Murder Aforethought

by Parker St John

  The two men he’d killed on Russo’s orders would still be dead, and maybe they’d have even suffered worse. But the guilt ate at him, more than anything he’d ever done for his country under orders. There was no moral superiority in killing an evil fucker at the behest of someone even worse.

  Emma wouldn’t have lost the sole responsible adult who cared for her.

  Maksim wouldn’t have lost the closest thing he had to family. He wouldn’t be selling his home. He wouldn’t be on a forced sabbatical, pending an ethics inquiry with his fancy employer.

  He wouldn’t have almost lost his life.

  He wouldn’t have killed a man.

  He wouldn’t have been forced to become what Val was.

  He’d been gentle with Val since he’d regained consciousness. There was no blame in his manner or his expression. But he’d always been a deep well, and Val didn’t doubt for a single moment that no one ever saw the complete inner workings of Maksim’s mind unless he allowed it.

  There was undoubtedly a complex risk/benefit analysis running behind his cool gaze, and Val had zero doubts about what the final result would be.

  Val was a bad risk. He was broken and unemployed. He’d gotten away with murder, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. He was a bad bet for anyone at this stage, but especially for a man like Maksim Kovalenko. A man who could have anyone.

  He appreciated the way Maksim had stuck with him. Without his legal expertise, Val would be cuffed to the bedrail right now. The man was more loyal and more caring than he preferred people to think.

  But it was time to remove the burden from his shoulders and let him return to his own life.

  The life he’d had before Val had fucked it all up for him.

  26

  Maksim

  There was an elderly woman in Val’s bed. She was wearing a yellow crocheted bonnet and flipping through the television. Her eyes lit up when Maksim froze in the doorway with a single red rose.

  “Oh, is that for me?”

  Maksim cleared his throat. He went to her bed and placed the rose inside a plastic water bottle. “Of course,” he lied. “Every beauty gets a rose at this hospital.”

  “Oh, aren’t you the sweetest thing!” Her smile was brighter than sunshine. She reached out and clasped his hand with fingers that were cold and papery. “If I were forty years younger, I’d… well, never you mind.”

  Her name was Estelle, and she was on dialysis for end-stage kidney failure. She had one daughter who lived in Tacoma. Her daughter was trying to convince her to move, but Estelle wasn’t certain.

  “Oregon is my home,” she said stubbornly, smashing the rose against her nostrils. “It rains too much in Washington.”

  “Yet family is a shelter in all things,” Maksim said smoothly. “Take it from a man who spent every last second with his own mother before she passed. It’s never enough time. Give your daughter the gift of what you have left.”

  “You’re too young to be so wise,” she flapped a hand at him. “But I’ll consider it. Now, you go on. I’ve kept you long enough. Thank you for my rose.”

  Maksim pressed a brief kiss to her cool cheek. She blushed and tittered.

  He held her smile close to his heart as he exited the room, but it didn’t do much to fill the hollow feeling inside it.

  Reese was waiting for him in the hall. He leaned against the wall opposite Val’s old room, with one boot crossed over the other and his hands stuffed into his pockets. He was smiling, but his gaze was flat like a shark’s.

  J.D. Reese was a man with something eating away at him. People like him often tried to fill the void by taking their own bite out of the nearest person.

  “That was remarkably wholesome, what you just did in there.” Reese nodded toward Estelle’s partially open door.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be released until three o’clock,” Maksim said. “Why did he leave early?”

  “You’re a smart man,” Reese drawled. “You know why.”

  Maksim took a deep breath. He thought of Val, the turmoil and pain that had been so clear in every flicker of his expression. Maksim had told himself it was the drugs and the shock of his injury, but he’d known there was more to it than that.

  Valentine Rivetti was battling more than one kind of demon. He’d solved the mystery of what happened to his father, but it hadn’t gotten him any closer to peace.

  One thing was for sure, someone in his position didn’t need the added weight of romantic entanglements heaped on an already full plate.

