by Rie Warren
How long had Maksim been there without me realizing it?
And why did it feel like it was too late now?
I retrieved my gun from atop the usual bundles of cash and business papers. I joined him, and he made space for me but said nothing more.
Miles, an ocean . . . a whole continent seemed to separate us just as surely as those first few days of our marriage had crashed us together on an unstoppable collision course.
“When is your birthday?” I asked softly, not looking at him, but instead at his hands.
Those very capable hands of his had known every part of my body many times over by now.
“Two days and six years after yours.” His gaze cut quickly to me. “At least that is what Arkady told me.”
“I didn’t know.”
He chuckled grimly. “Neither did I for the longest time.”
Everything suddenly hurt inside of me. Everything in me wanted to reach out for him.
Instead, I followed his lead, keeping my hands and my eyes on my Glock. I broke the handgun down piece by piece, just like I’d been broken down and maybe put back together again by him.
I knew he watched at certain points, and I hoped he admired the fact I could handle a gun, clean it, oil it, reload it, just as well as he could. I fetched my dagger and carefully sharpened it to a high gleam too.
It was so late by the time we finished, I felt like drooping.
Maksim stood, stretched, then carefully secured his weapons and positioned them at strategic places in the apartment.
He took my arm, ushered me to the bedroom.
He nodded to the small table on my side of the bed then waved at my blade and my gun.
“Keep them beside you and always on you now,” he ordered.
We got ready to sleep, and I was surprised to see him settle on the bed in sweatpants instead of naked and demanding.
I’d gotten under the covers ready for him.
He lay there motionless once more, staring at the ceiling even after he turned off all the lights.
The ghosts of both our pasts hung like heavy shrouds over us.
“I told Yury not to tell you.” His deep voice sliced through the dark night.
“Tell me what?”
“I bought you that dagger, Sashenka. Not him.” Sheets rustled as Maksim shifted. “It was birthday present.”
My tears seeped into the pillow beneath my cheek, waves of hurt and wasted time washing over me.
I reached out to him, touching his side, but I didn’t speak, and he didn’t move toward me either.
Love was never mentioned between us, which made my silent tears fall faster.
I’d already told Maksim I thought love was a stupid construct, so it was probably better like this anyway.
Swiping quietly at my nose, I divined his large dark shape among all the other shadows crawling around us.
Maybe part of me was glad Maksim couldn’t find Oleg, because at least then his life wasn’t in danger. But no mafia wife inhabiting this sort of lethal world could afford to think like that. The reality was that love was hardly ever a reason for marriage, and intense feelings could make someone that much more vulnerable.
He was smart to hold himself apart from me.
And I was stupid for suddenly wanting more, especially from Maksim Krasnov.
I woke up later, cold even though it was summertime.
The bed was empty beside me when I rolled over, and I realized Maksim hadn’t been next to me for hours.
It was still dark, but his silhouette was the densest. He sat in a chair in the far corner, facing the door. Moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun he held in his lap as he guarded the entrance to the bedroom.
I knew he was awake. Tension coiled inside his body, readying him to strike at any moment.
Leaning up on my elbow, I called out softly, “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
The gun lifted, and he pointed the muzzle at me before using the deadly weapon to beckon me to him.
I rose from the bed, completely nude, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to follow this man’s commands.
Walking slowly, I made my way to him. His gaze hot even in the black of night, he held me transfixed.
It was not sex he wanted, however, when he settled me sideways in his lap.
The gun’s barrel whispered down the center of my spine before his warm calloused hand replaced the cold metal weapon.
He shifted slightly, his hard cock trapped inside the sweats, and his other palm settled on my thigh. The fingers of both his hands brushed my flesh in slow, lulling motions until I rested my head against his shoulder.
The tension seeped away from his big muscular body when he nuzzled the side of his face against my hair.
“What were you going to say to Arkady earlier? About not being broken. Something about me, da?”
I didn’t answer.
“Let me guess. It was on the tip of your tongue to tell him I would never break you.”
He nailed it but, instead of answering, I shook my head. When I did, the stubble on his jaw rasped against my hair.
“Oh, Maksim. What does it matter now?” My hands reached for him, fingers drifting along the breadth of his well-muscled ribs.
I lifted my head, watching his eyes that seemed lit by the moon itself. “It doesn’t make any difference at all anymore.”
I would never forget the sober planes of his face when he said, “So many cross words between us. Too many.”
I hoped not. But maybe I was the only one.
He exhaled slowly, and I put my head back where it had been, nestled in the crook of his throat where I next felt his words rumble out.
“I would like a cigarette.”
“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” I smiled in the dark.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I. Maybe we should take up another bad habit. End of days and all that.”
“It is not end of days until I say so.” His voice emerged full of strength and force, his arms tightening around me.
When I tilted my face up to peer at him, he kissed me.
He consumed me.
He commanded me and my mouth and my body and my soul.
Ending the long involved kiss, he pressed a heartbreaking amount of warm pecks to my cheeks, my temples, my chin.
