AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I tried not to show how surprised I was that he was asking. “It was nothing special. Huge and filled with books, isn’t that the purpose of a library?”
His brow shot up to his hairline, a cocky smile quirking his lips. “Nothing special?”
I rolled my eyes. “’ It was breathtaking.’ Is that what you were expecting?”
Maxim's eyes lit up. My stomach squirmed as he chuckled. “I knew you’d love it,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice, and he wasn’t wrong because I loved it. “It's one of my favorite rooms in the house. I go there when I need a break from everything.”
His confession piqued my interest. Even a man like Maxim needed a break every once in a while. “What do you mean by taking a break from everything?”
“The mafia, the bloodshed, and all the nightmares and loneliness that comes with it.” He smiled bitterly. “I was born into this world, Gia. The darkness is all I know. Even so, it gets so cold sometimes I need a source of comfort.”
I couldn’t ignore the bitterness in his voice or the storm in his eyes. He was pouring himself out to me, being vulnerable in front of me.
“Don’t men in your world use sex to curb that loneliness?” At least I knew my papa used to. It was impossible to keep count of the several times he cheated on my mother, and she just had to take it.
“Men in our world are like that,” she used to say.
Maxim didn’t deny it. “At first, as a teenager, sex and drugs were a good way to take my mind off things. After I meet you…” He paused and looked me deep in the eyes. “It just wasn’t the same anymore.”
What did he mean by after he met me? Was that his way of saying that he loved me and never stopped thinking about me? There was no way in the world that was true. “So, you’ve not had sex with any other woman in the last six years?”
He dropped his fork and steepled his fingers in front of him. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying then?”
“It wasn’t the same with any other woman after you.”
A mental image of Maxim pinning another woman down and kissing her the way he used to do to me flashed through my mind. A rush of jealousy rushed through me. “Great for you that you were out there having the time of your life while I was—” I stopped myself before I could say more than I wanted him to know.
His eyes narrowed. “While you were what?”
Raising your children, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “Nothing. I kept thinking about you and what went wrong for you to leave the way you did.”
“You did nothing wrong,” he said as if that was breaking news.
“Of course, I didn’t.” I threw a piece of carrot in my mouth and chewed. My jealousy aside, I wanted to know more about him and the kind of life he lived until now. “I just thought you were like… you know, every other mafia guy out there.”
“I would say I’m much different, but our world is fucked up. It wasn’t the same after our parents were murdered.”
My jaw fell open. “Your parents were murdered?”
He nodded. “Sergey took over the Bratva then. He and Nikolai basically raised Vlad and me. There were people against him becoming boss because of how young he was, we had to toughen up and become more ruthless to survive.”
Bile slicked up my throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
He shrugged as if it didn’t bother him much, yet there was sadness in his eyes. “It’s been decades since. I learned to live with the pain.”
The atmosphere grew mournful. I didn’t like it. I imagined it must’ve taken a lot for him to be open about his pain. I knew this feeling better than anyone else, the extreme grief that came with losing a parent, and for him, he lost both of his on the same day.
He’d ripped my mother’s life from her, at least that is what my papa told me, but I still felt sorry for him.
“I think your library is beautiful,” I confessed, smiling softly at him. “You have quite the collection of books.”
He chuckled, a warm, melodic sound that made my heart skip two beats. “I've always been a bit of a bibliophile when I wasn’t busy with mafia business,” he admitted. “There's something magical about getting lost in a good book, don't you think?”
I nodded, feeling a surge of excitement at the prospect of sharing this newfound connection with him. “Absolutely,” I agreed. “I've always loved reading. It's like escaping to another world entirely.”
My mother loved books, so I followed in her footsteps and read some of her classics when I wasn’t learning how to fight or hack into a system.
