Maksim: A Dark Mafia Romance (Akimov Bratva), Nicole Fox [love letters to the dead txt] 📗

I’m prepared to … to act like I’m going to adopt her. What happens if she asks me if I’m her mother?”

“If she guessed that, I’d be impressed. I might even recruit her to be my right-hand man.”

“I’d kill you,” I snap.

He smirks at me and says nothing.

I fold my arms over my belly. “You know what, I don’t feel great. If I have a virus, I don’t want to give it to her.”

“You’re fine.”

“I’m not fine. I’m not even okay. I abandoned her. If she’s happy, I’m going to know that she didn’t need me. If she’s miserable, it’s my fault. Even if she’s just okay, she ended up in a foster home. She’s never had any real parents. She’s alone and she’s going to know it’s because of her mother. And she’s right. I abandoned her. I let her go when I should have tried harder to keep her.”

“You’re completely right,” Maksim says. I whip around to look at him. He parks his car in front of a small brown house. The paint is peeling, but it doesn’t look like a den of iniquity. There’s a plastic tricycle, a beach ball, and a dollhouse in the front yard. I hope they have a soccer ball for Lily. “You should have taken on the whole Balducci Mafia. Right after you gave birth, you should have leapt off the bed, grabbed your child, and run out of the hospital. Then you could have stolen a car and driven all the way to North Carolina and everything would have been perfect. Your daughter wouldn’t have any issues at all as you tried to pick up the pieces of your life and avoided your father, a relatively powerful mafia boss.”

“You don’t understand,” I whisper, but I’m already letting out a slow breath. “There had to be something I could have done. I just didn’t try hard enough to find it.”

“I’ve always chosen the harshest, most extreme route.” He takes my hand. He squeezes it, almost too hard, but it sends enough of a shock through me that my anxiety starts to go back into hiding. “If you’d killed your father, I’d fully support that solution, but I don’t think the most extreme route would be the best one for your child. You have to accept that you did what you had to do at that time in your life.”

I want to ask him if he feels the same about Natalie—if he has no regrets about the choices he made that led to her murder. But he’s so compassionate now, I’m afraid mentioning her would only tear him away from me.

He turns off the truck and opens his door. As I stare out my window, preparing myself for a nightmare, he opens my door and offers his hand. I stare at him, trying to remember why I can’t fall for him.

I put my hand in his, putting my weight onto it as I jump down to the road. He keeps his fingers laced in mine as we walk to the house.

Maksim and I sit down on an orange microfiber couch while Larry and Kimberly Neal sit in a matching loveseat. The Neals appear to be in their late forties or early fifties. Larry is wearing khakis and a polo shirt while Kimberly is in a floral blouse. The immature side of my brain—the remaining vestiges of the eighteen-year-old who let her newborn daughter be taken from her arms—is petty about everything about them. Larry Neal doesn’t look physically fit enough to play soccer with my daughter. Kimberly Neal sits up with the posture of someone who is about to be subpoenaed. Neither of them are good enough to raise my little girl. My Lily. I’ve spent so many years thinking of her under the title of “my daughter” that getting used to her actual name is unexpected, but strangely reassuring. She spent so many years as a hypothetical and she’s so close to real now.

“Fostering children must be a fulfilling experience,” Maksim says to them. He appears more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him—almost slouching—but I know it’s only a facsimile of a normal man. His back isn’t completely touching the back of the couch and his arm is stiff between the two of us. “How long have you been doing it?”

“For the last eleven years,” Kimberly says proudly. “It’s been such rewarding work. Hard work, of course, but it’s work that you know will have a lasting effect.”

I glance around us. The house is larger than it looks from the outside.

“Where are the kids right now?” I ask.

“The eldest boy, Marcus, took the other boys to the park. The girls are pretending to be models on the runway in their bedroom.”

Lily is right below me. I’m so close.

“So, Mr. Akimov.” Larry claps his hands together. “You said that you and your wife were interested in adopting a girl, preferably one between the ages of seven to ten.”

“Yes,” Maksim says. “We know the ones above toddler age have a difficult time getting adopted, but we also wanted a daughter who we could still impart our morals and values on.”

“Of course. We completely understand,” Larry says. “Do you have a separate room for the child? It’s required for fostering.”

“Yes. We have several rooms.”

“We live in a mansion,” I cut in. “We have several guest rooms.”

“But that part is irrelevant.” Maksim squeezes my knee, a little too tightly. A warning. “We know attentiveness is the important part. But I do love your house. It’s gorgeous.”

That is a massive overstatement. The house looks like it came out of the seventies. Wallpaper with complex patterns, shag rugs, linoleum floors in the kitchen, and everything is in bright orange or pale green. It makes me question their financial position and their good sense.

“I’m sorry.” I force a smile, but casually peel Maksim’s hand off my knee. “I didn’t mean to come off as rude. Sometimes my mouth gets the best of me.”

“My wife is a bit