18. Maxim
MAXIM
Warren Tate had supplied my family with crane leases for twenty-three years, and he stood in my office that afternoon looking like a man who had rehearsed his betrayal in a mirror and still couldn't say it without flinching.
"I can't renew the contract, Maxim."
"You signed that contract in this building six months ago."
"Things changed." He wouldn't hold my eyes, which told me everything his mouth was still too careful to admit. "I've got a family. I've got a business with my name on it, not yours."
"Doyle got to you."
His silence answered before his mouth caught up to it, and something in my chest went cold and precise in a way that had nothing left in it worth calling anger.
"He didn't get to me. He made a point. My warehouse burned down the same week your dock did." Warren finally looked up, and the fear in his face was old, worn smooth from days of carrying it. "I'm not you, Maxim. I don't have twenty men who'll stand between me and a match."
"You had my father's word that this family would never let anything happen to yours."
"Your father's been dead twelve years."
The words landed harder than he meant them to, or perhaps exactly as hard as he meant them to, and for a moment neither of us said anything else because there wasn't a version of this conversation that ended with him staying.
"Get out of my building, Warren."
"Maxim, please..."
"Get out before I decide loyalty only runs one direction today."
He left without another word, and Kirill, who had been standing by the door through the whole exchange, waited until the elevator swallowed him before he spoke.
"That's the third one this month."
"I know how to count, Kirill."
"I'm not trying to make you feel worse. I'm telling you Doyle's found the actual weak point, and it isn't our gates or our men. It's every supplier who remembers being scared before they ever remembered being loyal."
"Then find me suppliers who don't remember fear at all."
"Those people don't exist. Everyone's afraid of something."
"Then I make sure they're more afraid of losing me than they are of him."
"That's not a strategy. That's just the same problem wearing a different face." Kirill studied me a moment, the way he did when he'd already made up his mind and was only waiting for permission to say it out loud. "You look like a man who hasn't slept properly in a week."
"I'm fine."
"You're upright. That's a different thing than fine, and we both know it."
I didn't have an answer for that, because he wasn't wrong, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in meetings that all circled the same drain, contracts thinning, men who used to look me in the eye now finding reasons to look anywhere else.
By the time I got back to the compound, the sky had gone dark enough that the floodlights had already kicked on along the drive, and I sat in the car a full minute before I trusted myself to walk inside without carrying the day in with me.
I failed at that almost immediately.
Sofia was curled on the couch in my private wing when I came in, a book open and forgotten on her lap, and she took one look at my face before I'd said a word and set it aside entirely.
"Bad day."
"Warren Tate walked."
"The crane supplier?"
"The crane supplier my father trusted before I was old enough to understand what trust cost." I dropped onto the couch beside her, sleeves still rolled from a shouting match I hadn't fully cooled down from, my knuckles aching from nothing I'd actually hit.
"Doyle's picking us apart one frightened man at a time, and I can't put a fist through fear the way I can put one through everything else. "
"You're allowed to be angry about that."
"I'm allowed. I'm tired of being angry about it."
She shifted closer, close enough that her shoulder pressed into mine, and didn't say anything else for a long moment, letting the silence do what words usually failed to.
"Talk to me," she said finally, quiet. "Not about Doyle. About today. All of it."
Nobody asked me that, not really. Kirill wanted decisions. Andrei wanted reassurance. Even my own men, most days, wanted orders more than they wanted the man giving them.
So I told her. I told her about Warren's face, about the twelve years since my father died that had apparently made his word worth less instead of more, about the exhaustion of watching men flinch away from a name I'd spent half my life trying to make mean something other than fear.
She listened without interrupting, her hand finding mine somewhere in the middle of it, and by the time I ran out of words the tightness in my chest had loosened by degrees I hadn't expected.
"You carry all of it like it's yours to fix alone," she said. "Every single piece."
"It is mine to fix."
"It's yours to survive. Those aren't the same thing."
"You make it sound simple."