  They’d had a few good fucks. They’d comforted each other. There was no shame in that. But Maksim would be damned if, after all these years of going it alone, he became the kind of eager mess he despised.

  He would not be the clinging vine that dragged Val under the surface when he was barely treading water.

  He swallowed a painful tightness in his throat. “He’s going to need help,” he told Reese. “You know that, right?”

  Reese examined him with his curiously remote gaze. He nodded, just once, in confirmation.

  “Are you going to be there for him?”

  “I always have been.”

  Might as well go for broke. “You need help, too.”

  Reese chuckled. He clapped Maksim on the shoulder with enough force to knock him forward a step. “You’re a good guy, Maks. I’m sorry I won’t get to know you better.”

  That stung, but Maksim buried his grief deep. It wasn’t as easy to do as it usually was, despite the practice of a lifetime. He held out a hand. “Thank you for saving all our lives,” he said sincerely.

  Reese shook his hand.

  Maksim straightened his tie and cleared his throat. “Take care of yourselves.”

  “We will.”

  That was all there was to it.

  Maksim moved on with his life, though it didn’t much resemble any life he’d previously known.

  He hadn’t seen Emma since putting her in the back of a squad car so she could go home. She called him sometimes from her friend’s phone at school. He’d told her it wasn’t appropriate, but in typical vivacious fashion, she did what she liked.

  Maksim stopped protesting when he realized how much she needed to talk about what had happened. She needed to process her fear with someone who felt safe. So, he cleared his schedule every afternoon at two o’clock, and he picked up every time his phone rang.

  It wasn’t difficult to clear his schedule, since he’d only gone back to his firm on a part-time basis. Their ethics investigation had been a laughable formality. They’d only waited to be certain no charges would be filed, before swooping in to ask Maksim to handle a particularly nasty corporate espionage case.

  To the shock of everyone who knew him, he’d turned the case down. It might have offered a diversion to the misery that clogged his every waking hour, but he no longer had the heart to defend men who reminded him of Dominic Russo.

  He agreed to stay on a part-time basis because, even now, the idea of living without the safety net of a cushy salary broke him out in a cold sweat.

  To keep himself busy, he took on two unlawful termination cases at the CLC.

  In his spare time, he cleared out his old apartment and listed it for sale. He spent two weeks looking at ritzy condos and planned developments before settling on a custom log cabin nestled on a half-acre of forest in Beaverton.

  He didn’t know what possessed him. He’d been an inner-city man ever since he was born in Kiev. At his darkest times, the bustle of the city was all that had kept his loneliness at bay.

  But something about the house spoke of serenity to him, and serenity reminded him of Val. He remembered their conversation in The Dalles, about moving somewhere quiet. The house was calm, comfortable, and healing.

  The moment Maksim realized he’d bought the house for a man who had no place in his life, he knew he was fucked.

  He’d fallen in love.

  It was laughable. At his age, the chances of falling in love for the first time were slim
mer than being struck by lightning. Yet, here he was, pining for a man nearly two decades younger — and a horde of ghosts heavier — than him.

  It was a lonely sensation, but the loneliness was different than the desolate wasteland his life had been for years. It was simultaneously more painful, and yet, easier to bear.

  He didn’t need to hide from this kind of pain. He didn’t bury his head in work and pretend he was a fully satisfied, functional adult. He lived and breathed this sorrow and felt more alive than he had in a decade, despite his keen awareness of what was missing.

  He thought of Val… a lot. He enjoyed thinking of him, even when it hurt. He wondered if he was fully healed from the injury that had almost cost him his life.

  Until the day he died, Maksim would never forget the giant needle the paramedics had jabbed into Val’s chest to inflate his lungs.

  He wondered if he was being treated at the V.A., and if he’d told them about his nightmares.

  He wondered if Val thought of him.

  The weeks marched on.

  Eventually, Emma’s parents stopped pretending they cared what she did with her life, and she began visiting again. She didn’t outright tell them what she was doing, but she didn’t hide it, either. They never batted a single boozy eye.

