Chapter 4
4
Max
It was a good thing Max had devised an escape plan while Luca Barbarani slept off the alcohol poisoning. Only two simple steps needed to be in play: ensuring Luca’s balcony door was unlatched, and that the enormous trellis she’d seen covering the mansion wall from the limo reached as far as Luca’s bedroom.
The Fixer had clearly expected her to be skewered by shock like a marshmallow on a roasting stick but she’d bolted for the French-shuttered balcony door and flung herself over the railing before he’d finished his roaring battle cry.
Her arms shaking, she fought for purchase on the trellis lattice. The skin of her toes tore on the rough wall as she gave up the safety of the solid balcony rails for the flimsy wooden trellis planks and dark green (likely poisonous) vines.
Max’s stomach plummeted to the ground as that furious, chisel-led face leered over the balcony.
‘STOP!’
Now, in place of the Fixer’s brown eyes, Max was looking up at the barrel of a gun. She forced herself to move, but a scratchy vine had wrapped around her ankle.
Fuck. Would he really shoot her?
He cocked the gun.
Her right arm went instinctively to her waist, where her own holster used to be. She didn’t like the way his eyes tracked that movement. He lowered his gun. Somehow she knew that didn’t mean anything good.
‘Guess your aim’s full of shit too!’ she yelled, ripping her leg out of its tangle and spider-manning down the next storey.
The trellis trembled. Max’s stomach lurched as Grey, gun still in hand, climbed onto her escape plan. An escape plan that was meant to hold one medium-sized woman, not one medium-sized woman and a gigantic, less charismatic, short-haired Thor.
With a gun instead of a hammer.
‘Fuck.’ She did the one thing you weren’t supposed to in situations like this: she looked down.
The immaculately curated Barbarani garden bed wasn’t neck-breaking distance away, but it was definitely ankle snapping. Rib cracking. Her hands burned from gripping the narrow planks, her arms shaking from holding her weight. Another metre, then she could jump ...
The trellis groaned. Max’s hands caught fire.
SNAP!
Pink brick slashed against her skin. Twisted vines, broken boards. Ribs crushed against ground. No air.
She didn’t know how long she lay there – dead, most likely. Except she knew things, and surely you couldn’t know things if you were dead. The thing she knew was that there was something else entwined with her in the wreckage of the frangipani bushes.
And it was moving.
‘What the fuck!’
They rolled, trying to disentangle their limbs, but with no sense of up or down, it only served to push her on top of him. Her hair curtained his face and his hands gripped her upper arms, holding her above him because god forbid their chests collide. He was all muscle. Muscle and gun and stubble and ...
Did she have a concussion? The two wolves inside her, weary but still alive from her academy training, fought for dominance: Run versus Attack.
Attack.
She’d had the element of surprise. He had the element of size.
She lurched off him, but he didn’t let go. Their bodies pitched forward into a frangipani plant, elbows, chest – jaw?
‘Oooof.’
Oh. Nose .
Limbs scrambled, dirt up her nose, her long hair in her mouth. The hard angles of a gun against her hip. An enormous beast of a human pushing himself off her.
‘Hands where I can see them!’ His words were muffled through the hand clutching his nose.
A spear of satisfaction shot through her ribs. She pushed her hair out of her mouth and took him in. Assessing the threat was second nature – in her line of work, making the wrong split-second assumption could be the difference between life or death – and she hadn’t had the chance to view him in the daylight yet, without the shadows curling around him.
Tall ... Scratch that. Enormous .
Wide shoulders pushing through a plain grey T-shirt. Beige chinos. Leather boots. Same clothes as last night?
Stubble. No, beard . No, it was stubble.
Gun. She couldn’t see it, but she’d felt it when they collided.
Life or death?
Brown, glaring eyes. Full lips pressed to a hard, immovable line.
Death.
Her fingertips brushed her pocketknife—
‘NO!’
