A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

36. Vanessa

36

VANESSA

Nate is awake when I get home, sitting at the island in the kitchen with a glass of water half empty on the counter in front of him. I can’t see Ranger but I hear his tiny snores coming from the dog bed in the living room.

A day ago he was telling me he loves me. Tonight I am engaged to someone else.

I want to retreat to avoid the conversation entirely. If I can sleep right now, it can stay a secret. If nobody knows for another six hours maybe it won’t be real until then, and maybe he won’t hate me more than he already does.

Or maybe Nate will feel relieved that he doesn’t have to go back on the promises he made last night before he knew.

I don’t know which is worse.

He looks over his shoulder at me standing in the doorway.

“Hey,” he says. It’s dark in here, dimmed cupboard lights and the moon on the countertops. It reminds me of the night of the Mayor’s Gala, the first time.

“Hi.” I make my way to the other side of the counter opposite him where we stay in silence until the sprinklers in the backyard click on.

We both start to speak at the same time and cut off. He waves at me to go first.

“I have to marry Maxim,” I say.

The look on his face is so much worse than I’d prepared for. He’s never been good at hiding how he feels—I’ve seen him angry, then nervous, then disgusted. I loved most to see him lustful, in love. He held a warm softness to his green eyes that saw his own feelings reflected in my own. Now, I see him gutted, and it turns my insides over to know I am the cause.

“Is that where you were?”

“Yes,” I say and my voice is so small.

“Hm.”

I want to explain everything, spew word-vomit about how I will never be good enough to be with him. I’ve put him in enough danger and I refuse to do it any more even though I desperately want to. Even though it makes me sick to think about living without him next to me telling me when I’m being rude, or unfair. I want to tell him I already miss him, like there’s a vital organ in my abdomen that he’s carrying around with him, and that I’ll even miss that stupid dog, I’ll miss everything about Nate. I want to tell him this and more, but instead I just let my head bob on my neck as I try to swallow back the stinging in my eyes.

A tear spills over, and then another, and I wipe them both away.

“It’s not personal.” I try to contain the shaking in my voice, but it cracks. “It’s not you. If this was different, if I was different. . . it’s not you.”

He doesn’t cry, much more held together than me, but he does stare hard at me like he can still see straight through me.

“Don’t do this,” he says. “You don’t want to do this, Vanessa, so don’t .”

He reaches across the counter to grip my hand, but I pull it away from him. Hurt flashes again in his eyes before they harden to something else.

“I can’t convince you,” he says. Not a question, but I shake my head anyway.

Perhaps it would be easier for him if I lied. If I said I wanted to marry Maxim over him. But that lie would hurt too much to speak, and just like the rest of me, he’d see the truth behind my carefully curated walls.

Nate smacks a hand on the counter. “You’re so fucking stubborn , Ness. Why?”

Tears keep falling from my eyes, there is no stopping them.

I want to ask him if he’ll hold me, if we can have one more tonight, just one more, but it’s not fair to him and if I touch him again, I might be liable to never let him go.

“I have to do this.”

Nate stands up to leave and pauses like he might say something, and I selfishly pray that he will say anything at all about how he wants it to be him, how Maxim will never get me like he does, how his life will feel as empty as mine already does in this moment.

He doesn’t, just retreats from the kitchen, up the stairs, and into his room.

I’m left alone in the cold kitchen; Ranger’s snoring, the sprinklers stuttering on, and my own soft crying are the only sounds that remain.

A week has passed since I told Maxim Orlov I would marry him, and it has been filled with wedding planning and tracking down who shot Mary.

My family took the news fine when I told them I would be marrying Maxim. They all shared looks with each other, and Willa tried to give me one of her sisterly talks, but I told them that I wouldn’t be hearing any of it and now was the time for them to remember to respect my decisions. They all agreed after that, but nobody congratulated me. It would’ve been an empty gesture; one I didn’t need nor want.

Nate has kept to himself, largely avoiding me or acting like I didn’t rip out his heart and mine and put them into a blender. Conversations with him are stilted and brief. No more sitting on the couch watching movies until one of us falls asleep, no more glances over meals, stolen touches in hallways, no more just tonights.

Mary’s not allowed to train while her shoulder heals—her personal hell—so she’s been terrorizing Nate with lessons of self-defense and shooting. He won’t be here forever, so it’s a relief to know that when he’s on his own he will be able to defend himself.

Willa has been in her own kind of hell dealing with the insurance, buyers, and investors for the Washington Street project. I do not envy her, but I don’t envy myself either; Leo and I have been working with Sean investigating, it’s some of the worst work we have to do.

There’s lots of interrogating and threatening and watching lifelessly as Leo beats the shit out of someone until there’s nothing left to do but speak. We tracked down one of the vans, only to find that it was one of our vans stolen out of a parking garage last week and more video evidence was tampered with. After a particularly difficult conversation with the security guard on duty in the lot that night, he confessed that someone had paid him off to give them the key and threatened his wife and daughter to keep it secret. Classic move.

