But he’s softer now.
And I know that, in some small way at least, I am to blame. Even Felix, who is not particularly observant or tactful, noted this to me earlier tonight, about an hour after Max headed out. I was pacing back and forth nervously, my anxious tics in full drive as I twirled my hair, fidgeted with the hem of my shirt, and chewed my nails. Felix looked up at me from his laptop and shook his head.
“You and Max have gotten close so fast, haven’t you?” he said.
I jumped at the sound of his voice, being shaken from my thoughts. “I-I guess so, yeah.”
He scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve never seen him be so gentle with anyone before, you know. He’s even nicer to me when you’re around.”
I had just shrugged off his words like they weighed nothing, but deep down I know he was right. I can feel it even when Max just looks at me, those vivid green eyes staring right down into the depths of my soul. I know time has changed him, and distance, too. He’s spent some time away from the life and I worry he might be a little rusty. Felix assures me that he’s well-trained enough that the coldness he was accustomed to will never totally thaw.
And that only breaks my heart a little bit.
I know that he needs that coldness to survive, at least for now. If he hesitates to take a guard down, if he’s even a millimeter off his game, it could spell tragedy for him. Disaster. Even death. So I hope I haven’t softened him up enough to weaken him. But now, curled up in the bed we shared not twenty-four hours ago, I make a silent vow to myself: if and when we survive this mess, I will make it my life’s mission to work on softening him, melting the icy cage around his heart. I will bring him back to planet Earth, ground him with my love. I’ll show him that light and happiness can be just as powerful a reservoir of strength as years of battle-tested darkness.
Suddenly, I’m ripped from my reverie as Felix’s cell phone rings. I bound out of bed and rush to his side, staring anxiously at the phone as he slides it open and answers.
“Are you out? Max? What’s going on? It’s been hours —”
His words are cut off and his face goes pale. “What is it? What happened, Felix?” I ask quietly, tugging at his sleeve. He shakes his head, shushing me as he listens to Max for a moment, then hangs up.
“Get your stuff. We gotta go. Something’s happened,” Felix says worriedly.
I immediately feel a wave of nausea hit me. “What? Is he okay?”
“Come on, I’ll tell you on the way,” he replies quickly, urging me to follow him. We race out of the hotel down to the street, where Felix hails us a cab. After giving the driver specific instructions in rapid French, he rolls up the partition and explains to me in a hushed tone, “Max has been injured, but you’ve got to stay calm, okay?”
I’m surprised at how calm Felix is, considering his usual high-strung personality, but that only worries me more. If it’s serious enough that even Felix is acting this way… it must be bad.
“What happened to him, Felix? Tell me,” I demand.
“He… he was shot.”
The world around me goes silent, my head spinning.
“Wh-what?” I murmur weakly, feeling bile rise in my throat.
“Shh, it’s okay. He’ll be alright. He didn’t sound that bad on the phone —”
“It’s not okay!” I cry, tears burning in my eyes. “Why are we driving so slowly? Come on, hurry up! Step on the gas!”
Felix takes my wrists and pushes them back down as I start to beat on the partition, working myself into a frenzy. “He can’t hear you and he’s going as fast as he can, Olivia. Just let the man drive. Listen to me: when we get there, I’m going to take Maggie and you’re going to ride with Max to the hospital.”
“Hospital?” I repeat breathlessly. “Wait — he found Maggie? He got her?”
“Yes, yes. Keep up, Liv, come on. Do you understand what’s going to happen?”
“Oh — uh, sure. I got it. I’ll get Max to the hospital,” I say dutifully, even though I really don’t know how I’m going to manage that. Max’s car is a stick shift and I only vaguely know how to drive a manual vehicle, plus I don’t know the way to a hospital. And then there’s the added panic of the fact that the love of my life is gravely injured.
But I will figure it out. I have to, for Max’s sake.
When we pull up, I jump out of the taxi before it’s even completely stopped. Felix tells the cabbie to wait and runs after me, the two of us bolting around the corner toward Max’s parked car. I race to the driver’s side and throw the door open, kneeling by Max, my heart hammering away in my chest. “You’re hurt,” I mumble, tears blurring my vision. There’s so much blood, and it’s streaming down from his shirt. He was shot in the upper chest.
“It looks worse than it is,” Max replies, but his breathing is ragged, his voice rough. He doesn’t sound good at all. I rip off my cardigan and tie it around his torso to stem the blood flow as much as I can.
“Maggie, come with me,” Felix is saying, and I look up to meet my former roommate’s terrified eyes. She looks like hell, which is only fitting considering the fact that she’s just had a long, torturous walk through the inferno itself. We exchange knowing nods and she wordlessly goes with Felix, the two of them racing away to meet the cab.
“I’m going to drive you to get help,” I explain to Max, forcing my voice not to tremble. “I’ll need you to tell me the way, alright?”
“Do you even know how to drive a stick shift?” he asks, his eyelids fluttering. The color is draining from his gorgeous face, and I know this needs to happen fast.