  He took her to lunch, which she usually spent complaining about her crush and asking his advice. She helped him repaint his kitchen and stayed to do her homework at his dinner table before he drove her back into the city.

  And still, a man he’d known for only a week lingered in his every waking thought… and often in his dreams.

  27

  Val

  “Yeah, I know the registration deadline is passed, but I don’t have any other choice. I’m being treated at the V.A., and Thursday is the only day my therapist can see me.”

  Just saying the words out loud made heat crawl up the back of Val’s neck, but he was proud he’d forced them out, regardless. It was something he was working on, not hiding the fact that he had a problem.

  “Please,” he begged into the phone as he climbed his dark stairwell. “If I miss this pre-req, I won’t be able to take the advanced course next term.”

  It had been a long day. Val’s financial aid approval had finally gone through on the same day he’d officially laid his father to rest.

  Pop had been in the ground for months, with a matching headstone right next to his wife, but Val hadn’t really said goodbye. He’d shed no tears.

  Today, he’d stood at Pop’s grave with Reese at his shoulder, and he’d forgiven him for being such a colossal fuckup.

  Pop had made horrible decisions, and he hadn’t been worth much to society. But he’d tried his best to be a good father. Val had never doubted he was loved, not even when the disappointment of raising a gay son had almost crushed his father.

  Tears had come, finally, and Val had squeezed his eyes shut and said goodbye.

  He’d left the cemetery wrung out and exhausted, but something deep down inside him felt settled, like the fresh, still air after a rainstorm.

  The registrar buzzed in his ear about emailing the professor, but Val had stopped listening.

  Someone waited on the landing in front of his door. The light was out again, and the man’s features were hidden in shadow. Val could only identify that he was tall and had his hands in the pockets of a long coat.

  He disconnected his call and palmed the Glock beneath his jacket.

  His therapist had tried on multiple occasions to dissuade him from concealed carry, but the therapist didn’t know about the list of criminals as long as his arm who might eventually decide they wanted Val to work for them, just like he had for Dominic Russo.

  It wasn’t likely, but it was possible, and Val was taking no chances.

  As far as he knew, from the few acquaintances he had who lived the life, the entire family had descended into chaos after Mary’s death. Lower capos were fighting amongst themselves, and the family had divided into factions. Word on the street was that the Russians were backing one particular player. Val had no doubt they’d sweep any opposition in short order, and some other clueless shmuck would be out there putting bullets into their competitors’ heads.

  But it wasn’t going to be him.

  He was about to draw his weapon when the man in the shadows spoke. “It’s me.”

  Val’s heart stuttered beneath his ribs.

  That calm, deep voice. There was nothing like it anywhere else on the globe, and Val ought to know. He’d seen enough of it.

  Late at night, when Val had woken from a nightmare, he sometimes lay in bed and focused on the memory of that voice until it felt as if Maksim’s ghost was there whispering in his ear. It almost felt real when he needed it to be, when he was desperate enough for it. He’d never expected to hear it in the flesh again.

  “You aren’t going to shoot me, are you?” Maksim sounded amused.

  Val released the pistol’s grip and adjusted his jacket over the bulge. It took a ridiculously long time to summon his voice. “Nah,” he said, going for an ease he didn’t feel, “who knows when I might need a lawyer again?”

  Maksim stepped out of the darkness. God, he looked good. His silver hair was perfectly styled, and his clothes were expensive yet casual. The gray sweater he wore under his designer raincoat looked so soft Val wanted to grab fistfuls of it and bury his face against Maksim’s stomach.

  Hell, who was he kidding. He wanted to do that anyway, especially when he mounted the last step and was finally close enough to once more breathe the man’s cool, forest scent.

  “Uh…” He scuffed the toe of his sneaker against the floor and immediately felt like a moron. “What are you doing here?”