Then he whispered roughly, “Go to sleep now, krasivyy.”
My breath hitched. Russian was my first language just like it was his, and he had to know I understood the endearment.
Beautiful one.
When I nestled my head against the hollow of his throat again—the most welcome resting place in the world—it was with tears in my eyes.
Something would happen.
Something was happening.
Good or bad or downright evil, I had a feeling we were helpless to stop it.
18
Maksim
SITTING THERE IN THE blackness of the night, I had smiled when Sasha refused to answer my question about me not being able to break her.
I hoped she was never broken at all.
Strange things she did to me, and I knew she was affected too, but to what extent?
And to what end?
The kiss had been unintended and, when it finished, I’d pressed more upon her face, all over her delicate and determined features.
We should never have been together.
This fake marriage was fated to end badly.
With that knowledge piercing a part of my heart, I’d told her to go back to sleep, and sleep she did. On my lap while I held a gun in one hand and her hip in the other.
Ours was not a romance for the books. Or even a romance at all.
When her breaths deepened and steadied out, I lifted her. I carried her back to the bed. I shifted her onto the mattress so gently she didn’t wake up again.
I didn’t know what guided me when I kissed her forehead. When I swept the hair from her cheeks. When I tucked her in under a light sheet.<
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Returning to the chair and my gun and thoughts of revenge, I waited, wide awake.
Days had gone by with no sign of Oleg or his henchmen. I was certain he’d traveled to the shores of Boston with an entire Bratva of his own, or he never would’ve dared to challenge the empire of Yury Zolotov.
I was intensely aware that I was failing Sasha by not getting to the psycho Russian first. Being unable to act, kill, hunt, do rubbed me the wrong way.
It was only a matter of time now, time I was wasting.
He was close. I felt it in my marrow, in my gut. This premonition kept me awake, eating away from the inside like hunger used to.
Hours passed just like the days had, the clock ticking over useless time—seconds, minutes, hours.
Dusk had drained into darkness, and now darkness bled into dawn.
I had just stood to stretch some of the kinks from my body when I heard footsteps pounding up the staircase to the apartment. At the same time, my phone began vibrating on the small table beside me.
Grabbing the phone and my gun, I hurried out to meet whatever new disaster had arrived. I wasn’t about to go off half-cocked though. I slid my back to the wall beside the door then pressed the phone to my ear.
“Speak,” I muttered tersely.
As someone hammered on the door, Kirill’s voice came through the phone. “Oleg is at the estate—”
I yanked the door open to see one of our soldiers, his face pale. “There’s an attack at Yury’s.”
Shivers of the bone-chilling kind rode up and down my spine before adrenaline rushed in.
Kirill was still talking. “You need to get here.”
“Did you hear me?” the soldier asked.
Glaring at him, I jabbed a finger at the phone screen. “I know.”
The soldier bleated out, “Arkady called and—”
“Two minutes!” I barked, slamming the door in the guard’s face.
Kirill’s voice sounded . . . distressed. “Maksim, Oleg has Yury. It’s a standoff.”
Blood curdled in my veins.
“We need you and your rifle and do not fucking bring Sasha.”
Cutting off the phone call, I almost threw the fucking thing at the wall. But there was no time for that.
Goddamn pizda. I’d been lying in wait, and the suka went straight for the jugular.
Rushing back to the bedroom, I tried not to make a racket. I pulled on clothes, anything I could reach. I was viciously, terribly aware of the woman asleep in my bed the whole time.
In the other room again, I checked all the weapons I’d cleaned and loaded last night.
I should’ve gotten a fucking RBG from the cache at The Cat and the Sickle.
Armed up and ready, I remembered Sasha so carefully tending to her weapons last night.
Could I really just leave her with no explanation when chances were I might never return and, if I did, that might mean her papa was dead?
Fuck.
I stomped back to the bedroom, sank onto the side of the bed.
She looked so peaceful and pretty, and I was about to end all of that.
Wasn’t like her life had been a bed of roses anyway.
“Sasha.” I brushed the backs of my knuckles across her cheek. “Sashenka,” I said more loudly.
“Wha . . .” Flipping hair from her eyes, she jerked upright. “Maksim?”
Her gaze tripped all around my face, and I had to wonder how unhinged I looked.
Probably pretty fucking unhinged because next she sat all the way up, her shoulders stiffening. “What’s going on?”
“I have to go.”
“Where?” There was no time lapse between her waking up and becoming absolutely alarmed, and I’d done that to her by not taking Oleg out before he had the chance to strike again.
To strike against the most important person in her life, her father.
My cheeks hollowing, I stood from the bed.
She jumped to her feet as I headed for the door, creating an obstacle of beautiful, angry, obstinate woman. “You fucking tell me what’s happening right now, Maksim! Or I will never trust you again.”
“Then you shouldn’t trust me.” Setting my hands on her shoulders, I picked her up and placed her aside like a chess piece.
