36. Maxim
MAXIM
Kirill's call had ended twenty minutes ago and I still hadn't managed to sit down. My whiskey sat sweating a ring into the counter, untouched. My hands wouldn't stay still, like there was still something left to figure out.
Three men had waited there, a folding table and a cooler set up beside them, rifles laid out like they'd expected to hold that position past midnight if the convoy ran late.
They were positioned along the Delmar route exactly where the underpass by the old grain elevators would have slowed us to a crawl, exactly when my own schedule said we'd be there.
If I hadn't rerouted onto the industrial corridor at the last hour, I would have driven every man I had straight into it.
Sofia stood by the window with her arms crossed over her chest, still in the sweater she'd worn to my office that afternoon, watching me pace a groove into my own floor like she was waiting for the question she already knew was coming.
"How did you know?"
"I told you already. A feeling about the route." She didn't turn from the window. "I don't have a better answer than that."
"You've never been wrong about one of your feelings.
Not once. Not the fire, not the gate, and now this.
" I set the glass down harder than I meant to, the sound sharper than the moment needed.
"Three men with rifles were waiting for us on a route I finalized myself, and you want me to believe you felt something in your stomach and left it at that. "
"That's exactly what happened."
"Look at me and say that again."
She turned then, and something moved behind her eyes before she could smooth it away, quick and guarded, the same flicker I'd caught a dozen times over the last two months and always talked myself out of noticing.
"I don't know what you want from me, Maxim."
"I want the truth. I want to understand how a woman with no history in this business reads a shipment schedule better than men who've run this floor for twenty years.
" My voice had gone low and hard, the tone I used on men who lied to me for a living, and I hated hearing it aimed at her even as I kept using it.
"You've done this before. The résumé gap I never asked you about, the night I called you Detective and you laughed it off too fast, the gate.
Every single time, you knew something you shouldn't have, and every single time, I let it go because I wanted to believe you. "
"So don't believe me. See how that changes anything."
"It changes everything. It means I've been building my entire operation around instincts I can't explain, from a woman I apparently don't know as well as I thought I did."
The words landed exactly where I'd aimed them, and I watched them land, and for one terrible second I wanted to take them back before her face had even finished falling.
"You don't know me?" Her voice had gone quiet, which scared me more than shouting would have. "After everything I've handed you? After the doctor's office, after the fire, after I ran straight into gunfire at that gate instead of away from it?"
"That's not what I meant."
"It's exactly what you meant. You're standing there asking me to prove I'm not a liability by explaining a feeling, like feelings come with paperwork, like the only version of trust you actually understand is one you can put in a file.
" She crossed the room until she was close enough that I could see her hands shaking, small and furious.
"I have never once lied to you about what matters. "
"Then tell me how you knew."
"I can't."
The word hung there between us, honest in a way that should have made everything worse and somehow only made the room go very still.
"Can't, or won't?"
"Does it matter?" Her eyes had gone bright, wet at the edges, and she blinked hard against it like she resented the tears for showing up uninvited.
"Either way you're standing there looking at me like I'm something you need to solve instead of someone you love.
I can't give you the one thing you're asking for.
I can give you everything else. I have given you everything else. "
I opened my mouth to argue and found the argument had gone somewhere I couldn't reach anymore, burned off by the sight of her standing in my kitchen shaking, furious and frightened in equal measure. Three men with rifles still sat behind my eyes like a photograph I couldn't stop looking at.
"I almost lost you today." My voice came out rougher than I intended, stripped of the interrogation I'd been running for the last ten minutes.
"Not the shipment. Not the money. You. If that ambush had gone the way it was planned, I would have lost men I've known for years on a route I picked myself, and some part of me kept picturing you in that convoy anyway, gone along with the rest of it, and I would never have known why. "
"I wasn't in the convoy."
"I know. I still felt it happen anyway, sitting in my own office signing off on a plan that could have ended you, and I have never once in twenty years felt anything like it.
" I crossed the space between us before I'd decided to move, close enough to feel her breath catch.
"I built my whole life on not needing anyone enough to lose my mind over losing them.
You broke that without asking my permission. "
"I didn't ask for any of this either." Her hand came up to my chest, flat, like she needed to feel my heart working to believe any of it was real.
"I have spent months telling myself I could keep some part of this separate, the part that's just me and the part that's whatever this is with you, and it doesn't work.
It hasn't worked in a long time. Every single thing that happens to you happens to me now, whether I want it to or not. "
"That terrifies me."
"It scares me too, more than I want to admit."
"A month ago, if Kirill had called with news like tonight's, I would have poured a drink, made a list of names, and slept fine by midnight.
" I kept her hand pressed flat against my chest, holding it there like proof of something neither of us had said aloud yet.
"Tonight I couldn't sit down for twenty minutes.
I wore a path across this kitchen waiting to hear your voice, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I wasn't afraid of losing the shipment at all. "
"What were you afraid of?"
"Waking up one day and realizing I'd already built a life with no room in it for you.
One careful decision at a time, until there was nothing left of me that could feel much of anything.
" I said it plainly, the way I said things I'd decided were true and no longer worth softening.
"I don't want that life. I want this one, even with everything in it that scares me. "
Her breath caught, and for a second neither of us moved, the confession sitting between us bigger than either of us had planned for tonight.
We stood there a long moment with her hand still on my chest, both of us breathing like we'd run somewhere instead of simply standing in my own kitchen.
Something in the argument finally cracked all the way open instead of closing back over itself, the way it usually does when two people have more to protect than to prove.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said, quieter now. "Whatever you think I'm hiding, whatever it looks like from where you're standing, that part hasn't changed."
"I need you to understand what today did to me."
"Then show me instead of asking me to imagine it."
I kissed her before she'd finished the sentence, and she met it with a kind of hunger that had nothing careful left in it, both of us finally done with the version of tonight that involved words.
Her mouth opened under mine, and I took full advantage of it, one hand sliding into her hair to angle her exactly where I wanted her, the other flat against the small of her back to keep her pressed against me.
Her hands found the front of my shirt and pulled instead of smoothing, and I walked her back until the wall caught her, my mouth moving from her jaw to the pulse at her throat, feeling it jump under my lips like a second confession neither of us had said out loud yet.
"Maxim."
"I'm here."
"I need you to actually hear what I said. I'm not going anywhere." She pulled my face back up to hers, holding it there, making me look at her instead of losing myself in the easier part of this. "Not tonight. Not when this gets worse. I need you to know that before we do this."
"I hear you." I meant it more than I'd meant almost anything in years. "I'm not letting go either."
She undid the buttons of my shirt with hands that had stopped shaking, slow now, deliberate, working each one loose like she wanted to remember the exact order they came apart in.
I let her take her time even though every instinct in me wanted this fast and desperate after a night like tonight, needing the proof of her hands on my skin more than I needed air.
When the shirt finally slid off my shoulders she flattened both palms against my chest and just held them there a moment, feeling my heart working under her hands the same way I'd asked her to feel it minutes earlier, like she needed the proof twice.
We moved toward the bedroom without breaking apart, trading unhurried kisses for something rougher the closer we got, shedding what was left of the argument piece by piece along the way.
Her sweater came off somewhere near the doorway, pulled over her head between kisses, joining my shirt on the floor of the hallway behind us.
By the time we reached the bed there was only the rest of her clothes and the low, steady sound of her breathing standing between my mouth and everywhere it wanted to go.