His bicep against hers, he tried to pitch her forward but he’d clearly assumed she didn’t know a hammer lock when she felt one. He’d been expecting the first elbow to his nose to be the last one.
‘ FUCK! ’ Both hands were on his nose now.
Her elbow throbbed. ‘Don’t you fucking touch me!’ Her heart thrashed against its cage, like it was still in prison. Like she was back in Jackie’s kitchen, the rumble of the dishwasher and the knife, the smell: sweet and metallic and—
He was watching her like she was a roo he’d hit with his ute and he was trying to figure out if he should whack her over the head with a rock or let her bleed out on the bitumen.
‘Grey!’ a voice called from the balcony. Luca’s ashen face peered down at them, cricket bat in his hand. ‘Are you okay? Do you want me to call—’
‘Everything’s under control!’ Grey yelled, his eyes still on Max as though daring her to contradict him. ‘Go back to bed, Luca!’
‘Go back to ... are you insane?’
‘Stay upstairs and lock your door!’
Luca swore eloquently but the sound of a slamming balcony door ricocheted through the balmy, morning air.
‘What did you do to him?’ Grey had let go of his nose, but the creature inside her purred at the shiny wetness around his eyes.
‘Would have thought at your age you’d know what an erection is and the most common events that can—’
‘Enough,’ he hissed, bracketing her against the wall – he wasn’t touching her, but her skin buzzed like live wires beneath his frame. His arms were either side of her; there was nothing but his gaze, his voice and the knowledge that if she ran, he’d catch her with his body or a bullet, pinning her to the remnants of the trellis.
As his eyes traced a burning graze down her skin, she remembered with a jolt that she was wearing nothing but her lacy black bra and matching G-string.
It felt vaguely like a dismembering. On one hand, she was thankful it was her nicest set of lingerie and not the maternity underwear she’d bought by accident once and now wore most of the time. When she’d walked into Semperdom six months ago, the new black-lace set she knew she wouldn’t be wearing inside had given her the tiniest shot of courage.
On the other hand: Dear. God. Why?
They were both panting. Max tried to steady her own breath under the invisible weight and heat of him. God, if only she was wearing clothes ...
‘You tried to kill him,’ he said. His eyes, to his credit, were resolutely on her face.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I found this in your clothes.’ He took her pocketknife from his chinos. They were definitely the same ones he’d been wearing last night, as she remembered the stain on his left pocket that looked like Barbarani Sangue but could just as arguably be blood. Holy hell, he really had been waiting by the door all night.
An ember sparked inside her. ‘Give that back!’ She launched at her knife, but he pulled it back, out of her reach. She clawed at his fist like a demonic child, her fingers scraping uselessly down the thick ropes of muscle wrapping his forearms. ‘That’s my property!’
‘And you are currently trespassing on Barbarani property.’ He sidestepped her as she lunged at him again, her fists connecting with a wall of muscle. If she’d thought Luca was ripped, then this shadow of his gave a whole new definition to the word.
And goddamn, it was a good definition.
‘How can I be trespassing when you drove. Me. In?’ She jumped for her knife with each word.
He didn’t even move.
Enough.
She’d forgotten who she was.
Max feigned another jump, and as he lazily flicked his wrist out of her grasp, she kicked out. You don’t go for the knee. You go for the sack above it. Crippling with a metal baton, more of a mild shock with a bare foot. But enough.
He stumbled forward, hands breaking his fall against the wall, his chest now flush with hers, her knife still clenched in his fist. Surprise glittered in his furious brown eyes.
But it soon shattered into something worse.
His eyes trained to her hip. The memory of her ghostly grab for the weapon that was no longer there flashed in her mind.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded.
‘I’m Max.’ She had a stitch. She tried to inhale to loosen it, but all that did was push her breasts into him. She’d just have to hold her breath until she lost consciousness.
‘You better start learning to talk in full sentences. I’ll have the cops ...’
‘Too late.’ She forced herself to smile, even though he probably had no idea what one looked like; the line of his mouth seemed like it had never angled up past 180 degrees. ‘I am the cops.’
