Archive of Our Own

It is noon in Madrid and Max Verstappen is five minutes early. Which is ridiculous because he had just gotten out of an attempted assassination twenty minutes ago and statistically speaking, he should be late or dead or bleeding out in a hotel lobby bathroom with a man from Budapest screaming into a burner phone. But Max is not dead. Not bleeding. Not even flustered. He's just a little annoyed and very, very hot. In every sense of the word.

The rooftop bar smells like overwatered rosemary and overcompensating wealth. There's a jazz quartet playing in the corner, paid more than most hitmen get for a clean job, and the table Max is at is covered in one of those unnecessarily stiff white cloths that scream Michelin star. He doesn’t sit yet. Just stands at the railing, sunglasses on, hair slightly damp from the rinse he gave it in a café sink after kicking a Hungarian man through a window. His shirt is black and sharp and untucked like a threat.

Carlos Sainz shows up late. Obviously. He always does, the bastard.

He walks in like he owns the bar, the building, the street, and possibly the country. Aviators, loose shirt, gold chain, Mediterranean tan. Max doesn’t turn when he hears the steps. He just raises one hand in the air like a man calling in an airstrike and says without looking

"You’re late. Also, your Budapest friends say hi. Or they would. If they had a tongue left."

Carlos sighs so loudly Max can hear it through the sunglasses.

"They weren’t mine. Heavens, Max. You think I would send you amateurs? What would be the point?"

Max finally turns around. His face is unreadable. Sunglasses on. Mouth a line. He looks like an ad for violence.

"They thought I was still the Dutch mafia boss," Max says, walking to the table. He pulls the chair out like it insulted his mother. "I retired ten months ago. Everyone knows that."

Carlos raises an eyebrow as he sits.

"You didn’t retire, Max. You ghosted your entire organization and walked into Switzerland like a tax consultant with burnout. That’s not retirement. That’s abandonment."

Max waves a hand lazily.

"Tomato, escape from institutional rot."

A waiter approaches. Max orders water. Carlos orders wine. Of course he does. Max glares at the man’s teeth until he retreats.

"So," Max says, leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other like a CEO about to outsource your life. "Who am I killing now? This is the third person I’ve had to clean up because of your fucking emotional recklessness. One more and I’m sending you a loyalty card. Buy four, get a fifth free."

Carlos grins. He’s too smug for a man who’s been dumped enough times to make a Spotify breakup playlist for each season.

"But this time’s different."

Max rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses so hard they almost fall off his face.

"They all are. That’s what you say every time. And every time it’s another wide-eyed Instagram girl with too many earrings and a fake name."

Carlos leans forward, all teeth and tan and sincerity.

"Max. I fell in love."

Max blinks once.

"Oh wow. Put it on a shirt."

"I mean it," Carlos says, hand to chest, melodramatic as always. "He was different. Beautiful. Like... like art. Like if sin had a spine and cheekbones."

Max just sips his water.

"Congratulations on your bisexuality. Bold move for a mafia boss."

Carlos beams.

"I always knew I had it in me. Or something in me."

"Don’t finish that sentence."

Carlos pulls a phone out of his pocket. Max immediately groans.

"Please tell me you didn’t bring a folder. You know I don’t do folders. I don’t even do PDFs. This better be a picture and a voice note or I’m walking."

Carlos unlocks the phone, taps. Turns it around.

"This is him."

Max looks.

Stops.

Processes.

Something behind his sunglasses twitches.

"Ah," Max says after a moment. "I get it now."

Carlos nods solemnly.

"Right? Right? RIGHT? Like, what the fuck. Who looks like that? It’s offensive. I wanted to punch him in the face when I met him. And then I wanted to marry him."

Max stares at the photo. The man is... ridiculous. Golden skin, sharp jaw, full mouth, some kind of curl to the hair that screams expensive but tragic. There's a stage light in the background and a feather boa, but it doesn’t even look stupid. It looks like temptation auditioning for an Oscar.

“What’s the name?” Max asks, tilting his head slightly, the kind of calculated, casual movement that meant the question had ten hidden blades tucked inside it.

Carlos grins, like he’s been dying for that question.

“Charles,” he says, with the reverence of a man naming his favorite wine, his firstborn child, his most efficient pistol. “Charles Perceval.”

Max doesn’t react. Not really. Just reaches forward and picks up his glass of water like it’s a ritual and he’s the deity. His fingers are long, elegant, ringless today. No flash, no gold. All bone and veiled threat.

Carlos keeps going, because of course he does.

“He’s from Monaco,” he says, and Max hums softly under his breath in a way that could mean either figures or fuck off. Carlos doesn’t seem to care.

“I met him six months ago,” Carlos says, leaning back like he’s telling a bedtime story and not detailing the prelude to a kill order. “It was late. I had just handled a shipment in Marseille, went to Monte Carlo for a night out. I was planning to get drunk, maybe get my dick sucked, maybe play a few hands of poker, right? But then—”

Max raises one hand.

“Is this going to be like the last time,” he says, voice bored, “where you talk about eye contact during climax and I have to seriously consider if throwing myself off the balcony is a faster way out?”

Carlos grins. His teeth are white and stupid.

“Max,” he says, “this time is different.”

Max sighs so deeply the tablecloth flutters.

Carlos presses on, because Carlos has never once in his life shut up when it would’ve been the wise thing to do.

“I walk into this club. Flashy one. The kind where everything smells like sex and spilled vodka and the interior designer was clearly high on both. And there he is. Onstage. Wearing the tightest fucking shorts I’ve ever seen on a human man. Like painted on. ”

Max blinks slowly. This already sounds expensive.

“He’s got this boa thing, right? Red. Feathers. Glitter in his hair. Not, like, accidental glitter. Intentional. Weaponized. ” Carlos gestures vaguely like he’s trying to illustrate cheekbones with his hands. “And he’s dancing, Max. Not in the desperate way, you know? Not in the 'I need this tip to survive' kind of way. He dances like he knows you need him to survive.”

Max tilts his head again. Slightly intrigued. Horrified to be intrigued.

“And I’m sitting there,” Carlos says dramatically, “watching this man bend over backwards like the laws of physics don’t apply to his spine, and I think: This is it. This is what poets write about. This is what my father tried to warn me about.”

“Your father warned you about strippers?” Max asks, monotone.

“He warned me about love, ” Carlos snaps.

Max sips his water again. It tastes like lemon and mistakes.

“And then,” Carlos says, sitting forward like he’s about to drop classified intelligence, “he comes over. After his set. All glistening and smug and smelling like vanilla and sin. And he says— he says, ‘You look like you tip well. Want a private dance?’ And I said yes, Max. Obviously I said yes.”

Max waves his hand impatiently.

“Yes, yes, sex happened. Congratulations. Get to the part where he betrayed you and you started crying into your espresso.”

Carlos scowls.

“You never let me have any romance, man.”

“You never let me have peace. ”

“Fine,” Carlos says, relenting. “But I’m telling you the position.”

Max groans loudly and sets his glass down like it offended his ancestors.

“I hated this last time. You made me hear about cowgirl for twenty minutes.”

“This is important context!” Carlos protests. “It reveals the emotional dynamic.”

“No, it reveals you overshare like a lonely dog in a thunderstorm.”

Carlos ignores him.

“He liked missionary,” Carlos says, voice suddenly softer. “But not boring missionary. The kind where his hands are on your face, like—like he’s trying to memorize you, right? Like you’re going to vanish and he wants to remember what you felt like on his fingertips. He looked into my eyes the entire time. I felt seen, Max.”

Max is silent.

Then, after a long moment: “Heavens.”

“And after,” Carlos continues, “he asked if I wanted water. Water, Max. In a glass. With lemon. He wiped my forehead. Like I was made of something fragile.”

Max stares at the table like it just whispered state secrets.

“You fell in love because he gave you hydration. ”

“I fell in love,” Carlos says gravely, “because no one has ever touched me like that. Like I wasn’t dangerous. Like I could be... good.”

Max lets out a sound halfway between a sigh and a laugh.

“And now you want him dead.”

Carlos looks wounded. Like Max just insulted his outfit.

“He broke my heart,” he says. “Three weeks after I told him my real name. After I let him meet my cousin— Lucía , Max, you remember Lucía—and just when I thought I could trust again, I found out he was playing me.”

“Because?” Max prompts.

Carlos leans in.

“Because two days after we fought, the Monaco mafia ambushed my safehouse in Marseille.”

Max squints.

“You’re telling me he called them?”

“He must’ve. ”

“He's a stripper, Carlos. Maybe your security just sucks.”

“No. He knows someone. He doesn’t have connections, not officially, I checked, but he knows someone. ”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

Max rolls his eyes.

“I swear, you have the worst vetting process on the continent.”

“He’s just a stripper!” Carlos snaps. “He’s poor. He asked me for almond milk money once! And yet somehow he knows someone dangerous enough to get the Monaco mafia to target me. I don’t feel safe anymore.”

“You’re the most heavily guarded man in Spain.”

Carlos thumps his chest.

“Not in here,” he says tragically. “In my heart. ”

Max leans back, arms crossed, expression unreadable behind the sunglasses. He’s quiet for a moment, then glances again at the phone still resting on the table. At the image of Charles Perceval, with his angel-mouth and devil-eyes and arms that say dancer but smile that says liar.

“Still want me to kill him?” Max asks.

Carlos nods solemnly.

“He knows too much.”

Max pauses. Considers. Then says, carefully:

“Alright. But if I sleep with him first, that’s not against the contract.”

Carlos points a finger at him.

“That’s so against bro code.”

“There is no bro code.”

“There is when the ass is that perfect.”

“That was not an argument you think it was.”

Carlos groans and throws his hands up.

“He wouldn’t even go for you.”

Max raises a brow.

“I’m everyone’s type.”

“That’s so untrue.”

Max adjusts his sunglasses.

“I will become Dutch mafia boss again just to take down Spain for that comment.”

Carlos smirks.

“Verstappen Senior wouldn’t take you back.”

Max gives him the finger. With poise. Like a royal decree.