“Why go through the trouble of waking me up, huh?”
I halted, one hand on the doorframe. Wheeling slowly around, I tried to make the unbearable possible.
I tried to memorize all the snapshots of our life in an instant. The fighting. The teasing. The anger. Cross words.
The heat. The starving desire. The rush of having her riding my cock.
Most of all, the moments that had been quiet and just between me and her. Sashenka.
Swallowing roughly, I said, “It’s not good.”
“It’s Oleg then.”
“You think I cannot kill him?” I quirked my head curiously at her.
“Then there’s something else about what’s going on that you’re not telling me.”
Shrewd female. But then, she’d always been as much brains as beauty.
“Oleg has gotten hold of Yury.”
The color left her face in an instant. “Where?”
“At the mansion.”
“But Jo’s there. The baby!”
I just looked at her, the ugly reality etched across my face.
She whirled into action, racing to put on a pair of jeans.
“You are not coming with me.” Except I was still fucking standing there.
Her voice rang out across the room as sharp as her dagger’s point. “I am not sitting here being a weak woman while—”
Ranging across the room, I silenced her viperish tongue with my own lunging inside as my mouth crashed over hers.
It might be the last time I tasted her, and I would savor this one single moment.
When I let her go, she continued right on dressing, shoving her feet into sneakers as if I hadn’t just decreed that she remain behind.
“What does he want.” She bundled her hair up into a ponytail then sheathed her stiletto blade and holstered her Glock.
She faced off with me. “What does he want? If he has Papa but hasn’t killed him . . . what does Oleg want?”
“You know what he wants.”
“Me.” Her words sounded ghostly hollow.
Yet she turned for the doorway, her intent to meet this threat head-on clear.
It was then I knew it was futile to try to stop her no matter how much I wanted to.
One way or the other Sasha would find a way to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time.
I wasn’t going to let her go all half-assed though. Stalking to the closet, I retrieved the one thing that could keep her safe besides me. A bulletproof vest I’d had custom-plated, in her size.
Da. Ours was anything but a typical romance.
“Put this on,” I demanded.
“Are you serious? It’s June. I’ll sweat my boobs off.”
“Better than having you dead.”
That shut her up, and I roughly velcroed her into the armor, which would at least protect her from any upper body shots.
“You’re not wearing one,” she pointed out, eyes narrowed.
“Correct.”
With numerous SUVs at our lead and flanking our tail, Sasha and I shot toward Yury’s house out in the country. On my Harley, we made fast work of Boston’s early morning traffic. I wove in and out of cars and buses, soon losing the last SUV, but all that really mattered was getting to the mansion before that sociopathic son of a bitch murdered or maimed anyone.
Sasha’s grip around my middle reassured me she was still alive, at least. The bulk of the bulletproof vest pressed against me, giving added peace of mind.
I throttled down before we reached the perimeter of the mansion, hitting the kickstand on the bike at the bottom of a knoll that overlooked everything.
“Why are you stopping?” she asked when I disembarked.
Carefully li
fting my SIG rifle from the sling that housed it, I sprinted up the crest of the hill that butted against one of the stone walls that surrounded Yury’s acreage.
“Why do you think?” I eased the gun from the soft-sided case, quickly setting up the bipod on the ground.
From this location, I should have perfect overwatch position.
I had killed with one bullet from farther distances.
“You can shoot Oleg from here?”
Checking the dope and the scope, I tested the wind on a fingertip I wetted in my mouth.
The weather was as still as death, and wasn’t that a metaphor for this day.
“If I am fortunate, da.” I focused in on the house.
My breath grew slow, my heartrate almost sluggish.
I was the rifle and the rifle was me, and I dialed in my sights until the scene unfolded clearly in front of me.
That crazy bastard Oleg held Yury on the terrace, in front of the line of French doors.
And inside the doors, I saw faces pressed against the glass panes. It was Joanna. And Baba. And—blyad—the squalling red face of Saoirse in Jo’s arms.
Jo struggled while I watched, trying to get free with her newborn daughter, and my eyes pinched tight for just a second.
One stray bullet aimed at Oleg would end up with the slaughter of those dearest to us.
The other Zolotov soldiers in the SUVs finally caught up then zoomed beyond our overwatch position to provide backup to Kirill, Arkady, and the Brava, but I fucking hoped they took in the entire situation when they got on site before they started firing.
“What do you see?” Sasha paced back and forth beside me.
I swallowed hard, motioning her to the ground.
She fell to her belly on the grass beside me.
I squinted into the scope. “A lot of men. A lot of weapons. And no one is moving.”
I did not tell her about Baba or Jo. I definitely didn’t say a single word about baby Saoirse.
No one made a move with goddamn good reason.
At that precise moment, Kirill must’ve been dying inside.
I knew I was.
I had danced with evil before, but Oleg’s was a blackness I’d never encountered.
A sneer curved across my lips.
I would take utmost pleasure in plugging him so full of holes he would be well on the way to exsanguination before I made the final kill shot.