Maksim: A Dark Mafia Romance (Akimov Bratva) by Nicole Fox (read aloud .TXT) 📕

I move around the headstone, charging forward. It’s a mistake. It’s my fight instinct triumphing over my self-preservation instinct. I’m still in range of the gunman.

The gunshot goes off. I promise myself I’ll stay alive long enough to tell Maksim I love him and tell him to tell Lily the same thing.

I fall onto my stomach, but the only pain is the rock digging into my abdomen. I raise my head to see the shooter crumpled on the ground. Before I can move farther forward, a large hand grabs onto my ankle, pulling me so quickly and roughly that the rock under me cuts against my stomach.

I spin around, getting onto my back swiftly enough that I take my attacker by surprise when I stomp at his arm. He jerks his arm back, but his other hand grabs the front of my shirt, plucking me up, so I’m hidden behind the headstone.

I stare straight at Maksim, absorbing his body heat and his intensity.

When we kiss, it’s inconvenient, it’s rough, and it’s unruly, but every time our lips collide, it’s better than the last time. It’s relief. It’s the realization that our lives could end at any moment. It’s gratitude. And it’s love.

He pulls away from me, but his hand remains on the back of my head, his fingers slipped in between the strands of my hair.

“You should have stayed safe,” he says, but his voice isn’t angry.

“I’m your wife,” I say. “I go where you go.”

A pistol is in his hand, resting against his thigh. I realize he must have shot the man aiming for me and when he disappeared, he must have been getting a gun from a corpse.

“Are you ready?” he asks, kissing me quickly on the cheek.

“Ready,” I echo.

Being in a firefight with Maksim is significantly different from being alone. I’m never worried about myself. I know he has my back. There are fleeting moments of concern for him, but his confidence is a weapon all on its own.

I am madly in love with this man.

I never go for the kill, but Maksim pulls the trigger easily. Before, how easy it is for him to kill people might have frightened me or frustrated me, but as his hand touches me between every shot—my shoulder, the small of my back, my waist—I know it’s not death he’s focused on. His motivation has always been his family. First, it was the Bratva and the men he considers brothers. Then, it was Natalie and how he was determined to avenge her. Now, there’s Lily and me. But as Natalie’s headstone is chipped by bullets and he violates the Mafia laws, I know I’ve taken priority over everyone else.

Like Lynna said, loving a dangerous man is flattering and terrifying. But it’s also overflowing and aggressive in the most genuine way.

Maksim pulls the trigger one more time, his gun emptied of bullets as my father’s last man falls to the ground, the bullet hole on the right side of his forehead barely visible.

“Where’s my father?” I ask, scrutinizing the dead bodies.

“He’s hiding behind Natalie’s headstone,” Maksim says. He gives a hand signal to his employees that remain behind us. He calls out, “Gianluigi! Surrender yourself. I’ve told them not to shoot. I’m certain my wife has some questions to ask you and I wouldn’t deprive her of that.”

He’s right. I have a million questions for my father—about why he truly took Lily from me, if he ever truly loved me, if all of this was worth it to lose his family.

But as my father slowly rises, showing his empty hands, and takes a couple of steps forward to stand in front of the Akimov name on Natalie’s gravestone, those aren’t the questions appearing at the front of my thoughts. I don’t need answers to them anymore because they won’t change anything. The motives and the devotion of a narcissist always circle back to their own needs.

“You’re a goddamn common thug, Maksim,” my father snarls. “We signed contracts. You just exposed yourself as a liar and a cheat. No one is going to work with you after this. Everyone is going to hear about it. Your whole empire is going to burn and you will be known as a joke.”

I don’t know quite how to react to that, because from my research I know how airtight Mafia contracts are and how honoring them is valued by the Bratva. But I also don’t have time to think it over because

as the last word comes out, I see the glint of a gun at my father’s waist, followed by his hand starting to move toward it.

I see everything flash before my eyes, but it’s not the past. It’s the future—Lily’s eleventh birthday with a chocolate fudge cake, a Christmas morning filled with towers of presents, a normal morning with Maksim and I drinking coffee in the kitchen, Maksim and I poring over his plans for his expansion into—

I stop the flashes of future memories as my hand instinctively rises. I don’t hesitate. I pull the trigger.

The bullet disappears—right into my father’s skull. He slumps back onto Natalie’s headstone. He’s staring straight at me, but there’s nothing in his eyes anymore. No hatred, no greed, no malice. They’re devoid of anything as his body collapses on the same spot Maksim had been kneeling.

Maksim puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s about to say something when I hear a loud exclamation.

“Fuck!”

Maksim and I both turn. Maksim’s employees stand behind us, but they’re all tense and turned away from us to look at the crowd behind them. The crowd is composed of various menacing men and some of them have the olive complexion of Italians. I grip my gun tighter, preparing to raise it, but Maksim places his hand over my arm. I stop.

Nail walks forward, making his way toward us.

“We were all called for backup,” he says to Maksim. “I wouldn’t have come, but it was