“Maybe not. But I’ll take Charles.”

Carlos blinks.

“You better mean take him out. ”

Max shrugs, noncommittal, and sips his lemon water. His mouth quirks upward, just slightly.

This is going to be interesting.

Max didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to. The words hummed beneath his skin like an engine revving in neutral, just waiting for an opening. He reclined back in his seat, legs splayed like the sun blessed only him today, and tapped one ringless finger against the sweating glass of lemon water like he was thinking about murder, or thighs, or both.

Carlos was already frowning.

Max broke the silence with a tone so casual it was borderline illegal.

“So what other position does he like?”

Carlos blinked. Paused. Narrowed his eyes.

“Fuck off.”

Max smiled, and that was a dangerous thing. Like a lion baring teeth in a way that made you want to pet it anyway.

“No seriously,” Max said, voice as silky as sin, “you said missionary. But that can’t be it. A man with that face has at least three signature moves. You said he could bend backwards. I’m guessing he can fold in half like a suitcase. That usually opens options.”

Carlos groaned into his palms, muffled and deeply wounded.

“You are the worst, ” he said, fingers dragging down his cheeks like he was being personally punished by heavens.

“I’m being thorough,” Max said. “You want me to kill him, I need the full psychological profile.”

Carlos sat up, looking like a man halfway between throwing Max off the roof or just pushing himself off first.

“You did not ask for a psychological profile when I sent you after my ex, who stole three million euros and faked her death using a pig carcass.”

“That woman had a face like a soggy dishrag,” Max said flatly. “I didn’t need to know her backstory. But this one. This one’s got intent in his jawline.”

Carlos gritted his teeth. “You’re disgusting.”

“I’m just saying,” Max said, spreading his arms like a benevolent commander of slutty logic, “I like to know my enemies. Thoroughly. Biblically, if required.”

Carlos pointed an aggressively manicured finger at him.

“You will not fuck him.”

Max blinked. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“ I hired you. ”

“And you’re the one who said he’s a poor stripper. I could show up as a customer. You’d never know.”

Carlos made a sound like a dying dolphin.

Max leaned in, his sunglasses catching a glint of noon sun that made him look like the bastard child of espionage and Dior.

“Is he spicy?” Max asked. “Like, does he slap? Does he bite?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Max laughed, low and pleased, because Carlos was blushing. Carlos. The man who once smuggled cocaine in a priest's coffin and gave a press interview afterwards.

“Come on,” Max prodded. “Tell me. Does he get feral or is he like… soft whimpering?”

Carlos inhaled sharply through his nose.

“Max.”

“Yes.”

“I will put a bounty on you if you don’t stop.”

Max blinked slowly, mock-innocent.

“On me? Or under me?”

Carlos lunged for his glass of water and downed it like it could drown the mental images. He slammed it back on the table and said, tightly, “He likes holding hands during.”

Max made a delighted face like he’d just found an extra fry at the bottom of the McDonald’s bag.

“That’s adorable. ”

“He moans softly,” Carlos snapped. “And he does this thing where he holds your face like he’s sculpting you from marble. Are you happy now? ”

Max looked positively smug. His grin was a crime scene. Somewhere in Budapest, someone’s car was exploding because the universe was trying to balance itself.

“Heavens,” Max said. “I love him.”

Carlos looked like he aged five years in real time.

“You’re going to kill him.”

“I’m going to kill someone, ” Max said airily, “whether it’s him or you depends on how much more information you refuse to give me.”

Carlos pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something in Spanish that probably translated to I should have hired literally anyone else.

Max kicked back in his chair, tipping it onto two legs with terrifying confidence.

“So just to recap,” he said, counting on his fingers. “Beautiful. Flexible. Spicy. Whisper-moans. Kind. Hydrates. Possibly armed with mafia connections. Emotionally dangerous. Criminally pretty. I mean…”

Carlos groaned again. “I hate you.”

Max smiled. “But he might not.”

Carlos blinked, the flush of irritation—and something else, maybe embarrassment—creeping into his cheeks. 

Carlos didn’t speak. His lips parted slightly like his brain had short-circuited and was buffering for a full reboot. He reached for the wine glass, changed his mind halfway, flagged down a waiter, and muttered something in Spanish that ended with “whiskey, neat.”

Max tilted his head.

“Wine not working anymore?” he asked, faux-concern dripping off his tongue like honey on a blade.

Carlos grunted. “You’re not supposed to enjoy this.”

Max widened his eyes, blinked once like a startled deer in an assassin’s body. “I’m not enjoying it,” he said. “I’m working. This is reconnaissance.”

Carlos’s laugh was a bark, short and strangled. “You’re fucking frothing. You’ve never asked this many questions before.”

“That’s because none of your other exes looked like sin in leather and a fever dream had a baby,” Max said flatly. “Come on. What else. Favorite drink. Favorite color. Did he cry when you broke up?”

The whiskey arrived, neat and sweating. Carlos grabbed it like it was the last comfort left to him and downed half of it in a single, despairing gulp. His face twisted.

“Alright, fine ,” Carlos said, voice a little rougher now, eyes darting sideways like he was considering a tactical retreat, “what do you want to know? Besides the obvious fact that you’re a horrible person.”

Max leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers steepled. His gaze was sharp, predatory, but wrapped in lazy casualness, like he wasn’t even trying. “I want every little detail about Charles. The kind you wouldn’t tell your shrink. The kind you wouldn’t tell your mother if she asked you twice.”

Carlos stared at him like Max just asked for his social security number and his dog’s name. “Goodness, Max. You’re brutal.”

“I’m professional,” Max said. “But I’m also very interested. That face you described. The way he moves. The way he apparently holds your face like a damn sculpture during sex. You’re making him sound like a masterpiece I’m about to destroy.”

Carlos exhaled sharply, shoulders sagging a bit. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re going to tell me. Because otherwise I’m going to assume he’s got a weapon hidden in his socks and probably a gun in his waistband.”

Carlos blinked. “No weapons. Just a stripper pole in his apartment.”

Max snorted. “That is the best and worst information I’ve gotten today.”

Carlos gave him a sideways look, lifting the whiskey glass again and nursing the edge like he needed the alcohol to dull Max’s sharp curiosity. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

“I enjoy a good puzzle,” Max replied, brushing invisible lint off his black linen sleeve like he wasn’t asking for a complete dossier on a stripper ex with cheekbones sharp enough to incite wars. “Especially the beautiful kind.”

Carlos sighed, long-suffering and dramatic. “You’re wasting your time. Charles wouldn’t go for someone like you.”

Max tilted his head, lashes slow and deliberate as they lowered in amusement. “Then why do you look scared?”

Carlos’ eyes flicked up from the whiskey like he’d just been caught reading a diary. “Fuck off.”

“That’s not an answer,” Max replied lightly, reclining in his chair like a panther who’d just decided the prey would come to him. “Sounds like you’re worried he might like me back.”

“Life’s not about you, Verstappen.”

“It usually is,” Max said.

Carlos rolled his eyes so hard Max was impressed he didn’t pass out from the torque. “How’s life?” he asked then, far too casually, like they hadn’t just been discussing whether or not Max would bed and then kill Carlos’ ex.

Max narrowed his eyes. That was a pivot. A clumsy, glitter-coated one. “Life is great, actually,” he said. “Currently debating whether sleeping with a murder victim is morally wrong. The little dilemmas that keep my brain active.”

Carlos barked out a laugh. “You’re so fucked up.”

“And you think the Monaco mafia was sent to you by your ex,” Max said mildly. “We’re all just doing our best.”

Carlos chuckled into his drink and settled in deeper, voice shifting like it always did when he wanted to distract Max with business updates. “The Spanish mafia’s fine, by the way. Thanks for asking. We had a merger with—”

Max cut him off immediately. “Changing the subject is not funny.”

Carlos tilted his head, all innocent puppy eyes and faux virtue. “Just thought you might want to keep up with the family.”

“I never joined the family,” Max said. “I visited. And then I ghosted. Like a toxic ex.”

Carlos opened his mouth again, probably to start talking about regional exports or whatever awful accounting nightmare Max had always refused to learn about when he was still the Dutch boss, but then—smooth as silk, an artful pivot from a man who’d perfected emotional manipulation—he said:

“How’s Ollie?”

Max froze.

Carlos didn’t even blink.

Max took a breath through his nose and reached for his wine, only to remember he didn’t do wine in Spain, not after that one incident in Marbella that ended with a broken rib, three stabbings, and the world’s most awkward karaoke performance. He leaned back instead, gaze flattening into something unreadable.

“He’s fine.”

Carlos raised a brow. “Just fine?”

Max didn’t like talking about Ollie.

Not because there was anything bad to say—how could there be, when that kid was the softest, brightest, most inexplicably miraculous thing to ever happen to him? No, Max didn’t like talking about Ollie because every word felt too small, too clumsy. Like trying to explain a galaxy using a paper map. No one else ever really understood. They looked at Ollie like he was a child. A responsibility. A weight.

Max looked at Ollie like he was everything.

It had been just over a year ago when he’d first met him.

Max had woken up to crying. Not the usual cry of someone bleeding out near his fence or a cat being murdered under a car—he’d learned to tell the difference—but a real cry. Wet and desperate and tiny. The kind of cry that scratched at your sternum and made your stomach clench like you’d already failed someone.

He’d stumbled to the front door of his villa, hair messy, shirt wrinkled, gun loosely in one hand just in case.

And there he was.

A basket.

An actual fucking basket .

With a baby in it.

One year old, maybe less, with curls like a Renaissance painting and cheeks that could stop wars. Red-faced from crying, fists flailing, a ridiculous little onesie that said I ❤️ MILK .

Max had stared. Stared harder than when he looked down the scope of a rifle. Because what the fuck.

A baby. Sitting in a wicker basket like a fairy tale that had gone terribly off-script. There was a note tucked against a stuffed orange bear, smudged with what Max later realised was dried breastmilk and tears.

He hadn’t touched the note first.

He’d picked up the baby.