“Kind of. I’ll make it work,” I insist, urging him gently to move into the passenger seat. With a painful lurch he lumbers out of the driver’s side and walks around the front of the car, holding a hand to his chest with the other out to steady himself on the hood of the vehicle. He limps slowly around and into the seat, slumping back with an expression of intense agony on his face. I jump behind the wheel, murmuring to myself the tips my dad tried to instill in me in regards to driving a manual.
“Foot on the clutch,” I whisper, reaching down to fling the car into first gear. To my infinite relief, the knowledge comes trickling back to me through the fog of panic in my brain. Max gives me mumbled directions as we make the jerky, awkward drive back into town toward the nearest hospital.
By the time we finally get there, Max is conked out entirely, his eyes having rolled back into his head. But I am in survival mode, my former frenzy sharpened into a needle-point focus. Mustering all my strength, I all but carry his enormous weight to the glass doors of the emergency room, the two of us collapsing to the tile floor. Overwhelmed and exhausted, I black out amidst the frantic muttering of French doctors and nurses.
One week later, we’re finally home from the hospital, both on the mend. Turns out, my lack of proper sleep coupled with extreme stress resulted in my having a physical breakdown of sorts. I was booked into a hospital room alongside Max, for exhaustion and overexertion. Next to Max’s gunshot wound, I felt a little silly and weak, but the doctors assured me that I would be much better off repairing my body in the hospital. Besides, I think they caught onto the fact that I would probably be glued to Max’s side. If I was going to spend every second in the hospital room anyway, I might as well be getting treatment, too.
But now we’re both doing much better. I feel rejuvenated and relieved after our brush with near death. Max is up and mobile again, nearly back to his former strength already. Turns out, the bullet only grazed his left lung, too high up to fully puncture it or his heart. He is beyond lucky to have survived. Any further south and that bullet would have certainly killed him.
In the couple of days since leaving the hospital, Max has been fighting the desire to get up to his old ways again — not the hitman life, but the athletics. He wants to run and work out like he used to, but the doctors have urged me to keep him from doing anything too strenuous. To keep him busy and keep his mind off his current p
redicament, I’ve asked him to train me in self-defence so that he can live vicariously through me while he’s on the mend.
Granted, it’s not only self-defence he’s been teaching me… Now that we’re through the storm without any other distractions, we can explore each other’s bodies like we couldn’t before. And with his wound, I have been trying my best to give him all the TLC he deserves. Just because his body is weakened at the moment doesn’t mean I have to tone down my own physical abilities. And I am a gymnast, after all.
We’ve also done some weapons training. Even though I dislike guns, I still feel as though it would be beneficial for me to learn how to use one properly, just in case the situation ever arises that I need it. And with Max’s past still looming over us, it’s entirely possible that such a situation may very well find us again. Especially right now, with Max vulnerable, I am more determined than ever to learn how to defend myself. And him.
Not that I’m allowing that dark cloud to rain on our little niche of paradise, though. One upside to Max’s being on the mend is that we get a lot of quiet, soft time together, just the two of us. Tending to his wound and seeing a more exposed, tender side of him has been an eye-opening experience, a glimpse into how beautiful and complex his heart truly is. Underneath the layers of diamond-hard armor is an amazingly sweet man. We’ve spent many a night curled up in bed together, talking until the wee hours, baring our souls to each other. And during one of these late-night sessions, he let slip that he wanted to make this — us — official. It wasn’t exactly a proposal; more like a natural development of our current bond. It is a question that doesn’t need asking. Our union is inevitable.
So when he started talking about “when we’re married…” it didn’t come as a surprise to either of us. It’s just as natural as the air we breathe. That’s not to say he simply assumed it without my consent. Once he realized how assumptive his phrasing was, he stopped short and looked deeply into my eyes, then uttered the words I knew were coming.
“Will you marry me?”
Of course I gave the only answer there could be: yes! And sometime in between our training sessions, he managed to slip out and buy me the most beautiful, jaw-dropping ring I’ve ever seen. Rose-gold with a gigantic pink diamond. It’s more than even a princess could ask for. And our wedding is going to be absolutely gorgeous. At first, we toyed with the idea of simply eloping, but now we’re planning the big wedding of my dreams.
“I hope your parents will be pleased,” Max says, worry etched across his face. I lean over the coffee table to kiss the concerns away.
“As soon as they see how happy I am, they’ll understand,” I assure him. “Besides, how could anyone not love you? Especially with everything you’ve done for me.”
“I just don’t want to be the source of any disputes or anything,” he says. “I don’t have much by way of family, and the last thing I want is to ruin things for you. I know how much your family means to you, Liv.”
“Don’t worry, okay? This is a good thing, and my parents will see it the same way, I swear,” I tell him earnestly. At first, I was a little worried that my mom and dad would be put off by our age difference. But I’m old enough and mature enough to know what I want. They know how headstrong and intelligent I am. I wouldn’t decide to do something like this on a whim — I’ve always been cautious in life and love, and I know without a single shred of doubt this is what I want: to be with Max forever.
I just had no idea how short forever could be.
