Page 103 of A Love Most Fatal

“Hm.”

I want to explain everything, spew word-vomit about how I will never be good enough to be with him. I’ve put him in enough danger and I refuse to do it any more even though I desperately want to. Even though it makes me sick to think about living without him next to me telling me when I’m being rude, or unfair. I want to tell him I already miss him, like there’s a vital organ in my abdomen that he’s carrying around with him, and that I’ll even miss that stupid dog, I’ll miss everything about Nate. I want to tell him this and more, but instead I just let my head bob on my neck as I try to swallow back the stinging in my eyes.

A tear spills over, and then another, and I wipe them both away.

“It’s not personal.” I try to contain the shaking in my voice, but it cracks. “It’s not you. If this was different, ifIwas different. . . it’s not you.”

He doesn’t cry, much more held together than me, but he does stare hard at me like he can still see straight through me.

“Don’t do this,” he says. “You don’t want to do this, Vanessa,so don’t.”

He reaches across the counter to grip my hand, but I pull it away from him. Hurt flashes again in his eyes before they harden to something else.

“I can’t convince you,” he says. Not a question, but I shake my head anyway.

Perhaps it would be easier for him if I lied. If I said Iwantedto marry Maxim over him. But that lie would hurt too much to speak, and just like the rest of me, he’d see the truth behind my carefully curated walls.

Nate smacks a hand on the counter. “You’re so fuckingstubborn, Ness. Why?”

Tears keep falling from my eyes, there is no stopping them.

I want to ask him if he’ll hold me, if we can have one more tonight, just one more, but it’s not fair to him and if I touch him again, I might be liable to never let him go.

“I have to do this.”

Nate stands up to leave and pauses like he might say something, and I selfishly pray that he will say anything at all about how he wants it to be him, how Maxim will never get me like he does, how his life will feel as empty as mine already does in this moment.

He doesn’t, just retreats from the kitchen, up the stairs, and into his room.

I’m left alone in the cold kitchen; Ranger’s snoring, the sprinklers stuttering on, and my own soft crying are the only sounds that remain.

A week has passedsince I told Maxim Orlov I would marry him, and it has been filled with wedding planning and tracking down who shot Mary.

My family took the news fine when I told them I would be marrying Maxim. They all shared looks with each other, and Willa tried to give me one of her sisterly talks, but I told them that I wouldn’t be hearing any of it and now was the time for them to remember to respect my decisions. They all agreed after that, but nobody congratulated me. It would’ve been an empty gesture; one I didn’t need nor want.

Nate has kept to himself, largely avoiding me or acting like I didn’t rip out his heart and mine and put them into a blender. Conversations with him are stilted and brief. No more sitting on the couch watching movies until one of us falls asleep, no more glances over meals, stolen touches in hallways, no more just tonights.

Mary’s not allowed to train while her shoulder heals—her personal hell—so she’s been terrorizing Nate with lessons of self-defense and shooting. He won’t be here forever, so it’s a relief to know that when he’s on his own he will be able to defend himself.

Willa has been in her own kind of hell dealing with the insurance, buyers, and investors for the Washington Street project. I do not envy her, but I don’t envy myself either; Leo and I have been working with Sean investigating, it’s some of the worst work we have to do.

There’s lots of interrogating and threatening and watching lifelessly as Leo beats the shit out of someone until there’s nothing left to do but speak. We tracked down one of the vans, only to find that it was one ofourvans stolen out of a parking garage last week and more video evidence was tampered with. After a particularly difficult conversation with the security guard on duty in the lot that night, he confessed that someone had paid him off to give them the key and threatened his wife and daughter to keep it secret. Classic move.

When pressed further, it became evident that the man didn’t know who the thief was. They’d been in thick black masks, not even their eyes were visible, and they had some sort of tech to modulate their voices.

This news drove Sean nuts because that tech is familiar, something he and Cillian had brought in and sold late last year. He was certain it had to be a match and had been checking books for every buyer.

We’ve been chasing threads, desperate to get to the bottom of them before they’re cut short. There have been three attempts on the system this week alone, so on top of searching through last sales, Sean had his hands full making sure our cyber security was safeguarding us from further damage.

It’s been a shitshow, to say the very, very least.

While all of us have been doing our part to not make it look like we aren’t chickens with our heads cut off, Mother planned an engagement party and has already started planning the wedding that will happen next month.

We are on an expedited schedule, though trying to be discreet.

The announcement will come tomorrow at the engagement party when any number of Russian and Italian mobsters will be annoyed to hear that the town’s two most eligible criminals will be getting married to each other.

Mom brought a seamstress over to do some alterations to a gown made just for the party. None of the ones I had made enough of a statement. Which I think was code for:Your closet of blood-red slut dresses will not cut it for your engagement party, and this is hopefully your last one, so you’ll let me do what I want.

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