And the baby—small, red-cheeked, fists curled up like he was ready to punch fate itself—stopped crying.

Just like that.

Big brown eyes blinked up at Max. Wet lashes. Sniffly nose. A little bubble of spit.

Max had never been good with babies. Had actively avoided them. Too loud, too fragile, too unpredictable. He didn’t even like toddlers . But this one had blinked at him, and Max had stared back, something in his chest going terribly, violently soft .

He read the note then.

‘His name is Oliver. He was born May 8.

I named him Bearman after my grandfather. I don’t have much. I wanted to keep him but I can’t anymore. He deserves better. He deserves a future. He deserves a father.

You don’t owe me anything. You don’t have to keep him. But I hope you do. I hope you give him a chance to be loved.

He likes warm baths. He hates carrots. If you hum to him, he calms down. I think he’s going to be smart. I think he’s going to be kind.

Please. Just love him.’

Max hadn’t moved for nearly an hour. He sat on the steps with Oliver Bearman curled against his chest, the note limp in one hand, the other pressed to the baby’s back like some subconscious promise had already rooted itself in his bones.

He got a DNA test that evening.

Positive.

99.997%.

Max was 23 years old. He was the heir to the Dutch mafia. He’d built his first weapons ring by sixteen and run four territories by eighteen. He had assassins on call, a kill count higher than most wars, and a bank account so big the Dutch economy quietly relied on him staying alive.

And now he had a baby.

His baby.

Ollie.

He thought about handing the kid over. Honestly. Not out of cruelty—just reality. He didn’t have time. He didn’t have training. He didn’t have...whatever magical skill set made parents know how to swaddle a baby without turning it into a sad burrito.

He brought the topic up to Jos.

Jos, ever the charming father, had scoffed. “Give the kid up,” he’d said, like he was talking about throwing out spoiled milk. “Or find someone desperate enough to raise him for the name. You don’t have time for that.”

Max had said nothing.

Jos had tried again. “You don’t even know who the mother is.”

Max still said nothing.

Jos tried a third time. “You’re 23, Max. You’re barely stable. You’re building an empire. You don’t need a heir.”

Max had looked at him then. Just looked. That cool, terrifying quiet that made even grown men flinch.

“He’s mine ,” Max had said.

Jos had called it sentimentality. Weakness.

He named him Ollie. Short. Easy. Uncomplicated. Max liked things he could say without tripping on his own emotions.

Jos had been livid.

"You’re not built for this," his father had said, voice like concrete. "You’re twenty-three and you’re building an empire. You don’t throw it away for a fucking toddler."

Max had stared at him the way he stared down people he was about to kill.

“I didn’t build anything worth shit if I can’t keep this,” Max had said, holding Ollie tighter.

There had been three more conversations like that. The third one ended with Max holding Ollie in one arm while typing his resignation into the Dutch mafia group chat with the other. He used a clown emoji. Nobody thought it was funny except him. No one thought it was real either.

Max had called it the end.

He walked out three days later.

No further warning. No press release. No final meeting with the board of bloodthirsty bastards he’d built his entire legacy on.

He left.

Took Ollie in one arm, a single duffel bag in the other, and disappeared.

He bought a house on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Got fake papers. A new phone. Built security into the walls like he was preparing for Armageddon. And then he learned how to warm milk without burning it, how to swaddle without strangling, how to hold Ollie through the worst colic night of his life.

The first time Ollie laughed, Max nearly cried. He never told anyone that.

Ollie liked toy cars. And bubble baths. And calling Max “papa” in a voice so high and delighted it physically made Max’s knees go weak.

He didn’t care that he had to work through the night with one arm because the kid only fell asleep on his chest. He didn’t care that he barely slept, that his whole life had become a rotating list of diaper brands and lullabies.

Ollie liked oranges. He hated socks. He gave Max a flower one day—a weed from the yard—and called it a "boom."

Max framed it.

People might have thought he was softer now. The ones who knew, at least. They were wrong.

He was just sharper.

Sharper because now there was something to lose. Something to protect. Something that mattered .

So yeah. Max didn’t talk about Ollie. Because he couldn’t . Not without unravelling at the seams.

And especially not with Carlos, even if Carlos was one of the few people who’d known Max before he became a ghost with a baby on his hip.

Carlos was still watching him, quietly.

Max smiled, dangerous and too sharp to be kind.

“So Charles,” Max said, as if Carlos hadn’t just lobbed a hand grenade into the conversation.

Carlos blinked, caught flat-footed. “You really are obsessed.”

“I like knowing my targets.”

“Usually you just shoot them and go.”

“Usually they don’t look like that ,” Max said.

Carlos groaned into his hands. “Okay, okay. I’ll give you useful information. For the mission.”

Max smiled lazily, fingers tapping against the side of his glass. “Useful like... positions?”

“I swear to Spain ,” Carlos muttered, but there was no heat behind it. Just long-suffering rage.

“I’m just saying,” Max continued, “I might not kill him if he’s a good fuck.”

Carlos nearly spat his whiskey. “Then I’ll assign someone else, you fucking disaster.”

Max leaned forward, elbows resting on the table again, eyes burning like twin blue lasers. “Is he that good?”

Carlos didn’t answer.

Max tilted his head, smirk tugging at his mouth.

The silence stretched.

“I’ll protect him anyway,” Max said finally, softly. Not a threat. Not even a promise.

Just a fact.

Carlos stared at him.

Max didn’t blink.

Carlos sighed like it was physically painful to carry the weight of both his heartbreak and Max’s deeply unprofessional libido. He scrubbed a hand down his face, muttering something in Spanish that Max caught half of—mostly the parts that involved “horny,” “unstable,” and “Dutch devil.”

“I’ll send a voice note,” Carlos said finally, sounding like he was sentencing himself to death. “The details. Timeline. His movements. What clubs he works at.”

“I don’t do clubs,” Max said.

“He does.”

Max smiled. “Then maybe I’ll start.”

Carlos groaned so loudly a pigeon two rooftops over took flight.

He stood up, smoothing out the front of his shirt, the gold chain at his throat catching the noon sunlight like it had a starring role in a telenovela. Max rose too, slower, lazier, rolling his neck like a predator stretching its muscles.

Carlos glanced at him. “Even if you don’t kill him—”

“Which is a very real possibility,” Max added cheerfully.

Carlos ignored him. “Just make sure he’s not a fucking spy or some shit, alright? I don’t need to find out I gave my heart to a man who reports to the Monaco mafia on weekends.”

“That,” Max said, “just sounds like your incompetence.”

Carlos spun on him. “Fuck off.”

“You brought a stripper into your villa, gave him access to your personal shit, and then got shocked when he ghosted you and sent a few Monegasque goons your way?”

“I said fuck off , Verstappen.”

Max grinned, all slow and sharkish. “Love makes you stupid.”

Carlos shoved his sunglasses onto his face like the gesture could physically block out Max’s smug aura. “You’re an asshole.”

“And you’re the one who asked me to kill your ex. Again. Third time this year, if we’re counting.”

“I did not ask you to kill Gio, I just said—”

“You said, and I quote,” Max lifted a hand dramatically, “Do what you want with her kneecaps.”

Carlos hissed through his teeth. “That’s a figure of speech .”

“It’s not, when you say it to me .”

Carlos shook his head and started walking toward the stairwell exit, the wooden soles of his loafers clicking sharply on the stone rooftop.

Max followed, hands in his pockets, relaxed as hell.

Carlos pushed open the metal door. “I’ll send you the voice note tonight.”

“I expect audio quality,” Max said. “I hate reverb.”

“Fuck all the way off, Max.”

Max smiled. “Love you too.”

The club looked like someone had vomited luxury and glitter all over a warehouse, and Max had to admit, with begrudging aesthetic appreciation, that it suited Monaco well. The name of the place, Jimmyz and Sassyz , was offensive on several sensory levels. The spelling alone was an assault. The loud, pulsing bass was doing something unholy to his spinal cord. The lighting was a perpetual loop of red, purple, and gold, like the inside of a teenage vampire’s dream diary.

Max stood outside for a second longer, rolling his neck, thumb hovering over the play button on his phone again. He hit it.

Carlos’ voice came through, annoyed and nasal like he’d recorded this while squeezing a stress ball.

"He works at Jimmyz and Sassyz. Mostly VIPs. They pay him more. Tell them you’re looking for 'Charlene' if you want him to notice you. Yeah, he dances under Charlene. Don’t laugh. No, Max, I know you’re laughing. Stop. I’m being serious. Also, don’t stare at him like a serial killer. That’s what got you banned from that one place in Naples. He usually starts around midnight. Gets off at two. Don’t say anything. Don’t be weird. Just get the job done and don’t sleep with him. Also if you see Lorenzo Tolotta—leave. Do not engage. Don’t do the smug thing. Just leave.”

Max tucked the phone away with the kind of satisfied grin that said he absolutely wasn’t going to do any of those things.

The bouncer outside the main entrance clocked him immediately. Big man. Neck like a tree trunk. Face like a summer peach that had been in a bar fight.

Max didn’t say a word. He just smiled.

The bouncer paled three shades and stepped aside with a breathless “Sir—yes, sir—so sorry—welcome, sir—thank you for gracing us, sir.”

Max winked as he walked past. People still thinking he was a mafia boss? Excellent. Saved him the trouble of shooting someone in the kneecap for attention.

Inside was chaos. Controlled, glimmering, well-oiled chaos. The club throbbed with energy, bodies pressed together in every shadowed corner, the air heavy with perfume, sweat, alcohol, and that subtle edge of desperation that made Max feel a little nostalgic.

He moved like he belonged. Because he did. This sort of place—the velvet and vice kind of place—fit him like a well-cut glove. And when he passed the main dance floor, nobody stopped him. A few girls eyed him like they were trying to remember if they knew him from somewhere. He gave one of them a slight nod. She turned bright red. Heavens, he was good-looking.

He drifted up the curved stairs to the VIP lounge. Carlos’ voice note had mentioned that’s where he usually is —spoken with the kind of longing usually reserved for tragic opera tenors or people watching rain fall in slow motion.

