“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Liv,” Max continues, standing there with his towel wrapped around his waist. His chest and stomach muscles gleam with the fairest sheen of moisture, catching every sculpted line. Those smoldering green eyes watch me intently, waiting for a response. Like he’s waiting for me to cry, to break down in front of him. It’s almost as though he expects me to be afraid of him — like it would be easier if I did.
But I don’t. I fear my confusing feelings toward him, but I don’t fear Max in the least.
“You’ve done nothing to make me feel uncomfortable. You saved my life. I will never be able to thank you for what you’ve done for me,” I explain to him, biting my lip.
Our eyes meet and I feel a tingling sensation travel down my spine. It’s this powerful, unexplainable electric current, the same one I felt when I first sat down across from him at the banquet table in North Carolina. Something feels so primal, so natural about our meeting. Like we were always going to find ourselves here somehow.
But then he drags his eyes away from me, looking into the mirror as the steam begins to clear and reveal his handsome, conflicted face. He falls silent, and I wonder what kinds of thoughts are surging through his mind right now. I can feel that barrier coming up again, the same one he put between us the moment he offered me the position as his student.
“Your scars… how did you get them?” I ask suddenly, unable to stop myself, unwilling to let him recoil from me.
He doesn’t look at me, keeping his gaze trained on his own reflection, and for a second, I wonder if I’ve instead pushed him away.
“I told you that I used to walk a darker path. I lived a very different life years ago. I ran with a crowd who would sneer at the way I live now, would call me a coward or a quitter. But I could not run alongside them forever. Olivia, I did terrible things, and terrible things happened to me, as well,” he says slowly.
“That mark on your chest,” I begin cautiously, “what is it?”
He sighs, staring down at his hands gripping the edge of the counter as though it physically pains him to look himself in the eye now. “You don’t want to know.”
“Please,” I press, moving closer along the counter so that my bare legs, poking out of the bottom of the oversized T-shirt he gave me, are almost touching his arm.
Finally, he looks at me, and I feel that electric shock once again.
“It is the result of trying to burn away my past. It was… it used to be a tattoo, marking me as a member of the brotherhood. The Bratva.”
My blood runs cold.
The Bratva. I remember vaguely a voice saying those words coarsely in the backseat of the car while I was being kidnapped. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to move or find my bearings, but that word appears to me now out of the clearing mist.
Did the darker path he walk used to involve taking girls like me?
16
Max
The horror I see in her gaze doesn’t land on blind eyes. I can only imagine the terrible thoughts running through her mind, and it’s inexpressibly painful to keep eye contact with her. I see her on the cusp of asking, was I once a part of the slavers who subjected her and Maggie to this fate? Have I done still more wretched things? Are the two of them just some form of penance for myself, a saved couple of girls among countless slaves I’d condemned?
I was never a slaver, but I wouldn’t have been able to say ‘no’ to all of those questions written on her face.
“That life is far behind me, Liv,” I say with some finality, but I can tell she doesn’t fully believe me. “I burned that bridge when I burned the tattoo from my skin. What I do now has no ties to those men and the evil they conduct. I hope my actions speak for themselves.”
The look on her face is pained, and I frown, letting my head hang a moment. “I understand if this is difficult for you. I don’t expect you to believe me.” I cross the room with a set of clothes and let my towel fall to the ground out of her sight, donning a tight and thin black t-shirt, jeans, and shoes. She needs time to digest what I just confessed to her, or else needs time to run from me.
I’ve been foolish, and let my guard down. For a few hours, there was a lingering question in the back of my mind if I could actually be worthy of a woman’s love and respect. I’d written it off so long ago, accepted my fate as a life-long bachelor, until she came into my life.
Even then, I pushed those thoughts away, and was prepared to be professional with her, just like all my students. But fate had other plans for us. It gave me hope that there might be a future for me, outside of pain and death and work.