I feel his hips start moving beneath me and I tut. “Stop trying to exert yourself, you’re injured.”
Maxim sucks and bites on my neck. “I had a good doctor.”
“You’re insatiable,” I murmur.
“You make me this way, don’t you see that?”
I kiss him to keep him from carrying on talking like that; he gets carried away easily, traipsing too close to what feels like a confession that I don’t want from him. I can’t have it, not when I don’t have room in my heart for him and never will.
“Marian—”
“Quiet,” I command and grind harder on him, inching toward my release until it takes over me. Maxim is right behindme, his strong arms wrapping around my back pulling my chest as close to his as he can while he spills inside of me.
He repeats that Russian word into my wet hair,malysh, malysh, malyshas we catch our breaths. I’m sure it won’t always be like this. After I’m pregnant, he won’t want to have me so often, so intensely.
This is what I tell myself as he peppers soft kisses up my throat, my jaw, my forehead, my eyelids. Our marriage may be an arrangement, a business deal, but we can at least enjoy it for now.
Out of the shower, I dress the wound again with dry bandages, put on another of his shirts, and then tuck myself into bed next to him where I’m certain we’ll sleep past our alarms.
31
MAXIM
In the weekssince the wedding, I’ve spent much more time at home than I ever have. When I used to spend most evenings in my office above the club, I now try to be wherever she is. Some nights, though, it can’t be helped. Last week, for instance, when she had to patch me up. Tonight, too.
Marianna had another drop tonight with Nate, one she swore would go better than the last, and I got a call that someone was caught counting cards at the casino. By the time that was dealt with, it was past 1 AM. A thick exhaustion has set over me, making my spine feel heavy. I used to be better at all this running around late at night; now I’m feeling every one of my years above thirty like a weight on my shoulders and eyelids.
The elevator whirs as it brings me to the apartment, stopping with a soft ding when I get to the penthouse floor.
When it opens into the apartment, I see that most of the lights are off save for the one in the kitchen. There’s movement, too, like pans being picked up and moved, deliberate clanging around as if someone decided to organize at two in the morning.
When I reach the kitchen’s entryway, I don’t see her, but I hear her soft murmuring. I walk farther in until I find my wife on the ground, wearing one of my sweatshirts and a pair ofshorts, quickly removing glass bowls and serving dishes from the cabinet and depositing them on the tile. She has a sheen of sweat on her face and neck, the sleeves of the sweater rolled up her forearms, and a frantic look in her eyes.
“Marianna,” I say and she yelps, recoiling so hard that she thuds her head on the counter’s bottom ledge.
I curse and step over the kitchen supplies, trying not to step on them or her limbs, and kneel beside her.
“You scared me,” she says. I replace her hand with mine, lightly rubbing the spot on her skull. I don’t feel a bump, but her eyes still have a panicked quality about them.
“What are you doing down here?” I ask. She gulps and looks away from me. I touch her cheek and tilt her head back toward mine, but she’s reluctant to meet my gaze. “What happened?”
“I—” She rubs a hand over her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose hard. I don’t know what comfort she needs, but she is out of sorts, so I stroke my thumb lightly across her cheek.
She shakes her head and pulls back from me, scooting a few inches away. Her hands shake.
“Marianna,” I say, a plea for her to not suffer alone.
She takes a heavy breath and lets it out through her mouth. “You’ll think it’s stupid. You weren’t supposed to come home yet.”
I drop from my knees to sit fully on the ground, my back against the cupboard across from her. I’m too large to sit comfortably in a space as tight as this one, but I bend my legs in front of me and rest my elbows atop my knees as I wait for her to go on.
“Did you know about the bombs?” she asks after we sit in silence for a couple minutes. Something about it is familiar, but I can’t recall exactly how. “When Cillian took Ness, he’d planted dozens of these little explosives, about the size of a quarter, all over the place. The dining room, the gym, our bedrooms, theoffice, our cars, on Leo’s motorcycle. They were hooked up to a remote detonator so he could set them off any time if he wanted.”
I recall something Vanessa had mentioned in passing after Cillian’s death. A couple weeks when she and her family needed to stay at one of the Orlov hotels. She didn’t give details, and I didn’t press, just gave her the rooms they needed.We’ll be dealing with Cillian’s mess for a while,she’d said.
“We found and disarmed all of the ones hooked up to his list, but these things are tricky. If one is close enough to another, it doesn’tneedto be hooked up to the detonator to go off, so long as the first one did.”
Mary squeezes each of her fingertips on one hand, then uses that hand to squeeze the fingertips on the other. She does this twice before she goes on. “There were a hundred and forty bombs between Vanessa’s house and Willa’s. We looked for days, and just when we’d thought we’d found them all, there would be another tucked behind a headboard, or beneath the silverware holder in the kitchen.”
