Page 110 of Doctored Vows

“Ma,” Maksim snaps out like his mother’s tone is rude. It wasn’t. She sounds more pleasantly surprised than frustrated. “She just got back from God fucking knows where. Now is not the time.”

“Yes. I suppose you are right.” It is a highly inappropriate time for me to smile, but it can’t be helped when she adds, “I’m sure future grandbaby talks can wait. However, this can’t.” Her tone takes on a serious note as she twists to face Maksim. “She is here. In front of you. Safe and protected. So stop acting like she’s not.”

“She is my wife,” Maksim snarls, banging his chest. “It is my job to protect her, and I fucking failed.”

She acts as if his last four words didn’t shred her heart to pieces like they did mine. “You have an entire team at your disposal?—”

“It. Is. My. Job,” he repeats, shouting.

There is so much shame in his voice. So much disappointment. He truly believes he has failed me. I know that isn’t the case, but I learn where Maksim gets his spitfire stubbornness from before I can say anything.

His mother pulls him to the corner of the room without a single bead of sweat breaking onto her neck before she gets up in his face. “Your job is to protect her. I agree. That is precisely what you’ve been doing the past several weeks and the exact reason they let her go uninjured.” Without taking her eyes off her son, she points to me. “If she were anyone else but your wife, she would be dead. You saved her, Maksim. You protected her as promised.”

“If I don’t defend her honor, if I don’t respond to what they did, they won’t stop. I’ll be seen as a mockery, like a coward who can’t defend his own wife. Is that what you want, Ma? Do you want the legacy we’ve been building since he left us to crumble back to the pittance he wrongly believed we deserved?”

She doesn’t shake her head, but you can see the wish to do precisely that in her eyes. “You promised her there would be no more violence.” I assume she means during our elevator reunion, but I am proven wrong when she says, “That’s why she agreed to marry you.” She steps closer, her expression nurturing, her eyes wet. “She picked you, warts and all. Now you need to do the same. What is more important to you, Maksim? Revenge or her?”

With memories of my confrontation with my father rolling through my head like a movie, I miss what Maksim replies, so I am eternally grateful when his mother asks him to repeat it.

“Her,” he replies louder, the honesty in his tone unmissable. “It will always be her.”

Irina’s smile could warm the coldest heart. “Then do what needs to be done.” After flattening her hand where his heart thumps, she aligns their eyes. “And trust your intuition that brought you back here time and time again.”

They share a handful more unvoiced words before Maksim shifts on his feet to face me. I pretend I wasn’t eavesdropping, but my ruse only lasts as long as it takes for the heat of Maksim’s gaze to remove the chill of spending hours in the cold in the equivalent of tissue paper.

I return his stare, my heart squeezing when his eyes relay every emotion pumping through him.

There’s so much hurt in his narrowed gaze, so much pain and shame, but since there is also a love I never thought I’d witness again in my life, I say the last thing I ever thought I would say, “Go.” My words are choked by the sob I refuse to surrender when I add, “But if you don’t come back?—”

“I’ll come back.” He’s at my side in an instant. His hand is in my hair, his lips brushing my mouth. “Nothing could keep me away from you. Not even the Grim Reaper himself is stupid enough to come between us. I will be back.”

“Promise me?”

My words echo the ones I said to my father when I discovered him sneaking out of the front door of my grandparents’ apartment, but since they’re not coming from a man who just lost the love of his life, I trust them. “I promise.”

I hold back my tears for the hour it takes Maksim’s team to put plans into play while he showers and dresses me with a tenderness his agitation shouldn’t allow. And I keep them at bay for the additional two hours it takes for Eva to administer medication we’re hopeful will reverse the benzodiazepine I was forced to take. But I lose the ability the instant the elevator doors of my grandparents’ new abode open, and my best friend walks through them.

I break, and Zoya holds me like she did when I lost my entire family within weeks of each other.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Adoor creaks half a second before Zoya moseys into my grandfather’s makeshift medical room. It is a little after four in the afternoon, but she arrives with a super-sized mug of coffee like it is hours earlier.

“Thank you,” I whisper when she hands the mug to me, my head still too thumping for a more heartfelt response. It isn’t solely being drugged that’s responsible for my raging headache. It is the number of tears I shed last night.

Poor Zoya suffered the wrath of my downfall—again.

“About last night. I?—”

“If you’re about to apologize, my foot is about to land in your butt crack.” When a smile tugs at my lips, she says, “Don’t smile. I’m not joking. I even removed my shoes to make sure I wouldn’t get anything nasty on my new pumps.”

“You got new shoes?” I ask, happy to take the focus off my dread for half a minute.

“Yeah. Wanna see?” When I nod, she nudges her head to the elevator. “Follow me downstairs. There’s an entire wardrobe of brand-new designer clothes and shoes that look like they haven’t been touched.” I roll my eyes, making her laugh. “If my new husband wants to gift me a wardrobe of designer babies, I’m not going to look at a single item priced under five figures.”

The annoyance in her tone makes me realize I am one of those women who wrongly believe everything is about them, but Zoya smells my interrogation from a mile out and stops it before it can occur. “Any news?”

One simple question and my curiosity about her unexpected marriage is stored, and anxiety takes its place.

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