t afforded a life where people like Maxim Orlov and me get to marry who we’d like.

“I’m doing what I can to keep business moving while searching for the people who want to see me fail. But until I do, this is my baggage,” I say.

“I will help you find them,” Maxim says, a new determined lilt to his voice. When I raise an eyebrow, he goes on, “It serves both of our best interests if we take them down quickly.”

Searching means more interrogations, more blood, more bodies. But he is right.

It never gets easier being the one with final say, the one who makes decisions, shakes hands, reports it to others. It’s a constant second guessing, imposter syndrome bubbling in my stomach that I must pretend doesn’t exist.

I wish again that my father was here to make this decision for me.

“You have until we announce the engagement to wrap up any romantic entanglements you may have,” I say.

He dips his chin in agreement. Steadying myself, I hold out a hand to Maxim.

“Maxim Orlov, will you marry me?”

A smile tugs on his lips. “I will,” he says, and shakes my hand.