16. Maximo
CHAPTER 16
Maximo
By the way she’s looking at me, her eyes wide and unsure, I don’t know what to do. Christ, she hasn’t blinked in over a minute, and I’m wondering if she’s about to have a stroke or something. Not only is Rocco going to kill me, I’m going to kill me because what the fuck was I thinking. Jesus Christ, I heard her run up the stairs halfway through my conversation with him, and seeing the panic on her face when I came into the room, I knew there was no way out of this.
“ Bella.” I reach out to touch her, but she immediately steps back out of my grasp, holding her index finger between us. Silently telling me to stop.
“Shut up.” She breathes, finally blinking. “I…I don’t…” bringing her fingers to her mouth, a flutter of giggles leave her throat. “You’re joking…this is a joke. Yeah, this has to be a joke.” She begins pacing back and forth around the room, and if this were related to anything else, I’d probably be laughing at her. But unfortunately, there isn’t a single thing about this situation that is even remotely funny.
“Julia.”
“You? No way. No, I don’t believe it.” She begins babbling, walking around the room with one hand pressed to her head and the other on her hip. “You’re like this…this really like…you’re a nice guy, Max. You’re sweet and funny. And are you serious?” She looks at me then. “Oh, my fucking god…you’re serious. I need to sit down.”
“Okay, sit, sit on the bed.”
She sits but immediately jumps back up. “No, no, I need to stand. In fact, I need a drink…actually…Max, I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Julia,” I take hold of both her hands. Her eyes train on where they connect with her skin before flicking them back up to meet my eyes. “I need you to breathe, okay. This isn’t good for you. If you can just relax, and we can?—”
“Are you going to kill me? Please don’t kill me.” Her eyes swell with unshed tears. “Max, I swear to God I won’t—fuck! Is that even your real name…this is just too much. I don’t even…”
I lead her to the bed and help her sit down, crouching at her feet. The fact that she’s wearing my shirt doesn’t go amiss, but now is not the right time for my cock to get any illusions of grandeur about fucking her again.
“Julia, I’m not going to kill you. That’s not at all why I brought you here. I just…you promised you’d listen to me. If you don’t like what I say, I swear on my father’s memory I will take you right back to your apartment, and you’ll never have to see me again.”
Her beautiful eyes flick back and forth between mine like she’s weighing up the options.
“Promise me?”
“I’ll promise you whatever you need for me to convince you that I would never hurt you. I’m not that kind of man.” I watch her silently stare at me, so I tell her what she wants to hear. “I swear I’m not going to kill you, okay?”
“O-okay.” She presses her lips together in a tight line, shrugging her hands from my grasp and placing them in her lap.
“You obviously know who John Richardson is,” I sigh. “He was the man responsible for my father’s death.”
I watch as her features fade from panicked to solemn.
“But not just my father’s, many people in this world. Removing specific medication from insurance lists so that patients in hospitals have to pay through the nose for treatment. Refusing to support sick people’s health care, he was a vile human who did some heinous acts, Julia.” I take a breath, steadying myself before I continue. “My father had an extremely rare form of cancer, one that, over a very short space of time, turned him from a man that was busy every single day, running marathons and working twelve-hour shifts, to someone that could barely fucking lift a fork to feed himself.”
“Max—”
“He got sick so quickly that neither myself nor my mother knew what to do. It didn’t matter how many forms we filled out, doctor trips we took, or hospital stays he had, John Richardson’s company always shot us down. I ran through my savings, and my mother through hers. We remortgaged our house and my father’s business to pay for his care, but even then, it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough.”
The burn at the back of my throat reaches my nose, and now I’m the one who feels like they’re going to throw up. I never should’ve told her. There’s no way someone as kind as her will ever take a chance on someone like me after this.
“When he died, I decided to look up the company. My cousin, Rocco and I got together with his brother, and we started looking into John and what he was doing…why he was doing it. Rocco’s brother is a computer genius. He hacked into the company’s mainframe and managed to find out everything this man had done.”
“L-like what?” She asks me, and maybe this means she doesn’t think I’m a fucking despicable human. Who knows.
“He created an AI system that would randomly choose the sickest patients on the list, automatically denying them healthcare insurance. Then it would go through different medical problems and randomly select medication, operations, treatments, and take them off the list, causing patients and their families to pay thousands of dollars in bills to keep their family members comfortable.”
I stand up, running my hands through my hair, and now I’m the one pacing the room. She’s sitting there, on the bed in my fucking shirt, looking like a lost puppy, sadness and fear ever evident on her features, and I fucking hate myself for it. I hate that I’m the one who put her in this position.
“After I saw all the terrible things he had done to people and found out that it wasn’t even a human dealing with those claims, I knew I needed to do something. The cops wouldn’t give a fuck about the information, but I’d be blamed for illegally hacking the company. So that wouldn’t work. I’ve never hurt a single person in my life,” I stop, turning to face her. “My mother raised me better than to be a man who thrives off of the pain of others, but this…I couldn’t let this go. So, my cousin and I watched him, studied every move he made, and after a year of it, we kidnapped him…and I shot him in cold blood in the middle of an abandoned warehouse.”
Julia gasps then, both hands covering her mouth in shock, tears spilling over her lower lash line and bouncing onto the apples of her pink cheeks. Reaching into my pocket, I lift the white piece of paper from the denim and hold it out in front of her.
“I planned on telling you when we got here, so I printed off the list of names to help you see why I did it. It lists every single person he hurt. Every person who passed away because of his negligence and stupidity. Here, take a look at it.” I release a heavy sigh as I place it into her hands. “I’ll be downstairs. Take some time to think and read the list. If you still want to go home after processing that, I promise I’ll take you.”
Taking a few steps back, I leave the room and close the door behind me, wondering if I wasted my time or if she will understand my reasonings.