Up here, the music changed—slower, smoother, like it knew people were spending real money in this zone. Max swept his gaze over the booths. Silky curtains. Mood lighting. Empty stage. No Charles.

Unfortunate.

He slid onto a barstool at the curved white-marble bar like he owned the joint and ordered a whiskey—one of the expensive ones, aged like war crimes. The bartender didn’t argue.

He sipped it slowly. And waited.

Someone sat next to him.

Max didn’t look immediately. That was a tactic. Instead, he took another measured sip and then slowly turned his head, gaze sliding like a blade.

Lorenzo Tolotta.

Hair slicked back like a mob prince who’d watched The Godfather too many times. Suit perfect. Teeth even more so. He was grinning like he’d just won something.

“Well, if it isn’t the Dutch Mafia Boss,” Lorenzo said, voice smooth like polished brass. “I never thought I’d see you in my part of town.”

Max didn’t correct him.

He just offered the man a lazy smirk. “Well. You make such loud neighborhoods.”

Lorenzo laughed, low and delighted. “And here I thought you retired. But no—no, of course you didn’t. Max Verstappen doesn’t retire. He just vacations with body counts.”

Max raised his glass, humming into the rim of it. “Maybe I’m just here for the ambiance.”

“Oh? You a fan of the glitter and grind now?”

“I like the music.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

Max turned to face him fully now, elbow on the bar, the gold light catching on the scar near his knuckle. “Why are you here, Tolotta?”

Lorenzo tilted his head at the question, the ever-present smug curl of his lips twitching with amusement. He spread his hands, the gold rings on his fingers catching the light like teeth. “Max. Monaco is my jurisdiction. It would be weird if I wasn’t here. Like you showing up in Amsterdam and acting surprised to see your own men.”

Max snorted and tipped his glass. “Monégasques aren’t legally allowed to play poker in Monaco.”

Lorenzo let out a soft, rich laugh. “And we both know how religiously we follow the law, don’t we?”

The bartender placed a fresh glass in front of Lorenzo, something unnecessarily amber and overcomplicated. Lorenzo didn’t touch it yet. He was watching Max too closely for that.

Max leaned back a little, letting his gaze drift lazily across the lounge, already clocking the exits, the cameras, the guards pretending not to be guards. Then, as casually as if they were chatting about weekend tennis, he asked, “How’s your mother doing?”

There was a flicker in Lorenzo’s expression. A flicker of real warmth. “She’s doing great. Still terrifying. Still the same.” Then, with a shrug that was far too controlled to be real, “She’s thinking about stepping down. Passing the... let’s say, administrative burden to someone younger.”

Max’s brow twitched, just once. “Why are you telling me that?”

“Because I believe you’d like to know,” Lorenzo replied simply, swirling his drink now. “Even if you’re retired. Even if you keep saying you don’t care.”

“I don’t have anything to do with Monaco,” Max said. Quietly. Not defensive—just factual.

“Right,” Lorenzo said, nodding along agreeably. “So why are you here then?”

Max didn’t answer immediately.

He turned again, letting his gaze wander lazily over the velvet-draped stage, the shadowed booths, the half-curtained windows of private rooms. The club pulsed around him, dim lights dancing over slick skin, over perfumed movement and expensive intentions. A low, sensual beat vibrated in the soles of his shoes, and the air tasted like ambition.

He let himself exhale, slow and quiet.

“Pleasure,” Max said at last, voice smooth, empty of explanation.

Lorenzo smiled. “Of course.”

Max watched him for a second longer, then lifted his glass again, elbow resting against the velvet-lined bar with the lazy grace of a retired killer. “Is the heir gonna be you then?” he asked, eyes never quite fully narrowing but definitely sharper now, like he was trying to peek through a half-drawn curtain.

Lorenzo’s mouth twitched, the rim of his glass just brushing his lower lip. “I thought you didn’t care about Monaco.”

“I don’t,” Max said with a shrug, “but I care about gossip.”

That earned a laugh, warm and unhurried. “No, not me. I already have too many responsibilities. And one of them is a four-year-old who thinks he's invincible and somehow has the lung capacity of a concert trumpet.”

Max’s brow lifted. “Didn’t know you had siblings.”

“They’re half-brothers,” Lorenzo said, and he said it with no edge, no weight to the word half at all, just matter-of-fact, like it never made a difference. “Two of them. Charles is twenty-three, Arthur’s four.”

Max froze mid-sip.

Then blinked.

Then very, very slowly turned his head, setting the glass down with a soft clink on the counter.

He didn’t let anything show on his face, but something definitely twisted low in his gut. He didn’t like coincidences. He especially didn’t like ones named Charles .

He looked at Lorenzo again, taking him in carefully this time—the high cheekbones, the glossy brown curls combed back with old-money precision, the faintest dimple in his right cheek when he talked. There were... tiny, beeny bits of similarity. Just a hint of something. A shadow of a jawline or the slope of a nose from that damn picture Carlos had shown him. But not enough to scream sibling.

Still.

Still.

“He’s a bit too silly though,” Lorenzo went on, completely unaware he was casually dragging Max closer to the edge of a breakdown. “Which is why maman might force me to take up the position eventually.”

Max tilted his head, expression flat. “Silly how.”

Lorenzo chuckled, and it was the chuckle of an older brother who’d had to clean up too many messes. “Silly the way little brothers are silly. He runs around, makes everything a dramatic event, disappears without telling anyone, comes back covered in glitter. Likes singing. Fucks off randomly to Paris for a week and forgets to charge his phone. The usual.”

Max stared at him. His jaw flexed once.

He made a vague humming noise that sounded like tell me about it and scrubbed a hand down his face like he was suddenly, impossibly, tragically exhausted.

“You have siblings?” Lorenzo asked, watching him over the rim of his glass.

Max sighed. “Too many. My dad’s a proper slut.”

Lorenzo laughed, delighted. “Oh, I like you.”

Max did not say same , and he definitely did not say I am also a slut , because no one—especially not this oddly chatty Monégasque heir—needed to know he had a two-year-old with soft curls and sticky fingers and a tendency to shout FIRE TRUCK! at inopportune moments. Ollie was not part of this world. Ollie was not allowed to be part of this world. Max would raze empires for that kid to never know what this world meant.

“Charles is probably here tonight,” Lorenzo said, suddenly looking around the club like he could summon him by glancing. “You might get to meet him. Could be fun.”

Max nodded very seriously, like he’d just been offered an audience with a pope. “Sure.”

Inside, however, he was fighting the urge to scream into the LED strip lights behind the bar.

Because if this Charles and Carlos’ Charles were the same fucking person—if Carlos had not realized his fuck-of-the-month was literally the Monaco mafia heir’s little brother—Max was going to either murder Carlos or send his brain to get refurbished in a lab, because what the actual, entire, unforgivable fuck .

He sat very still.

That kind of stillness that didn't look like much but could crack stone if you held it long enough. A patient, coiled kind of silence. The bar’s gold lights were warm against his cheekbones, the room loud with smoke and bass and champagne-laced laughter, but in Max’s head it was silent. White noise. A slow, creeping tide of dread and fury bubbling just below the surface, fizzing in his blood like poison and carbonated confusion.

He took another sip of whiskey. It was smooth. It burned.

His jaw ticked once.

Because really? Really?

Carlos had fucked— dated , apparently, for five months, with candlelit dinners and feelings —a man named Charles. A man who danced in a club called Jimmyz and Sassyz. A man with a pretty face and a sugar-sweet voice and a laugh so dangerous Carlos had sent a voice note about it like a man haunted. A man Carlos swore was too dumb to be a threat, too sweet to be dangerous.

And now, Max was sitting here in that exact club, drinking seventy-year-old whiskey next to the mafia heir of Monaco, and being told—with casual fraternal fondness—that his twenty-three-year-old baby brother Charles liked to run off, disappear, cause chaos, come back covered in glitter, and sing songs.

Max didn’t move. He blinked once, slowly.

The Charles Carlos had described had glitter eyeliner in one of the pictures. He sang for VIP clients.

Max gripped his glass tighter.

He wanted to find Carlos. Not to kill him, not yet, but just to grab him by the collar of that smug little linen shirt he always wore when he was playing not-an-assassin-anymore and retired businessman Carlos Sainz and no-Max-I-don’t-fuck-up-I’m-perfect-Carlos-Sainz , and shake him until the dumb fell out of his body.

Because there was dumb, and then there was I accidentally fucked a mafia heir’s brother and asked you to kill him later dumb.

This was historic dumb.

Olympic-level dumb. A new personal record in Carlos’ ever-expanding catalog of international idiocy.

Max drained the rest of the whiskey in one long pull and gestured for another. The bartender moved like they’d been waiting for it, refilling it with reverent hands.

He should’ve known.

He should’ve fucking known when Carlos had said, “He’s silly” in that voice of his, the one that was too fond to be casual and too casual to be detached. Max had heard that voice before, twice, both times before Carlos had accidentally fallen in love with someone and ended up lying face-down on Max’s carpet in Madrid like a soggy corpse after it ended.

He took a slower sip this time, dragging the glass along his lower lip before setting it back down.

This could be... catastrophic.

If Lorenzo found out Max was here not for a social call but for a hit , that would be bad enough. But if it came out that Carlos Sainz, previously a known associate of Max Verstappen and the literal Prince of the Spanish Mafia, had once kept his balls in the same vicinity as the baby brother of Monaco’s most powerful family—

No.

No, Max would need divine intervention. Or a shovel. Or both.

He leaned back against the velvet barstool, eyes flicking over the room with disinterest he didn’t feel. A gaggle of men in pressed suits laughed in a booth across the VIP section. Some stockbroker was getting a private dance near the corner, mouthing oh fuck over and over again while his friend filmed. Glitter sparkled in the overhead lights. There was perfume in the air and the unmistakable smell of danger underneath it—like blood behind a closed door.

Max barely noticed.

He was too busy panicking in his own brain.