It landed like the grenade she’d hoped it would.
His eyes tracked her arms. Every tattoo he clocked seemed to narrow them further. Her neck, the small scar on her chin, the scratches across her throat where she’d skimmed against the wall. Her bra ... Nope. Back up again.
His conclusion: yeah fucking right.
‘Don’t see a badge.’
‘I don’t have it with me.’
‘Convenient. Every cop I know takes theirs to bed with them.’
Max had kept hers next to her charging phone on her nightstand. Smug bastard.
‘My badge number’s 76542. You can look it up.’
‘And what will it show – the postcode of Antarctica?’
Fuck. What was she thinking? The worst possible thing to happen right now would be for this oaf to look into her.
‘Impersonating a police officer will get you five years in Western Australia.’
‘Two years.’ She flicked her hair over her shoulder. Facts. The law. This was her comfort zone. She could do this. ‘Or twelve months without trial and a twelve-thousand-dollar fine.’
‘Come with me.’
Right. Ridiculous to assume she’d be able to out-logic him. You don’t out-logic a bear, you run. Or you slit his throat.
As he gripped her upper arm, panic shot through her. She flexed her bicep, twisting out of his hold in two flawless moves that would have made her old Academy instructor flush with pride.
‘Don’t ... fucking ... touch ... me!’
Something flashed in his eyes. Some sort of realisation she didn’t like.
‘You seem to think you’re the one in control!’ His breath was hot against her skin, but he released her. ‘You brought a weapon into Luca’s room—’
‘If I wanted to kill Luca, I had plenty of chances to slit his throat while he snored my goddamn ear off! Have you ever slept in the same room as him? Let me tell you, people have killed for less.’
‘Right’—he folded his arms, head nodding sarcastically—‘and you know this because you’re a cop.’
‘That’s right.’
‘A cop with no badge, running around in her underwear with a pocketknife, screaming “someone’s going to die!” as you launch yourself at an unarmed man.’
‘I’m not trying to kill Luca!’ she yelled. ‘I’m trying to save his life!’ He’d snapped her resolve. Now it was sharp and jagged and ready to attack. ‘Get your head out of your arse and listen.’
A muscle in his jaw twitched but he didn’t stop her.
She took a deep breath. ‘There’s going to be a murder at whatever Barbarani gala is happening tomorrow night, and I need to stop it.’
He flicked up his wrist – tiny scratches from his fall the only imperfections against the deep fissures of muscle running down them. His mouth made a frustrated spasm as he looked at his watch.
‘Do you and I have different definitions of the word “murder”?’ she asked. A brief contemplation: ripping that watch off his wrist and crushing it under her foot.
‘I don’t think the main issue here is a language barrier.’
There was something under the intensity of his gaze. An undefinable shape in dark water. Something she might be able to grab onto and bring to the surface. She willed herself to stand firm, even though her heart was scampering around like a blind rat not realising it was in a trap. He smelled like a crackling log fire – something earthy and sweet too, or maybe that was the frangipani bush. Breathing him in felt treacherous, like parts of him would nestle into her lungs and she wouldn’t be able to get him out.
‘Take me to Giovanni Barbarani.’
His expression hardened. That shadow disappeared. ‘Playtime’s over. Why aren’t you in uniform, Maxella Conrad ?’
Goddamn it. He remembered her full name.
‘Why are you here as a civilian?’ he pushed.
He knows. He fucking knows.
‘It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. Would you be asking a man the same thing?’
‘I absolutely would if he was pantsless and shirtless, trespassing on this property. It doesn’t matter—’
‘What matters is that I know Kaine Skinner – Matteo La Marca’s man – was boasting to his missus that he’s getting paid the reward of his life for taking out a hit on Barbarani.’
Dammit. She hadn’t planned to give away her trump card this early. But she hadn’t anticipated the Barbarani Fixer to be ...
This.
