4. Maxim
4
MAXIM
Hayley glances over my shoulder and I tense, waiting for her to shrink from me, and what I am.
A monster. A killer.
A huge, tattooed man who has scraped his way up from nothing in a Russian orphanage, then in Greenwich once I was old enough to run away to what I imagined to be a city with streets paved in gold via the Bratva, and earned the role of trusted henchman, then eventually second-in-command of Greenwich. Then ten years ago killed that bastard and replaced him as the kingpin.
I steel myself, but the next moment, she has tipped forwards into my waiting arms.
The relief as I draw her slowly into my chest and she wraps her arms around my neck is unreal.
“Maxim… Oh my god. Where were you?”
My heart breaks. Fuck. I should have been here earlier. That stupid deal with Hampstead.
“I needed you. I thought…” She grips my lapels.
I wasn’t there at the moment she needed me. I believed I was keeping her safe from the ugly part of my life. The violence, the danger.
But it found her anyway.
“You came for me,” she adds in a whisper.
I switch to my mother tongue, and lose the words in her soft brown hair. “I’ll always come for you, malishka. I’ll always look after you.”
Hayley clings to me as I carry her out of the café. She’s covered in blood, but all I can see as I place her in the passenger seat of my car—a modest-looking thing with armour-plated doors and bulletproof glass that I use to drive myself to visit my girl quietly—is her fear.
That expression of terror hovers in front of my eyes, even as I climb into the driver’s seat and start the engine.
I think she’s in shock. Frankly, I might be too.
I tried to protect her from my world, and it came to find her another way. I was so fucking lucky. I could have lost her. Ten minutes later, or a stupid, misguided thought about how I shouldn’t visit her two days consecutively, and she could be dead, or…
The pain of what could have happened to her if I hadn’t arrived when I did is worse than when Camden waterboarded me.
They could have taken the most precious, innocent, lovely thing from my world, and I might have allowed it because I thought I was keeping her safe .
If those ignorant little shits had been luckier, I’d have lost her.
That’s not happening.
Not now. She’s mine.