Because he couldn’t— could not —kill Charles now. If this Charles was who he thought he was, there was no shot in hell. It would mean taking out Monaco royalty, and Max may have been many things, but he wasn’t a suicidal fucking idiot.

It wasn’t just about politics. Max knew how to play politics. He just didn’t want to play them anymore.

It was Ollie.

Fuck.

Ollie.

Max’s chest twisted in a funny, familiar way. He ran a hand down his face and exhaled slowly through his nose. The whole reason he left this world behind—the midnight deals, the blood on linen, the quick-draw knives and encrypted phones and endless debts—was that curly-haired two-year-old who thought the moon followed him specifically and liked to hug cats with his whole body.

Max hadn’t told anyone. Not just because he didn’t trust anyone, but because it felt like saying it aloud made it too real . Like someone might hear it and try to take Ollie just for the hell of it.

He’d spent over a year building a life with walls thick enough to keep Ollie safe. A fake name. A fake job. A fake everything . Just to keep the realest thing in the world untouched.

And now Carlos had dragged him back into this, for a man with big eyes and a pretty laugh and glitter , and Max didn’t even know if the contract was fake or real anymore.

Max was supposed to be a contract hitman for an unsuspecting fool, not the unsuspecting fool himself.

He took another drink.

He didn’t even feel it burn this time.

He should walk away. He could walk away. Pretend he never got the voicemail. Fly back to Amsterdam or Italy or wherever the fuck his latest safe house was. Pick up Ollie from the nanny, take him to the beach, let him scream at seagulls and eat strawberry gelato. Go home. Put on a stupid kids’ show about talking vehicles. Let Ollie fall asleep in his lap while Max whispered promises into his curls.

Instead, Max sat there.

Waiting.

For a boy named Charles who might be the same Charles he wasn’t supposed to fuck, wasn’t supposed to meet, wasn’t supposed to spare , and who Max already knew—deep in the awful, gnawing, buzzing cavity of his gut—was going to fuck up everything.

Max didn't move for a second. Just sat there with his whiskey and dread and general loathing for the world.

Then, with the kind of cool detachment only professional murderers and heavily repressed Dutch men could manage, he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his old burner, and typed out a message with one hand.

to: carlos
i might have to kill you.

He added a full stop at the end, for emphasis. Let it hang there. Dead and final.

The little "delivered" tick blinked into existence like it knew it had just carried something violent.

Max pocketed the phone again like nothing had happened, then turned back to Lorenzo, who was watching him with polite curiosity and the exact vibe of someone who’d just asked him a question.

“Hmm?” Max hummed, swirling the drink in his hand like it could solve his problems if he stared at it hard enough.

“I asked,” Lorenzo said mildly, “why you left the Dutch mafia.”

Max stared at him.

That wasn’t the kind of question people just asked. Not unless they had balls made of diamond or a death wish wrapped in silk.

Max exhaled slowly. “Jos was being a bitch.”

Lorenzo nodded solemnly, like Max had just given him the kind of answer that required no elaboration. “Fair,” he said. “I never liked Jos anyway.”

Max blinked.

He looked up at Lorenzo again, actually looked this time, and found that the other man’s mouth was tilted just enough to show the edge of something smug. There was no fear in his eyes. No hesitation. Just the cool confidence of someone who was untouchable and knew it .

Max raised an eyebrow. “That’s a bold thing to say.”

Lorenzo smiled, slow and sharklike. “This might start a mafia war,” he said, “but I don’t care.”

Max paused.

Then grinned. An unhinged, delighted kind of grin. “Goodness,” he said, “I love badmouthing Jos.”

Lorenzo laughed, short and sharp, then leaned an elbow back on the bar like he was settling in for a long story. Max was just about to make a joke about Jos being the human equivalent of a bootleg espresso machine—loud, dangerous, and always leaking somewhere—when Lorenzo dropped a nuclear-level sentence into the atmosphere like it was nothing more than a weather update.

“Jos tried to kidnap Arthur last year.”

The words didn’t land. They detonated .

Max’s head snapped around so fast his neck cracked. “ I’m sorry, what the fuck?! ”

Every glass in a five-foot radius trembled. Someone in the VIP corner glanced over. The bartender flinched.

Max was shouting . He never shouted.

But—what the actual fuck —

“Jos tried to what ?!” he barked, completely forgetting the whiskey in his hand. “He tried to kidnap a toddler ?! Arthur ?! Your brother?! The one who’s fucking four ?!”

“Yes,” Lorenzo said calmly, as if they were discussing renovations on a beach house and not child abduction by a certified lunatic . “It was a Tuesday. I remember because maman ruined her heels chasing after his men.”

Max just—stared. Stared like he was watching a car crash and a helicopter crash and the fall of capitalism all at once.

“Are you—do you hear yourself right now?!”

Lorenzo gave a gentle shrug. “It’s not the first time someone’s tried to kidnap a Leclerc. You get used to it.”

“ No, you don’t! ” Max shouted again, arms flailing now. “That is not a thing to get used to! What the fuck, Lorenzo?! That’s Jos ! That’s my —that’s— what the fuck was he even planning to do with a four-year-old?! ”

“Something about leverage,” Lorenzo said airily. “Or maybe revenge. He was angry because I called him a tulip once.”

Max put a hand over his face and screamed into it. Just—actual noise. Guttural, agonized Dutch despair . The kind of sound that comes out of a man who’s been holding in rage for years and has finally been given a socially acceptable excuse to let it all out.

He slammed his hand back down on the bar and wheezed. “I told him,” he said hoarsely, “I told him the next time he did something that fucking deranged , I’d shoot him in the knee . I told him—”

“And yet here he is,” Lorenzo said serenely. “Still limping around Monaco like a man with no sense of international boundaries.”

Max dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t—Goodness—I can’t believe this. You’re saying he actually tried to steal a four-year-old.”

Lorenzo nodded. “Charles cried. It was dramatic.”

“ CHARLES CRIED?! ” Max exploded.

“I mean, he was four too, back when it first happened to him.”

Max made a choking sound.

“You’re telling me— you’re telling me —this has happened before?! ”

Lorenzo tilted his head. “Only twice.”

Max threw back the rest of his whiskey like it was a tranquilizer. “I am going to strangle Jos. With his own tongue. Through a meat grinder. Lorenzo, why didn’t you lead with this? ”

“I thought it would be funnier now,” Lorenzo said.

Max stared at him.

Just— stared .

And he realized, belatedly, that this man—the man sitting across from him with cufflinks more expensive than some assassinations and the casual air of a Bond villain in a pastel sweater—was actually, deeply, fully, insane .

And, somehow, still less insane than Jos.

And, somehow still , Max was in a nightclub full of smoke and murder contracts , trying to figure out if the man Carlos had casually shagged for five months was not only the baby brother of the Monaco mafia heir , but also a repeat victim of child abduction attempts by Jos Verstappen himself.

Max poured himself another drink.

He didn’t even ask.

He just needed something cold and strong to stop the mental spiraling, because now all he could think about was how fun it would be to tell Carlos.

“Guess who your boyfriend was,” he’d say.

And then shoot him in the foot. For fun .

Max didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. The fantasy was rich enough on its own—Carlos limping dramatically, clutching his Gucci loafers like they were the real victims, screaming about emotional betrayal while Max calmly explained that foot wounds were the lightest punishment for emotional treason . His therapist would approve. If he had one. Which he didn’t. Because he was a functional adult with a history of murder and a rage management plan called whiskey.

He swirled the amber liquid in his glass again, then casually asked, “So how’s Monaco doing with the Spanish mafia?”

Lorenzo turned his head toward him in a painfully slow motion, blinking once, like he was trying to decide if Max had just asked about the weather or made a coded death threat. Possibly both.

“Not that good,” Lorenzo said finally, in a tone that suggested massive fucking understatement .

Max nodded slowly, swirling his drink, trying to act normal, trying to breathe like a man who hadn’t just added arson, child abduction, and mafia warfare to the giant steaming pile of Carlos-related regrets that was his life.

He was now approximately fifty percent sure that the two Charleses—Carlos’ Charles, and Lorenzo’s silly, running-around-being-a-nuisance Charles—were the same person .

He was also fifty percent sure that Lorenzo had figured that out five minutes ago and was actively deciding whether or not to skin Max alive.

“Do you actually like gossip,” Lorenzo asked slowly, “or are you just really good at pretending to be a dramatic little bitch?”

Max blinked. “Both,” he said honestly.

Lorenzo nodded, accepting that with alarming grace. “Alright then. You’re friends with Carlos, yeah?”

Max exhaled. “Define friends.”

“You haven’t killed him yet.”

“Barely.”

“Close enough,” Lorenzo said with a diplomatic shrug. “Then you probably already know he tried to sleep with Charles.”

Max froze. Again.

This was starting to feel like a recurring medical condition. Max Verstappen: stricken once per minute by the overwhelming urge to murder Carlos Sainz with a fork .

“We—uh,” he said vaguely. “We might’ve discussed that.”

Lorenzo’s mouth curled, but it wasn’t a smile. It was something worse . Something knowing and faintly malevolent. “Yeah. They were dating for a bit.”

Max had known . On a surface level. In the abstract, diluted way people know celebrity couples exist. Carlos had bragged about his latest conquest. Had called him “Charles with a ch,” said it like he was chewing on a damn treat. 

Max had never bothered to ask for more details. Why would he? All he needed to know was Charles’ name, what he looked like, and what positions he liked best.

Now Max wished he’d fucking interrogated Carlos.

Lorenzo leaned forward, elbows on the bar, voice low and sharp like glass. “And then, apparently, Charles got bored and tried to set Carlos’ house in Barcelona on fire.”

Max’s glass paused halfway to his mouth.

“Come again?”

“Oh yeah,” Lorenzo said, sipping his drink like this was common family drama. “Apparently there was some fight. Something about paella and infidelity. And Charles set the couch on fire.”

Max blinked. “The—just the couch?”

“He started with the couch.”

Max waited.

Lorenzo stared at him.

