“You’re hurting me,” I say quietly and his breath hitches as he realized how tightly he holds me. I don’t mind the pain, but this has the desired effect of bringing him back from his stricken, panicking state. “It’s okay, I’m okay.”
I pull his head down until his forehead rests on my shoulder. From where he kneels in the kitchen, Sasha watches us with a sad understanding.
In this position, my face is close to Maxim’s ear, so I lower my voice and murmur that I’m alright, I fought them and I won, and isn’t it so good that he married such a strong fighter?
“Lev is downstairs. Cleaners are on their way,” Sasha says. Maxim takes a big breath before he stands to full height, pulling me up with him. He wipes from his face the intense panic that had just been there.
I meet his stare and give a slow nod.
I don’t protest when he leans down and scoops me up in his arms. I let him carry me to the dining room and sit me in a chair where Lev meets us and makes quick work of my arm.
Elise has come-to again, and I hear Sasha comforting her there.
I think about the three tests in the trash can. About how there will never be a good time to tell Maxim if I want nothing to change between us. About the way I never want to see that fear on his face again.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Maxim vows.
I snatch his wrist before he can leave my side.
“I’m sorry I killed him,” I say. He goes completely still. “We could’ve questioned them.”
Maxim leans down and presses a hard kiss on the side of my head.
“Never apologize for protecting yourself,” he murmurs.
When he wraps his arm around me and holds me against him, I have to admit, if only just to myself, that there’s no escaping the change in our relationship into something much messier than I planned. Not when that change has already taken place in me.
33
MAXIM
I sitin a chair watching the slow rise and fall of my wife’s chest as she sleeps. Her lips are slightly parted, her still-damp hair strewn in a mess about her pillow.
It’s been three hours since Marianna called me. Three hours since my world tilted, since I raced through this city with infinite imaginings of her death playing behind my eyes.
She almost died.He almost had her.
Earlier, after Lev finished sterilizing, stitching, and bandaging Marianna’s forearm, she stood up only to immediately get dizzy and stumble back into the chair she’d just vacated. She then dry heaved into the trash can that held her bloody gauze.
Elise gave a startled yelp as I held Marianna’s stiff and shaking shoulders. It wasn’t more than a minute of this before Marianna composed herself and wiped the saliva and bile from her mouth, sitting up straight in my arms. She was tired, despite the way her face tried to telegraph she was okay, and I felt her lean into my chest.
“I need to eat something,” she said, which is easier than what I was thinking which was—I don’t know, hospitalization? Shelooked to Elise. “Can I have one of the green juices? Maybe some toast?”
“Of course,” Elise said, her eyes still glassy from the trauma she just experienced herself.
“Thank you,” Marianna said, and then, finally, her brown eyes turned back to mine. I still held her against me and whatever she saw on my face made her sigh. “I think I have a stomach flu after all, but I’ll be fine.”
“Food, rest, and rehydration will help get her where she needs to be,” Lev said as he closed up his suitcase. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check in on the stitches, but the best thing you can do today, Marianna, is lie low.”
“Will do,” she said, already sipping on the bottle of green juice Elise brought her.
“Sasha, will you have Samuel drive Elise home, please?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
One by one they filed out of our home, our home which has been violated, intruded upon, proven unsafe for Marianna, and all the while I held her to me, her weight still resting against my chest while she finished her meager food.
She didn’t protest when I picked her up in my arms again, only rested her head on my shoulder; perhaps she was too tired to pretend she was well enough to walk.