"It isn't simple. It's just true, which is different." She turned enough to face me fully, her knee tucked up on the cushion between us, studying me with the same careful attention she brought to everything. "You don't have to solve tonight, Maxim. You just have to get through it."
I looked at her then, really looked, and something in me that had been braced all day simply stopped bracing.
"I don't know how you do that."
"Do what?" she asked, tilting her head, warmth and curiosity both sitting behind the question.
"Make the day smaller just by being in the room where it happened."
She didn't answer with words. She leaned in instead, slow, giving me every chance to close the distance myself if I wanted it, and I did, more than I wanted almost anything else that day.
The kiss started soft, an apology neither of us owed the other, her mouth parting under mine before I'd even asked it to.
I felt the exact moment she stopped holding anything back, her hand sliding into my hair, her body curving into mine like the space between us had become unbearable, and the kiss turned heavier, more weighted, the longer it went on.
I pulled her into my lap without breaking it, her knees bracketing my hips, her hands finding the collar of my shirt like she needed something to hold onto while the day finally drained out of both of us.
"Maxim."
"Stay," I said against her mouth, low, the closest thing to begging I'd let myself sound like in years. "Just stay here tonight."
"I wasn't planning on leaving."
We made it to the bedroom slower than either of us intended, pausing twice against walls that had no business being that interesting, her fingers working at my buttons with more patience than the moment probably called for.
I caught her wrist at the third button and brought her knuckles to my mouth instead, watching her breath catch at nothing more than that.
"You're stalling," she said, a little breathless already.
"I'm savoring. There's a difference, and tonight I intend to prove it."
When we finally reached the bed she pushed my shirt the rest of the way off my shoulders like she'd been waiting all day for permission to finish what she'd started against the wall.
I undressed her carefully, none of the urgency from our first night together, every movement drawn out like the slowness itself was the point instead of something to get past.
I found the hem of her shirt and drew it up an inch at a time, watching her skin come into the lamplight like it was something worth memorizing before I let myself touch it.
She raised her arms to help me finish it, and when the fabric cleared her head, her hair fell loose around her shoulders in a way that stole whatever composure I'd managed to hold onto until then.
Her bra came next, my hands slower with the clasp than they needed to be, and the small, impatient sound she made when it finally gave told me exactly how much my patience was costing her.
"You're doing that on purpose too."
"I contain multitudes, Reyes. I told you."
I bent my head and found her skin with my mouth instead of answering further, tracing a slow line from her collarbone down, and the way her hands fisted in my hair told me more than words would have.
She shivered when my mouth reached her breast, not from cold, and the sound she made when I closed over her, unhurried and thorough, went straight through every wall I had left standing.
I worked my way lower, unfastening her jeans and easing them over her hips with the same unhurried care I'd given everything else, my hands finding new skin with every inch of fabric I cleared.
She reached for my belt in return, her fingers less steady than she probably wanted them to be, and by the time she'd worked it free and pushed my slacks past my hips, there was almost nothing left between either of us anymore.
"Maxim."
"I know." I lifted my head only far enough to look at her, her eyes dark and half lidded in the low light. "I'm not finished."
I wasn't. I took my time with her, learning what made her breath catch and what made her go still and what made her say my name like it was the only word left in her.
By the time my hand found the last of what still separated us, she was trembling under my palm before I'd even properly touched her.
She arched into my hand the second I did, a small, helpless sound leaving her that I intended to hear again before the night was finished.
"Look at me," I said, low, when her eyes started to drift shut.
She did, and I lost something in that look I hadn't known I still had to lose.
I kept my eyes on hers as I worked her slow, feeling every shift of her hips, every catch of breath, learning her like I learned everything that mattered, thoroughly and without hurry.
"Maxim, please."
"Please what." I wanted to hear her say it, not because I needed the words but because I wanted to watch what asking cost her.
"Don't stop."
"I don't intend to."
I made good on that, working her until her thighs shook and her hands twisted in the sheets and my name broke apart in her mouth on a sound that finally cracked something in my chest I'd kept locked down for years.