“He used a decorative Molotov,” Lorenzo said, tone painfully casual. “The kind with glitter in it. Apparently it was meant to be symbolic.”

“Of what?!”

“Emotional dissatisfaction.”

Max didn’t even try to process that.

“And then,” Lorenzo continued with the serenity of a priest, “he framed it on the Monaco mafia.”

Max stared. Absolutely dead-eyed. He wasn’t fifty percent sure anymore. He wasn’t even ninety-nine percent sure. He was one hundred percent , full-body-certain that Carlos’ Charles and Lorenzo’s Charles were the same exact unhinged, glitter-bombing, emotionally volatile motherfucker.

He was also one hundred percent sure that Charles was completely insane .

And therefore, tragically and inescapably, exactly Max’s type.

Insane? Check.

Arsonist tendencies? Check.

Mafia-adjacent childhood trauma with bonus emotional repression and a vague superiority complex? Check, check, and fucking check.

Max wanted to scream. Or kiss someone. Or scream while kissing someone. Preferably Charles. While the world burned behind them.

Max exhaled through his nose like a man trying to hold back a religious revelation. His hands were too warm. His chest was tight. He was laughing internally —not because it was funny but because he was doomed .

He took another sip. The whiskey burned. So did the realization that he had been thinking of fucking this man and then killing him in the most polite, most Dutch, most premeditated fashion possible.

But now?

Now he regretted nothing .

If anything, Max wished he had known this specific bit of truth after the fucking. After the mattress caught fire. After the trauma. After Charles had possibly carved a love note into his wall with a butter knife and set his car alarm off at 3 a.m. just to get his attention.

He had needs . He was only human .

And Charles—whoever the fuck Charles really was—was clearly a one-man hurricane of damage, charm, reckless vengeance , and emotional pyrotechnics .

Max rubbed his eyes.

He was going to have to kill Carlos.

Not even for the usual reasons—those ranged from “he stole my vodka” to “he laughed at my Spotify playlist”—but for something far worse .

Carlos had known . Carlos had known this Charles , had dated this Charles , had been emotionally violated and arsoned by this Charles , and still had the audacity to ask Max to kill him .

Because his heart was broken .

Max wanted to scream. Not because Carlos had a broken heart. But because if Charles had broken Max’s heart , Max would be begging at his feet .

Begging. On the floor. Maybe shirtless. Maybe bleeding. Maybe with one of Charles’ glitter-Molotovs in his lap and a knife to his throat.

Max hadn’t even met him yet.

And he was already a little in love.

It was awful. Disgusting. Intrusive. A crawling, ticklish feeling in his chest that had no business being there. Max took another sip of his drink just to drown it—burn it, douse it, muffle it in oak and fire and 18 years of distillation—but it wouldn’t leave. It was just there , slinking around in the back of his head like a smug cat with too much eyeliner. He hated it. He loved it. He hated loving it.

In the awful, embarrassing, possibly fatal way—like getting hit by a bus and then asking the bus if it’s single. Max sat there, whiskey warm in his hand, brain hot with the glow of interest and poor decisions, and already imagined what it’d be like to have Charles throw a tantrum in his living room. Maybe try to stab him with a salad fork. Maybe hiss at him like a wet cat and then cry about the “symbolic implications” of being emotionally misunderstood while draped across Max’s couch in an artfully torn sweater and revenge eyeliner.

Across the table, Lorenzo exhaled sharply, his hands drumming once against the worn wood before clasping again. “The Spanish mafia’s been trying to take us down for the past few months.”

Max blinked. Focused. Nodded. His head was already spinning with Charles and glitter-bombs and emotional pyromania, but he tucked that away, locked it in the “Deal With This Later, Probably Naked” box in his brain.

He pulled himself out of his increasingly unhinged internal spiral and nodded. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Lorenzo rubbed a thumb along his jaw. “They’re relentless. Carlos’ cousin—Esteban, I think—keeps poking around our ports. Maman’s… not been sleeping much.”

Max sat up straighter. His spine instinctively aligned like he was about to go to war on behalf of a woman who’d once kissed his forehead at a mafia summit and told him his haircut was ugly in the most loving way possible.

Mrs. Leclerc. The Madame Leclerc. The only mafia matriarch Max had ever liked, even when he was a bratty little Dutch teen who bit diplomats and set car alarms off in quiet courtyards.

Lorenzo shook his head. “She’s tired. Worn thin. There’s so much going on and no one to trust. Everything’s going to shit.” He paused. “Arthur’s learned how to use a gun.”

Max choked on air.

“Arthur,” he repeated, incredulous. “As in… Arthur. The four-year-old.”

Lorenzo didn’t even flinch. “Yeah. That one.”

Max opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, like maybe this time, a sentence wouldn’t get strangled to death by his own disbelief. “Kids shouldn’t know how to use guns.”

“They shouldn’t,” Lorenzo agreed, grimacing. “But he’s got Charles as an older brother. And I swear, the kid thinks he’s in a Quentin Tarantino film. Wears sunglasses indoors. Keeps trying to dual-wield Nerf pistols. It’s getting out of hand .”

Max’s brain was short-circuiting. Arthur. Four . Could barely read, probably still needed help tying his shoes, and apparently also knew how to aim at vital organs.

Ollie would never learn how to use a gun. Max would not allow it . Ollie could use spreadsheets. Ollie could use tax shelters. Ollie could use coded language and burner phones and high-frequency trading bots. But guns ? No. No. Not unless it was a water pistol. Not unless it was part of a summer pool aesthetic .

“I’m just saying,” Lorenzo went on, like this wasn’t deeply traumatic, “living in a mafia family isn’t great. And Arthur already shot at one of Charles’ night lovers .”

Max’s jaw dropped.

“ He what? ”

“Only grazed him,” Lorenzo added, like that made it better. “But still. The man tried to sneak out at 5am and Arthur greeted him with a warning shot and a juice box.”

Max just stared. Entirely stunned. Fully speechless. This family—this entire lineage —was clinically insane. They made his own family look like the fucking Von Trapps.

And Max loved it here.

“I mean,” Lorenzo added, with a helpless shrug, “it’s been stressful lately.”

“Yeah,” Max said weakly. “I… I can imagine.”

“Sorry,” Lorenzo added after a pause, glancing at Max with something a little too soft for mafia ambiance. “I know I’m venting. You didn’t come here for this.”

Max waved a hand, still too stunned to stop himself. “No. No, it’s cool. Gossip is fun.”

He drained the rest of his glass.

“I’m retired anyway,” Max said again, almost dreamily, as he set his glass down like it might float away. He wasn’t sure if he meant it anymore. He had meant it when he’d said goodbye to the bloodstained ledgers, to the coded messages stuffed in pastries, to the scent of gun oil on leather gloves and whispers of death in dim corridors. But now—

Now he was sitting across from Lorenzo Tolotta, heir of Monaco, a man who talked about four-year-olds shooting ex-lovers like he was reciting grocery lists. And Max’s hands were warm with whiskey and the edges of panic, and his brain was spinning with the certainty that the Charles he wasn’t supposed to fuck was the same Charles that set fire to Carlos’ patio furniture and taught a toddler to shoot a Glock.

Lorenzo chuckled, low and dry. “Maman’s planning on getting Charles married.”

Max’s head snapped up. “Oh?”

Lorenzo nodded, calm as a saint, as if he hadn’t just dropped a diplomatic nuke across the Mediterranean. “She thinks if he’s tied to someone influential —with a good head on their shoulders—he might stop being such a menace.”

Max blinked. Once. Twice. The words took their time to settle, like molasses trying to get through customs. Married. Influential. Good head on shoulders.

And Max— stupid, stupid Max —wanted to say he would volunteer as tribute.

It hovered in the back of his throat, tickling his vocal cords, a sacrilegious declaration that screamed suicide by Leclerc . But he didn’t say it. Because Charles might stab him on their wedding night and frame it as an accident. And Madame Leclerc might smile gently and say, “Well, I did tell you he needed supervision.”

Max took another sip of whiskey to drown the urge. “Mothers know best,” he said instead, voice carefully neutral. “Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.”

Lorenzo turned to him, sharp with amusement. “You believe that?”

Max, professional liar, nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”

Lorenzo grinned. “If she finds someone suitable enough, maybe they could even be her successor.”

And Max—poor, retired, hidden-child-having Max—froze.

He couldn’t be her successor. He wasn’t even supposed to be here . He had peeled himself off the underworld like dead skin and built a life around spreadsheets and nannies and quiet anonymity, a ghost in the wind with a fake name on kindergarten applications and a bulletproof Range Rover just in case.

But here he was, already mentally unbuttoning a metaphorical suit jacket and preparing for a metaphorical throne next to Charles, the menace, the myth, the problem.

Max’s brain was melting. He didn’t even know Charles yet. But he was somehow thinking about wedding rings and tax-advantaged shell corporations and matching mug sets.

Lorenzo sighed. “It’s all going to shit.”

Max nodded, throat dry.

“Charles is problem number one.”

Max coughed, almost fondly. “He sounds like it.”

But what he didn’t say—what he couldn’t say—was that Max had always liked problems. Especially the pretty, unhinged ones. Especially the ones who left arson in their wake and knew how to dodge sniper bullets. Especially the ones Carlos cried about while eating paella off Max’s floor at 2 a.m.

Especially the ones that might just make Max forget he’d ever retired at all.

That thought lingered in Max’s mind like smoke. Dangerous, intoxicating, and completely fucking stupid.

“I wish them luck,” he said aloud, casual, as if his brain hadn’t just started plotting interior décor for a waterfront villa with Charles and Ollie and maybe two adopted children who’d call Max papa and Charles dad and definitely not learn how to shoot guns at four. Not unless Max lost an argument to Charles, which, now that he thought about it, would probably happen. Repeatedly.

Lorenzo hummed and took a sip from his glass. “Charles has too many secrets. Even Maman hasn’t figured them all out. And she knows everything.”

Max leaned forward like an idiot. “I could help.”

He didn’t mean to say it. It just—fell out of his mouth. Like a tooth or a confession.

