I focus on my task, pulling the line through his skin before tightening like my dad taught me. When I tie it off, Maxim’s other hand reaches up and fingers the hem of the shirt I was sleeping in. It’s another one of his, this one a worn New York Knicks tee that fits me like a short dress. Sean would probably disown me if he saw me wearing it.
“Where did you find this?”
“Your drawer,” I lie. It was in the basket, at the top, barely worn. Hardly even dirty. I don’t tell him it smells like him, and that I have a hypothesis that the scent of him is the only thing that lets me sleep a whole night through.
“I like it on you,” he says. His fingertips skim across my upper thigh, sending goosebumps across my skin and up my back. I pause.
“Stop distracting me,” I grumble. “You’ve lost too much blood, you’ll probably pass out if you get a boner right now.”
Maxim’s eyes fall shut and he lets out a light laugh, one so soft, and so foreign in this gruesome scene it makes me smile and let out a huff of my own.
“Focus,darling,” I chastise. “We’re almost done.”
His hands return to their place on my hips, and I think for a moment of the many ways he’s used them on me in the last few days.
No.
Not the time.
I force my attention at the job in front of me.
“You’re good at this,” he remarks.
“Hold your assessment until you see the results,” I say, but I admit that they look pretty clean. I once gave Leo stitches so bad on his upper arm that we still laugh about it ten years later. I had to learn somehow, I guess.
“Who taught you?”
“My dad. I was fourteen, he was giving stitches to my uncle.”
“Leo’s father,” he says.
“Yes.” I pull the knot a little too tight and he barely winces. “Sorry.”
“What happened to his parents?”
“Car crash,” I say. The memory still makes my chest ache—my aunt and uncle were a formidable pair and as involved in my life as I am with my sister’s children. We live such dangerous lives that it’s almost more of a shock to die in as common a way as a car accident or a heart attack. “It was their anniversary.”
“How old was he?”
“Seventeen.”
“That must’ve been hard for all of you,” he says.
I pause my work for a moment, remembering that time. It was a huge loss to us all, and Leo the most. He was an only child, though always felt like our brother. He moved into the guest house and hasn’t left since, which is how we’ve all liked it.
“Do your sisters also know how to give stitches?” he asks.
“Just Leo and me. And Sean. Willa hates wounds. Vanessa is better at snapping orders and buzzing about while Leo or I do the tending.” I cut the thread for the last time and tilt his head left and right to survey my work. I soak a pad with hydrogen peroxide and rub it lightly over the newly stitched wound. “The last person I stitched up was Cillian.”
Maxim stays quiet, but his eyes darken at the mention of him.
“I should’ve let him bleed out,” I add.
“I’m sorry he betrayed you,” Maxim says. He’d said something similar the day we stormed the church where Cillian nearly forced my sister, bound and bruised, to marry him. I drove there in a car with Leo and Maxim, my arm still in a sling from the gunshot wound.
Maxim was already calling his men to meet at the church, and I remember that I was shaking with adrenaline and rage,urging Leo to drive faster. I’d been picking at my nails, and cursed as I pulled too hard and one started to bleed. Still on the phone, Maxim handed me a handkerchief without missing a beat.
I still have it.