She could see the pieces falling in his mind like autumn leaves. Kaine Skinner’s girlfriend was in jail.
I was at a prison all morning.
There we go – he was almost there ...
‘What’s her name? The girlfriend?’
‘Libby Johnston.’
His lips tightened. He thought he had her at that.
He’d know it was a strange lie for her to tell – too easy to disprove. She could practically hear two sides of him street-brawling in his mind. Should he risk the possibility that she could be a methaddict trespassing on the Barbarani Estate to lick someone’s foot, or would he do what every muscle in his damage-controlling Fixer body must be screaming to do?
‘I get it,’ she said, and before he could stop her, her fingers tugged up the bottom of his shirt so she could see the black holster she’d felt against the flat plane of his lower stomach. Max hated the way her skin tingled as she took in the shadow of abdominals above his belt. How much time did sculpting that physique, like a marble statue, take away from his divine duty as the Barbarani Guardian Angel?
‘You’re their hit man – you gotta take out the threat,’ she whispered, satisfaction pooling at the way his abs shuddered against her touch. ‘Let me help. Take me to Giovanni.’
He pushed her hand away. ‘I’m not a hit man. My job is to keep people like you away from people like the Barbaranis.’
‘How do you hire a hit man to kill a hit man? Is that the same thing as googling “Google”? How are the Barbaranis going to get rid of you once it comes out that you ignored the threat to their lives, just because I don’t fit your bourgeoisie description of a credible source?’
‘I’m warning you—’
‘How do you take your guilt, Mr Fixer? With a side of anthrax? Or will you be more poetic and make an identical bullet hole in your head to match Giovanni’s—’
‘ ENOUGH! ’
Finally. She’d found his bruises. Now she just had to press harder.
But he got there first. ‘You say you’re a cop? I’ll give your name to the sergeant in town and he can verify your badge number. Who knows, if he’s feeling generous, he might even let you make a statement. They can display it on the same wall as the kids’ crayon drawings.’
Fuck. Fuck! She could not get other cops involved. Not yet.
‘ Valanga .’
Her final hand. Four of a kind. She prayed he didn’t have a royal flush.
His face hardened. ‘What did you say?’
‘ Valanga is Skinner’s code name. Only known to the La Marcas.’
A sharp breath escaped the cage of his gritted teeth.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and I guess the Barbaranis’ hit man knows it too.’
Just as it looked like his jaw was about to grind off completely, something beeped, like a heart-monitor machine flat-lining. Grey pulled his phone out of his pocket, eyes still on her. ‘Your real name’s Maxella Conrad?’ His gaze flicked to whatever was on the screen, his expression giving no indication of what it was.
Hmm. Not what she’d been expecting. Luca’s cricket bat to the head would have been more fitting. ‘I’m not a liar. And it’s just Max.’
‘Well, Not-a-Liar-Max , if you’re really psychic and can predict murders before they happen ...’ He twisted her so she was facing away from him, his enormous hand on her waist, guiding her in an almost protective way down a small white-stone path lined with the winter skeletons of rose bushes. But it was only protective in the way a nurse guides a psych patient back to the padded ward after a regulated mealtime. At this point, there was really no other choice but to let him. ‘Let’s see if you can predict what I’m about to do.’ His breath trailed down her neck, the threat in his tone blistering against her bare skin.
They were approaching the little limestone cottage she’d seen from Luca’s room. ‘Make a huge mistake?’
‘In here.’ He unlocked the door – a soft baby-blue colour that was at odds with everything about this man and this situation. It should be midnight black, with violent splatters of red warding it against outsiders. Or grey.
He gestured for her to go in first – not chivalry, likely just to ensure she didn’t stab him from behind. Her footsteps echoed on the stone floor as he tapped his phone.
‘I’m arming the house,’ he said. ‘If you so much as fart too loudly, I’ll get an alert.’ He held up the phone.
‘What are you—’
‘Stay here,’ he told her, ‘and put on some bloody clothes.’
The door slammed in Max’s face.