Lorenzo blinked. “That’s generous of you. But why would you do that?”

Max shrugged and leaned back, masking his panic with nonchalance, the way only someone who used to stab people for money could. “Not much drama in my life. Just Carlos and the occasional run-in with the Aussie sub-branch. You know, Daniel and his feral kangaroo circus.”

He did not mention Ollie. Never would.

Lorenzo raised an eyebrow, just enough to remind Max that this was still a Leclerc he was talking to. Not as elegant as Charles, maybe, not as ethereal or insane—but dangerous . All the same blood. All the same knife-honed instincts.

“You do realize fraternizing with both Monaco and Spain this time of the year is a terrible fucking idea,” Lorenzo said coolly, swirling the contents of his glass like he was plotting an assassination.

Max smiled, teeth hidden. “Maybe a fraternizing Dutch is what you need.”

The look Lorenzo gave him was that of a man who had heard the dumbest thing all week and was still deciding whether to behead the speaker or let them finish digging their own grave.

Max cleared his throat and said, “Carlos didn’t know Charles is a mafia prince.”

Lorenzo tilted his head.

Max shrugged again, pretending to examine his nails. “Still doesn’t, I think.”

Lorenzo sighed the kind of sigh that came from years of dealing with Charles. “Of course he doesn’t. Charles probably never told him. He’s a menace like that.”

There was no protest from Max because that sounded exactly right.

“Maybe resolving the misunderstanding would help,” Max offered, lightly, carefully, like stepping on a landmine just to see what it might do.

“It’ll make it worse,” Lorenzo replied immediately, tone clipped. “Now the arson’s personal. Carlos is going to want revenge. And if —when—he finds out he got played by a literal mafia royal—”

Max nodded, slow and thoughtful. “It’ll prove how dumb Carlos is. And Carlos would hate for that to get out into the wider mafia world.”

Lorenzo paused.

Max could practically hear the gears grinding behind that still, calculating face.

“That means more protection for Charles,” Lorenzo said finally. “And I don’t even know where the fuck Charles is.”

Max blinked. “You don’t?”

“No,” Lorenzo snapped. “So many Spanish agents have tried to intercept our goods. Nearly all traced back to Catalonia. We know they’re targeting Charles. I only know he’s alive because he keeps sending Snaps of him drinking wine on a yacht like a little shit.”

Max did not say he came here to meet Charles. He didn’t say he’d received multiple voicenotes from Carlos, all tagged with Charles’ last seen location, like a breadcrumb trail of doomed decisions and terrible ideas. He definitely didn’t say that the minute he left this bar he was getting in his rental car and driving straight to one of those locations because he was suddenly possessed by the ungodly desire to see this man in real life.

Instead, Max said, “I could get Carlos to retire.”

Lorenzo’s head whipped around. “ Excuse me? ”

“If it gets that bad,” Max continued coolly, already writing his own funeral invitation in his head, “I’ll take power back from Jos. Spanish mafia goes down. Clean sweep. Charles stays safe.”

Lorenzo took a deep breath. Like he was deciding whether to scream or shoot someone.

Then came the silence.

Then came the question.

“…Why are you really here, Max?”

Max’s brain went static.

Oh fuck.
Oh fuck.
Oh fuck .

“I—” he started. And stopped . His mouth had suddenly become a war zone between instinct and impulse, with diplomacy bleeding out on the floor.

Lorenzo’s eyes narrowed.

“Was it pleasure?” he asked, soft and sharp. “Or were you hired ?”

Max said nothing.

And that was the problem.

Because silence could mean so many things. Because now he didn’t know which words would fix this and which ones would get his head in a box by sunrise.

“…Did Carlos hire you to kill Charles?” Lorenzo asked, voice deadly.

Max swallowed.

The silence stretched like the universe expanding—vast, starless, eternal.

And then—

“No,” Max said.

Sharp. Immediate. Reflexive.

But Lorenzo didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t stop projecting the exact same energy Mrs. Leclerc had once exuded when she held a blade in one hand and a tray of lemon tarts in the other. Domestic and deathly. Clean and cold.

Lorenzo leaned forward slightly. “No?”

The word came out wrapped in silk and steel.

Max’s spine twitched. He cleared his throat. “Okay. Yes. ”

Lorenzo groaned, tilted his head back like he’d been shot in the soul. “Max.”

“It’s not what it sounds like,” Max said quickly. “Carlos wanted me to kill his ex, sure, but technically I wasn’t fully considering it, like, emotionally . I just wanted to meet Charles. And maybe talk. And maybe if he vibed enough, I dunno, marry him.”

Lorenzo blinked.

Max powered through.

“And then if Carlos had a problem with me dating his ex, I might’ve—hypothetically—killed Carlos , but like, respectfully. And then I’d marry Charles, and we’d live happily ever after and it would become everyone’s problem .”

He finished speaking and realized his heart was pounding. He hadn’t breathed in 45 seconds. He blinked sweat out of his eyes.

Lorenzo stared at him like someone discovering a completely new species of idiot.

Then he waved the bartender over. “Something stronger. For both of us. Now.”

The bartender, no stranger to mafia men having slow-burning meltdowns in this bar, simply nodded.

Max still wasn’t sure if he’d been disqualified from life or somehow passed the first trial.

“When Charles asked me to talk to you,” Lorenzo said, massaging his temple, “I didn’t expect it to be this complicated.”

Max’s mouth fell open like a trapdoor. “ Charles knew I was coming? ”

Lorenzo handed him a new drink—darker, heavier, probably flammable. “Yeah. Charles planted a chip on Carlos’ ring. You know, that ridiculous Spanish mafia heirloom monstrosity? The one he never takes off?”

Max blinked. “The ruby one with the tiny coat of arms?”

“Yeah. He bugged it. Has a voice recorder feature. Because Charles is insane.”

Max’s jaw dropped again . It was becoming a problem.

“So Charles heard the whole thing?” Max asked. “Like. Me. Talking to Carlos. About killing him.”

Lorenzo nodded grimly.

Max stared into the abyss. The abyss stared back and muttered dumbass .

Max thought of every single scenario he’d ever fantasized about with Charles. The yacht ones. The ones where Charles was hand-feeding him strawberries while calling him mon soleil . The ones where they faked a marriage for political reasons and it turned real and ended in wild kitchen sex. The ones where Charles was pregnant and threatening to kill Max for eating the last slice of chocolate cake. The domestic ones. The filthy ones. The emotional ones. The ones where Ollie was their child and Max taught him how to fix cars while Charles taught him how to poison diplomats discreetly. The one where Max proposed to Charles at gunpoint and Charles said yes just to see what happened.

“So,” Max said, dazed, “I will marry Charles.”

Lorenzo blinked. Slowly. Like a man witnessing the collapse of civilization.

“ Why. ”

“Because I can fix him,” Max said seriously, gripping the table.

“You don’t even know him,” Lorenzo hissed.

Max sat up, emotional now. “I will become Mrs. Leclerc’s descendant . I will bring honor to this damn family. I will be faithful , forever, even if Charles burns down Monaco again, even if he fakes his death for tax reasons or commits light treason, I will stand by him.”

Lorenzo just stared . There were no more expressions. Just pure blank shock. Somewhere, a neuron tried to process this and failed.

“Max,” Lorenzo tried again. “You haven’t even met Charles yet.”

Max put a hand on his chest. “But I’m in love . I’ve heard the voice notes. I’ve envisioned the chaos. I know. ”

Lorenzo exhaled through his nose like a dragon trying to maintain composure.

“This is not the Max I remember,” he muttered.

“Retirement changed me,” Max said. “I garden now. I cry at commercials. I’m trying so hard to be a good person. But I swear, if it’s for Charles, I’ll burn a country to the ground and feel nothing.”

“You haven’t even met him, ” Lorenzo snapped again, louder this time, the words bordering on a scream.

“ Then let me meet him! ” Max yelled back, full of unhinged sincerity.

The bar went silent.

The bartender slid over a bottle of something black and unlabeled.

Lorenzo knocked half of it back in a single pour.

Max just stood there, clutching his drink, vibrating with purpose.

“I will,” Max whispered, “be so good to him. I will carry his gun. I will fetch his wine. I will learn French .”

Lorenzo groaned into his hands like the weight of the world was now exclusively concentrated between his temples, pulsing in sync with Max’s apparent death wish.

“ Why, ” Lorenzo said again, muffled through his palms. “Why. Why. Why. For the love of every Leclerc ancestor and whatever decency remains in this bloodline— why? ”

Max, impossibly, insultingly, romantically declared, “Because I’m in love.”

Lorenzo made a high-pitched noise, like a tea kettle being possessed by a demon. His fingers slid down his face like he was trying to peel his own skin off and escape through the bone.

“You don’t even know him!” Lorenzo barked.

“I’ll love him through brain damage ,” Max said earnestly, like that was a normal vow to make at a mafia bar on a Thursday evening.

Lorenzo’s mouth flapped open like a fish caught in a cosmic horror film. “Max. Do you know what Charles did this week? This week . Seven days. Monday through fucking Thursday.”

Max blinked. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than the stuff I’ve done.”

Lorenzo leaned forward, voice low, hands clasped like a man about to deliver a war crime confession. “Charles released genetically mutated bees in the middle of a UN meeting , Max.”

Max’s brain hiccupped.

Lorenzo continued, eyes dark and wild. “Because one of the diplomats commented on his scars during an elevator ride the day before. Charles tracked him, waited, and unleashed designer bees . The man is in a Geneva hospital in a medically induced coma with biblical swelling. ”

Max paused. Blinked. Nodded slowly. “…I did read about that. But I didn’t know it was him . The article said it was someone called ‘ Lord Perceval. ’”

Lorenzo dragged his hand down his face again. “ That’s his middle name. ”

Max stared into space like he was seeing angels. “That’s so fucking hot. ”

Lorenzo slammed his head gently into the table, thunking it against the wood like a man trying to concuss himself out of this conversation. There was a second thunk. Then a third. By the fourth, the bartender cautiously slid over a coaster to cushion Lorenzo’s skull, like he was worried about blood.