When pressed further, it became evident that the man didn’t know who the thief was. They’d been in thick black masks, not even their eyes were visible, and they had some sort of tech to modulate their voices.

This news drove Sean nuts because that tech is familiar, something he and Cillian had brought in and sold late last year. He was certain it had to be a match and had been checking books for every buyer.

We’ve been chasing threads, desperate to get to the bottom of them before they’re cut short. There have been three attempts on the system this week alone, so on top of searching through last sales, Sean had his hands full making sure our cyber security was safeguarding us from further damage.

It’s been a shitshow, to say the very, very least.

While all of us have been doing our part to not make it look like we aren’t chickens with our heads cut off, Mother planned an engagement party and has already started planning the wedding that will happen next month.

We are on an expedited schedule, though trying to be discreet.

The announcement will come tomorrow at the engagement party when any number of Russian and Italian mobsters will be annoyed to hear that the town’s two most eligible criminals will be getting married to each other.

Mom brought a seamstress over to do some alterations to a gown made just for the party. None of the ones I had made enough of a statement. Which I think was code for: Your closet of blood-red slut dresses will not cut it for your engagement party, and this is hopefully your last one, so you’ll let me do what I want .

We stand in her room in front of her tall mirror while the seamstress fixes the hem on the green silk gown, the exact color of the emerald eyes that will haunt me forever.

“Green signifies new beginnings,” she says. “I wore green to my own engagement party.”

“You did?” I’ve never seen pictures of that night, only the wedding where she looked like a goddess with huge, curled hair all over her shoulders.

“I was so nervous,” she says, her eyes dreamy into a near distance. “I grew up watching your father at weddings and parties, he was ten years older than me, practically a prince to me and my friends.”

A smile flits across her lips, and I’m reminded how young she is, fifty-three. She married my dad when she was twenty-two and had Willa right after. Once their parents decided they would be married, Dad wanted to marry her immediately, but she made him wait until she was out of college. Said it was important to be educated, even if she’d never want for anything for the rest of her life.

She didn’t know she would be left wanting for her own husband.

“Any advice?” I ask, because I’ll cry if I keep thinking about how much she misses my father. How much I miss him.

The seamstress pulls tight at the skirt, and then lets it fall, repeats this a few times and adjusts a pin.

“Oh, sweetie.” Mom meets my eyes in the mirror. “You are so much smarter than I was. You have a brilliant head on your shoulders.”

There’s a ‘but’ there, I can feel it.

“Spin,” the man working on my dress says, and I follow his instructions. “Perfect.”

He helps me out of the dress carefully before Mom can continue, and it’s another seven minutes before he’s gone, leaving me and her in the quiet of her room. I used to hide in here when I was a girl, when I was too tired to consider doing another training session with Dad. I would come hide behind their curtains, waiting for mom to find me. I wish I could do that now.

“All I want for my babies is happiness,” she says. “My biggest advice is to find a champion for you and hold on as tight as you can until the end of the line.”

She’s talking about Nate, but we both also know that he’s not an option anymore.

“Maxim will be good to me,” I say. “He will love our children and fight to protect them. I think this is as much as I can ask for.”

Her eyes swim with sadness at this.

“Are you sure about this?” she asks.

I turn to face her; I’m wearing her old slip, the one she wore beneath her wedding dress, that Willa wore beneath hers.

“I’m not sure,” I admit, just a whisper, and it’s a weight off my chest to finally say it aloud to someone. “I’m not.”

Mom pulls me to her chest where I don’t cry, but I do stay, holding her and being held, remembering the thousands of times she’s comforted me this way in my life. Like I haven’t let her in years.

“I didn’t realize how lonely I’ve been,” I confess in a whisper. She keeps stroking a hand through my hair and down my back until there’s an imprint on my cheek from where it was pressed against her shirt.

It’s time to keep moving.

“I’m going to marry Maxim.” I sit up to face her again. There are unshed tears pooled beneath her brown eyes that look like mine. “And somewhere along the way, there will be happiness.”

Mom gives my arm one more long squeeze before crossing the room to her armoire and pulling it open to look at her jewelry. After a moment she closes it, retreating with a black felt box I recognize instantly as the object of 40% of my adolescent longings. She pulled out the box for every big event—sometimes letting my sisters and I try it on in front of her bathroom mirror.

Now, she inclines her head to the mirror like she did then, and I gulp before following her there.

Mom pulls out the necklace, and I hold up my hair so she can fasten it on my neck, the thin gold chain holding up a ruby pendant that lies in the middle of my chest.

“Your grandmother gave this to me when I needed it. You need it now, and when there comes a time one of your sisters needs it, you’ll give it to them.”

I touch the stone, bright red and a weight against my skin. A comfort.

“Thank you,” I say, and set my shoulders, lifting my chin.