I feel all the air whoosh out of my lungs.
Max must think I look shaky, because he stalks over to me, takes my arm, and leads me to the small dinette table by the window, pulls out a chair and pushes me into the seat. The bottle of whiskey and the single empty glass are sitting on the table.
He gestures toward the bottle and I shake my head no. "Wine?" he asks, and I nod.
He looks in the fridge, pulls out a bottle of sangria I opened a few nights ago, and pours me a glass. He sits down across from me, and I finally find my voice.
"So you're telling me that you - you personally - did that to Ramon?" I look down at his hands on the table. The hands that can both gentle and demanding, hands that know exactly the touch to wring every ounce of pleasure from my body.
Are those same hands really capable of the kind of violence I saw evidence of in my office today? I suddenly think about all those articles I found on Google with speculation about business deals Max's companies were involved in, where people opposing him either disappeared or suddenly went silent. I passed those off before as exaggerated rumors, but now I can't help wondering what lines Max might actually cross if someone got in his way.
Is Ramon Suarez just the tip of the iceberg?
"This was none of your business, Hadley," Max says.
"I disagree." Knowing what the man I'm in love with is capable of is definitely my business. But I don't say that. Instead I point out that Ramon Suarez is my client.
"Yes," Max says, "he's your client. And all you had to do was follow my instructions and negotiate the plea deal."
"That's not how this works. It doesn't matter who is paying the bill. The defendant is my client and I have to do what is in his best interest."
He pours himself another two fingers of whiskey and leans back in his chair.
"Has Ramon expressed any dissatisfaction to you with the way his case has been handled?"
"Would you expect him too?" I remember the look of fear that came into Ramon's eyes when I suggested I might have a talk with his employer about better security to protect other employees from being mugged when they left work. His plea that I not mention anything to Mr. Bennett.
"I would expect," Max says, "that he would be grateful."
"Grateful? You expect that he's grateful that his face has been pummeled, his arm broken in several places, and his ribs cracked?"
Max gives me a level gaze while his fingers toy with the rim of the glass of whiskey.
"He's not dead."
I feel the blood drain out of my face at his implication.
"Have you killed people, then?" I ask him, my voice barely a whisper.
He just looks at me for a few moments. "Not in situations like this," he finally says.
"But . . . in other situations?" My heart is beating faster. It didn't seem real before, Max being part of a family-run criminal enterprise. Max sitting at the head of it since his father went to prison.
Even in Las Vegas, the dealings with Gino and Joey D were so businesslike, so civilized. A group of well-dressed men sitting around a table in the penthouse of a luxury hotel. A polished veneer, covering the violence I should have realized lay just beneath the surface.
At the moment all of it seems very real.
"My father," he finally says, "handled problem employees a little differently."
My throat is dry. I lick my lips and then take a small sip of my sangria. I don't even taste it.
"Hypothetically," Max says, "if an employee were causing problems that interfered with the orderly conduct of our business, a convenient solution might be a drive into the everglades and a bullet in the back of their head."
"Oh, god." I can't believe he just said this, like we're just having a casual conversation. As if discussing something like this was completely ordinary.
"That is not the way I handle problems," Max says, in that same calm voice.
"No," I say, "your way is apparently to beat someone so badly that you put them in the hospital. I don't understand how you can do something like that."
He studies me. "Would you prefer that I sent Gabe - or someone else in the organization - to do it for me? It would be more palatable to you if I didn't get my own hands dirty?"
"No. It would be more palatable to me if you let the justice system take care of people like Suarez. He should be sitting in a cell right now. Instead, he's back at work with his arm in a sling, nursing his broken ribs."
"He's a first offender - officially," Max says. "Although God knows how many times he hurt Ashley in the past and she covered for him. How long do you think he would have spent in jail, particularly with your excellent legal skills working on his behalf? How long would it be before he raised his fists to Ashely again, or if she had the sense not to go back to him, another innocent woman?
"My way, he'll think long and hard before he abuses a woman again."
"You can't just mete out your own form of vigilante justice, Max."
"No?" he says. "I think you're wrong. What happened to Ramon sends a strong message to everyone in my organization that certain behavior will not be tolerated. And watching him limp around a loading dock for a few weeks struggling to do his job speaks a lot louder that rumors that the reason he suddenly disappeared is because his body was dumped in the everglades."
"Those aren't the only two options," I tell him.
"Right. I should let your legal system handle it. How's that been working out for the majority of domestic violence victims?"
I know the statistics. And it's not going to do any good to argue that the judicial system works in every case, or even most cases. It doesn't. Not when so many times the victims of domestic violence are caught in a cycle of dependency with the very people who abuse them.
"That's not the point," I tell Max.
"Isn't it?"
"You knew how I'd react to this, Max. That's why you lied to me."
He narrows his eyes, leans closer to me over the table. "I never lied to you, Hadley."
"Maybe not directly, but it amounts to the same thing. I asked you about the mugging. I was worried that someone was trying to get to you by beating up one of your employees. We had a conversation about this, and you specifically told me that Ramon getting mugged had nothing to do with the work he does for you as an employee."
Max takes a sip of his drink then sets the glass back down, his gaze never leaving mine.