  Maksim’s hard mouth curved into a crooked half-smile. “Aren’t you going to ask how I found you?”

  Val skeptically scrunched up one eye. He shook his head. “I’m going to assume it’s something along the same lines of how you know how to steal cars and run from the police. We’re all lucky you use your powers for good.”

  Maksim chuckled.

  “Miguel tried with his buddies at the P.D., but they’re locked up tight ever since Internal Affairs began investigating leaks. I hired a private investigator. It only took him an hour to find the new address listed on your financial aid forms.”

  “Ah.” Val rubbed the back of his neck. “You want to come in?”

  “Yes.”

  There was an awkward shuffle as Val squeezed by him on the landing. He did his damned best not to touch any part of the man. He even held his breath, just to avoid his delicious scent as he inserted the key into his lock and twisted. He gave the handle a jiggle and bumped the door with his hip to unstick it.

  Maksim followed him into the battered recesses of his apartment.

  The place wasn’t much by anyone’s standards, even Val’s, and he’d slept in barracks for years. It was a studio with a small kitchen and a large window that overlooked the busy parking lot of a Jiggles.

  Maksim, of course, immediately noted the view.

  “You don’t even need a T.V. with entertainment like that,” he said, strolling to the window and looking down.

  In the dim apartment, the city lights made a halo around his silhouette. He looked as if he’d just materialized out of one of Val’s waking dreams. He couldn’t be real.

  The intimacy of the darkness was too much for Val. It stirred up a dozen sense memories, like the taste of Maksim’s mouth and the feel of his strong thighs pinning Val’s hips down. He remembered the warmth of someone sleeping at his back, and he thirsted for it with a fierceness he’d never known.

  He cleared his throat and flipped on the overhead lights.

  “It was a tossup between this and the corner apartment overlooking a liquor store. I guess even a gay man can’t say no to purple nipple tassels. You, uh, you want something to drink?”

  “No, thank you.” Maksim turned to face him. He appeared at ease, but something about the tension in his body lang
uage told Val his hands were fisted inside his coat pockets.

  He didn’t want to be there. Of course, he didn’t.

  “Did something come up?”

  “What?”

  “Are they charging me? You? Fuck, Reese?”

  Realization dawned across his expression. “No, nothing like that,” he assured him. “I spoke with Detective Nilsson a few weeks ago. She closed her investigation. The entire department is focused on covering their own asses at this point.”

  “Good.” Val huffed a relieved breath. “That’s good. So then why—”

  “You look good,” Maksim interrupted.

  Val blinked. He scratched his nose. “Yeah, thanks. I, uh, do some sparring at this gym over off MLK Boulevard…”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Maksim whispered. He removed his hands from his pockets and crossed the room.

  Val’s eyes widened, but he held his ground even when Maksim stopped less than two feet away.

  He wondered why he’d once thought Maksim’s eyes were cold. They weren’t. They were the pale blue of an early sunrise, with the heat of the sun lurking just out of reach.

  “You look healthy. Relaxed.”

  “Yeah? I guess I wasn’t exactly operating at my best back then. Getting shot really takes it out of a person. Hey, I’m going to get a beer. Want one?”

  “No. You’re fully recovered, then?”

  Val’s head was in the fridge when the concern in Maksim’s voice washed over him. He closed his eyes and shuddered. “Sure. It’s been two months. I was back at the gym in a few weeks.”

  He had two bottles in his hand before he remembered that Maksim didn’t want anything. Fuck it, he’d drink them both.

  “Are you… happy?”

  He hammered off a cap on the edge of the countertop and took a vicious swallow. “No,” he said after another gulp. “But I don’t feel like the grim reaper anymore.”

  “Good,” Maksim said, “That’s really good. I apologize, but I overheard… you’re in therapy?”

  Val didn’t want to discuss this. Saying the words to a stranger over the phone was one thing. Admitting it to the man he couldn’t stop thinking about, the man who had it all together, was another. But if anyone deserved to know, it was Maksim.