24
Liv
I stand in front of a floor-length silver mirror in the back alcove of a tiny historic chapel on the outskirts of Paris, surveying my own reflection in mingled astonishment and joy. I am nineteen years old as of one month ago, with my first semester abroad finally over. I take a deep, slow breath, blinking in disbelief at the way I look — so foreign to my own eyes.
Not much about my physical appearance has changed, of course. I still have the same long, wavy auburn hair and huge cinnamon-brown eyes. But right now my hair is parted down the center, the smooth waves decorated with a delicate crown of little white flowers. My eyes are wide and luminous, accented by expertly-applied smoky eye makeup and mascara, courtesy of my wonderful French makeup artist. There’s a deep, raspberry-red stain to my full lips, and they part to reveal a glittering and white, yet slightly anxious, smile.
I look beautiful in a way I never could have predicted. And more importantly, I actually feel beautiful — truly and unabashedly. It’s not the professional makeup job that’s caused my transformation, however. It’s the love which beats like a second heartbeat beside my own, filling me with light, making me glow.
It’s an appropriate look for a woman about to walk down the aisle.
My body is adorned in a gorgeous, pearly-white lace gown designed by Lili Hod, with a silky, scalloped swath of fabric draped from my breasts to dangle over my abdomen, smoothing out to a floor-length rippling skirt. The dress is much more expensive than my plane ticket here was, more expensive than my rent back at the flat I would have shared with Maggie, had I gotten the chance.
I am proud of her, though. Despite everything that had happened to her over the course of the semester, she didn’t cower in fear and shrink back into the smothering arms of her parents like I feared. Instead, she pulled a total one-eighty. After spending nearly a month in a hospital being treated for her extensive injuries both physical and psychological, she emerged standing tall and proud. The day before her release, she called me and asked for me to be the one who would pick her up, and not to tell her parents yet that the doctors were letting her out. She wanted to have a chance to breathe the free air and walk the streets of the city which had scarred her without her parents hovering around. So I obliged her happily, a little uncertain of what she would be like when she came walking out of the hospital.
To my relief and happiness, Maggie looked even better than she did when I first saw her on the campus green. She was still thinner than before, after the starvation under the thumb of the Chechens. Her cheeks were a little hollow, her hair slightly limp. But there is a sparkle in her eye now, a kindling of a powerful fire ignited by adversity. In fact, she is now bolder and more open than I am.
She leads a monthly therapy group for sexual assault and human trafficking survivors, in which she describes her trauma and helps others learn to cope with their own issues. On top of that, she also came back to school, like I did, and the two of us finished with new records in our category. She’s refused to let her parents yank her out of university and keep her holed up in some foreign fortress far away. She’s taken charge of her own life, realizing that if she could survive the experiences she’d had this year, she can probably do just about anything she sets her mind to.
We’ve become fast friends, and that’s why I asked her to be my maid of honor today.
All morning, she’s been by my side, chit-chatting excitedly with my makeup artist, Helene, and my mom, who came all the way from North Carolina to be here today. Of course, my mother has also had to split her time between tending to my bridal concerns and tending to my father’s nerves and emotions, as he is preparing to be the one walking me down the aisle.
Knowing how easily his emotional boat is rocked, I’m sure he’s spent most of the day weeping happy tears. I smile at the thought. I can’t wait to have him link arms with me and guide me down the flower-scattered aisle of this chapel, right into the arms of my prince.
I’m a little antsy because I haven’t been allowed to see Max all day. I know it’s only traditional for the bride to be hidden away from the groom until the ceremony, but I’ve gotten so attached to him that it feels odd not to be sharing every moment of this day with him by my side. Soon, though, we will be united in that most beautiful and sacred of ways, and I’ll never have to walk alone again.
Tears burn in my eyes and I blink them back, not wanting to ruin the perfect makeup job Helene did for me. We’ve really pulled out all the stops for this wed
ding. It is a small congregation of only our closest friends and family — mostly mine, since Max doesn’t have much by way of family… or friends. Except for one, whom I have invited unbeknownst to Max. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he sees the person I’ve asked to attend, someone he hasn’t seen in a very long time.
I want so badly to sweep away the musty cobwebs in the dark corners of his life, throw open the windows, and let the sun warm him once again. I am determined to bring joy into his world, show him what it feels like to live freely and happily, away from the tragedy and pain of his past. I cannot go back in time and rid his memory of such terrible events. I don’t have the power to eradicate the debts and strikes against him, and I know he will never truly forget the awful things he has seen and done. His past is his own, and I can’t change it. But his future… that rests in my hands. I am so excited to start this next chapter of our lives together, seeking the same bliss we have found in one another.
Still, I have to admit that I am somewhat grateful for his past, in that it has given us both a newfound strength. Especially for me. I will continue to regard the world around me with wonder and love, but I know now to be cautious. I can embrace life with wide open arms, provided that I have my eyes wide open and watching, as well.
And that is why, underneath the frilly, fragile lace of my wedding dress, there is a little sheathed knife strapped to my garter. I know now how important it is to always be prepared. Sometimes, in the pursuit of beautiful things, ugliness can still follow.
Hitman - the Series: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Collection (Alexis Abbott's Hitmen #0) Page 71