"All of that was true," he says.
"You don't think that would have been a good time to tell me the truth about the so-called mugging?"
"Maybe we should start now with telling the whole truth about what happened to Ramon. Is that what you want, Hadley?"
He doesn't wait for me to answer.
"I'll tell you exactly how this played out, and then you make up your own mind if you want to be with a man like me."
I shiver. The man sitting across from me, looking at me with such intensity, seems like a different person from the man I've been falling headlong in love with. Do I really know Max Bennett at all?"
He starts by describing what Gabe found when he checked up on Ashley for not showing up at work for a few days. How she opened the door and stood there, the bruises on her face already turning purple and yellow, her eye still partly swollen. The way she cradled her wrist, and how he could tell just by the way she held herself that her ribs were bruised.
How she'd looked at Gabe with so much shame when he lifted up her t-shirt and saw how bad the bruising was.
"You already know this part," Max continues. "Gabe called me and I told him to insist that Ashley file a police report and have Ramon arrested, and that I'd deal with the situation when I got back. I relocated Ashley to a branch of one of my companies in Tampa, and set her up in a new apartment there with instructions to have no further contact with Ramon.
"I let him sweat it out in jail until I got back in town. Then I posted his bail and had Gabe pick him up and bring him to me."
I'm starting to feel sick again.
"I don't need to hear this, Max."
"Oh, I think you do. You want the truth, then I'll give you the truth. You want to know who I am? Then you need to know this part of me, too."
I'm afraid to hear what Max is going to say next. But I'm even more afraid not to know.
So I sit there, staring into my wine, while he tells me.
"Gabe brought him in and Ramon is so sure I'm going to kill him that he starts begging me to give him another chance. So I explain to him that he's going to get another chance, all right, but first I want him to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of the kind of abuse he's been dishing out.
"I sit him down in one of those metal folding chairs, and I take a lot more care with him than he ever did with Ashley. I want to hurt him, bad, but not permanent. I did a little boxing when I was in college. I know how to use my fist to cut him bad enough that his eye swells shut."
Max pauses, downs the rest of his whisky, and then sets the glass back on the table with a quiet thud.
"Then I broke his nose and dislocated his jaw."
I'm afraid I might literally be sick. I concentrate on breathing in and out, and make myself unclench my hands that are fisted in my lap.
"I don't want to hear this," I tell Max, pushing back my chair and starting to stand up.
"Sit down," Max says, in a voice that assumes people will do what he tells them. "You are going to hear this."
I lock eyes with him for a few long seconds, then slowly ease back down into the chair. If I walk away he'll just bring me back.
"I don't want to know."
"It's a little late for that, Hadley."
And he's right. I can't unhear what he's told me already. Can't erase from my mind the picture of Ramon Suarez sitting in the small conference room at my office, bruised and bandaged, insisting that he was just the victim of a random mugging. And the picture I now have in my mind of Max beating him without mercy. Just like Ramon beat Ashley without mercy, says a little voice in the back of my mind, but I don't want to listen to it. I don't want to think about how maybe Ramon got exactly what he deserved.
"Then I picked up a lead pipe," Max says, "took a firm grip on his wrist, and used the pipe to break his arm in three places."
My eyes are filling up with tears, threatening to spill over.
"By then he was screaming at me to stop. I chose a warehouse a distance outside of town, so there wasn't much risk anyone would hear him."
"But you didn't stop."
"No. I used the lead pipe to break his ribs. I knew where to hit him so there wasn't too great a risk I'd puncture a lung. Maximum pain with minimum permanent damage. Then I told him Gabe would be back to take him to the ER, and exactly what he should tell them when he got there.
"I also told him this was his one and only second chance, and if he ever laid his hands on Ashley or another woman again and caused them pain, he'd be a dead man."
"Who are you?" I whisper.
Max gives a short laugh. "I'm Maxwell Bennett, acting head of the Bennett family syndicate and the owner of several legitimate businesses you know about already. As much as I've tried to distance myself in the past, I am my father's son."
He looks down, strokes his thumb over the signet ring on his finger, then looks up at me again.
"I tried to compartmentalize my life for you. That was a mistake. If you're going to be in my life, Hadley, you need to know exactly who and what I am."
"You aren't your father."
"That's right. I'm not my father. But what I am is the heir to everything he built, and everything that was passed down from the previous generation. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let it all crumble to dust while he wastes away in prison. I may not have wanted this role, Hadley, but it's one I was groomed for since I was a child."
"You don't have to do this."
"I actually do have to do this. And while there are parts of running the family business I find distasteful - parts I've either discontinued or left to my uncle to manage without interference - showing Ramon Suarez the consequences of his actions is something I had no hesitation about doing. And no regrets."
"You really think he'll change because of this?"
Max shrugs. "Probably not. He's a greedy, egotistical little coward who will likely revert to his old habits eventually."
"And then you'll kill him."
"You said that, not me."
But as I look into Max's eyes I believe for the first time that he actually is capable of killing someone, if the reasons are justifiable to him. It's a sobering realization.
He's studying me again now. I know what he's waiting for.
Can I live with what Max is, with what he does? Or will I say goodbye to him forever?