“I’m not drunk enough for this,” Lorenzo muttered into the varnish.

Max, meanwhile, had the glazed look of a man experiencing religious visions. He clasped his glass, eyes dreamy, lips parted like he was whispering love poems to the condensation.

“I love Charles so fucking much,” Max said, completely unfazed by the threat of a Leclerc tantrum, execution, or ritual bee-releasing. “I’d learn the French language for him.”

“You already said this,” Lorenzo grumbled, face still mashed into the table.

“I don’t care,” Max said, clutching his chest like his heart had sprouted wings and was trying to flutter out. “It’s final. It’s terminal. I’ve got the diagnosis and everything. Incurable. Full-blown Charles Syndrome. Stage four.”

“God,” Lorenzo said to the tabletop.

“Mon dieu,” Max corrected gently.

Lorenzo sat up slowly like the weight of all of Monaco’s political history was crushing his spine. His eyes were bloodshot with disbelief. “Max. Even if, hypothetically , Charles likes you back—which is a long shot because he doesn’t like anyone except maybe that cat he rescued from an arson scene— he would still kill you. ”

Max sipped his drink again, something syrupy and dangerous, like Lorenzo’s patience. “Why?”

“Because you’re associated with Carlos. Because Carlos asked you to kill Charles. Because Charles may or may not have recorded the entire conversation and is probably planning his revenge as we speak.”

Max swirled the drink in his hand, watching the liquid twist like his sanity. “Then I’ll love him through our enemies era too,” he said solemnly. “Through murder plots and blood feuds and bee stings and betrayal. Through explosions. Through heartbreak. Through war. True love perseveres. ”

Lorenzo stared at him in mute horror. “This isn’t a Shakespeare play, Verstappen.”

Max just smiled, a little bit feral, a little bit in love, like a man who had already married Charles ten times in his head under ten different aliases.

“I’ve got a bulletproof vest and a dream,” Max said, finishing his drink with the tragic flourish of a man making a toast at his own funeral. “Try and stop me.”

Then he tried to stand up.

Tried being the operative word.

Because what he actually did was make it halfway up before wobbling sideways like a windswept flamingo on ice, then plop right back into the barstool like gravity had suddenly become sentient and vindictive.

“Oh,” Max blinked. “Okay. Legs said no.”

Lorenzo sighed with the full weight of someone who knew he was going to be morally complicit in whatever disaster happened next.

Max looked mournful. “I don’t usually drink this much, you know.”

“You didn’t,” Lorenzo said flatly, rubbing his temples.

Max blinked again. “Huh?”

“You didn’t drink that much, Max,” Lorenzo said, tone shifting into something that bordered on fond exasperation. “ Charles drugged you.”

“…Huh?” Max repeated, more confused now. “With what , glitter?”

The bartender waved at them cheerily. Max turned sluggishly to look at him for the first time properly, and—

Oh.

Oh.

Max blinked again. The bartender was… wearing a white collared shirt, sleeves rolled, black apron tied haphazardly around his waist, curls pinned under a dark cap that did nothing to hide his dumb perfect face but apparently did enough. Max’s brain blue-screened. He stared. He squinted .

The bartender smiled. Not just smiled— grinned , sharp and sugary and smug like he knew exactly what Max was thinking.

“Wait,” Max croaked. “Has it always been you?”

“Yeah,” Charles said sweetly, like a landmine dressed as a compliment. “Since you walked in.”

Max gaped, turning back to Lorenzo like he knew??

Lorenzo didn’t even flinch. “He came over from the yacht the second he saw you walk in. Apparently, he wanted to ‘see what you’d do.’”

Max turned back to Charles. “Was the yacht real?”

“Oh, yes,” Charles nodded, resting his elbows on the counter like a sin in motion. “I was on it. Until you showed up.”

“You… were on a yacht…” Max said slowly, “...and you left the yacht… to pretend to be a bartender ... just to spy on me?”

Charles beamed. “Oui.”

Max’s brain made a strange noise. It might’ve been love. Or a stroke. Unclear.

“Are you,” Max said, somehow still hopeful, “into me?”

Charles giggled.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even legal. Max was going to report him to someone. The Monaco Board of Ethereal Menaces. The Intercontinental Federation of Pretty Smiles. HR.

Max leaned forward like he needed to whisper it to Charles and also to the entire bar, “You’d look better with glitter on.”

Lorenzo immediately pushed back his chair with the slow, solemn air of a man releasing himself from the shackles of babysitting. “I’m leaving,” he announced to the universe, the table, the gods, whoever would listen. “I’m leaving. ”

Max turned to him dreamily. “See you at the wedding.”

Lorenzo closed his eyes. Exhaled. Whispered something that might’ve been a prayer. Then he looked Charles dead in the eye and said in French, “Please, for the love of everything holy, do not kill him. If you do, I will raise him from the dead just to kill you myself.”

Charles smiled and threw up a chipper thumbs up, like a gremlin pretending to be a flight attendant.

Lorenzo groaned, and walked out muttering something about bees and Monaco and terminal brainrot.

And then Max was alone.

Alone with the man. The myth. The menace.

Charles.

Charles fucking Leclerc, perched behind the counter like he’d been born to stir drinks and souls and unmake Max’s very sense of self-worth.

Max stared.

Charles stared back, smile tugging at the corners of his mouth like he was enjoying the show.

Max cleared his throat. Squinted. And in a horrible, butchered attempt at seduction, slurred, “T’es… trés jolie. Comme un… uh. Pamplemousse.”

Charles blinked. “Did you just call me a grapefruit?”

Max beamed. “A very pretty grapefruit.”

Charles chuckled, warm and velvet, and said, “Let’s stick to English before you start reciting fruit baskets.”

Max nodded sagely. “Smart.”

Silence. Then Max blinked very slowly and said, “You have beautiful eyes.”

Charles tilted his head, mildly amused. “Merci.”

Max looked confused. “But like. My legs feel weird.”

“That’s the drug,” Charles said casually, like he was talking about the weather and not his own war crimes.

Max frowned. “Am I gonna die?”

Charles leaned in, smiling so softly Max thought he might start glowing. “No. I need you alive to marry me.”

Max gasped.

His hand flew to his chest. “I do.”

Charles choked on a laugh, shaking his head. “ Not now , dumbass.”

And then, with the ease of a man who had absolutely drugged several people before, Charles stood up, pulled off his apron in one fluid motion, tossed it under the counter, and came around to sit right beside Max like they were old lovers reunited at an airport bar.

Max stared. Charles was so close now. Warm and real and stupidly gorgeous in a way that made Max’s brain feel like soup.

Max squinted harder. “They’re green,” he said like he’d just discovered a new planet. “Your eyes.”

Charles hummed noncommittally.

Max kept going, as if narrating a wildlife documentary. “Not brown like the picture Carlos showed me. The picture where you looked like a disappointed choir boy.”

“Cameras tend to be weird around vampires,” Charles said smoothly, like that explained anything.

Max blinked. “That’s funny.”

He hummed. Again.

Then again.

Then paused.

And then, finally, he said what had clearly been building up in the hamster-wheel of chaos spinning in his brain.

“…What the fuck.”

Charles, with the patience of a man watching a child realise they’d just eaten glue, leaned an elbow on the bar. “Yeah. That’s the correct reaction.”

Max stared. “You’re a vampire.”

“Oui.”

“You drugged me.”

“Also oui.”

“You bartended to spy on me.”

Charles smiled.

“You came off a yacht to pretend to be a bartender to drug the guy who might’ve planned to kill you but also maybe wanted to marry you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Max stared deeper. “That’s so fucking hot.”

Charles shrugged, completely unfazed. “You did say you liked glitter.”

Max swayed slightly in his seat. “Are you actually gonna marry me?”

Charles smirked. “That depends.”

Max blinked. “On what.”

“On whether you survive the next thirty-six hours.”

“…Why?” Max asked, deeply alarmed and slightly more sober.

“Because,” Charles said, reaching out to gently tuck a strand of Max’s disheveled hair behind his ear, “I told the UN I wouldn’t kill anyone this week, and I’m already technically on thin ice because of the bee thing.”

Max nodded. Then paused.

“…What the fuck,” he whispered again.

Charles just smiled and sipped from Max’s drink like it was always his to begin with.

Max squinted. “Wait… wouldn’t that drug you too?”

Charles looked at the glass. Looked at Max. Then back at the glass like it had personally offended him. “Poison doesn’t affect me.”

“…’Cause you’re a vampire?” Max guessed.

Charles nodded, calm as a stormcloud. “Mmhmm.”

Max accepted this like it was a weather report. “Okay. Cool.”

A beat.

“You’re very pretty.”

“I know,” Charles said without hesitation, like vanity was baked into his bloodstream along with venom and other cursed things.

Max tilted his head and looked at him closer, like he was trying to identify species. “Are you really a vampire?”

Charles gave him a sharp, glinty grin that showed just enough teeth to answer without words.

“…Are you gonna kill me?”

Charles leaned forward like a secret was coming. “Why do you believe in vampires in the first place?”

Max blinked. “Carlos is a vampire.”

There was a silence so sudden, so startled , even the neon sign outside the bar stuttered.

Charles stared. “I’m sorry, what? ”

“Carlos,” Max said, completely earnest. “Tried to convert me when we were teenagers.”

Charles looked like someone had handed him a live rabbit and told him it was a toaster. “You knew ?”

Max nodded solemnly. “Yeah. But then I bit his hair off and he’s kept a safe distance ever since.”

Charles sat back and laughed.

Not a polite, charming sort of chuckle. Not the soft breathy amusement of someone used to being mysterious.

No. This was full-body, hands-on-knees, teeth-baring laughter like he’d just been given a life-altering gift and it came in the form of Max Verstappen telling him he once bit Carlos Sainz’s hair.

“You’re kidding,” Charles wheezed.

Max shrugged like this happened to everyone. “He’s been mad ever since. He still sends passive-aggressive texts.”

Charles wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “Carlos converted me.”

Max’s jaw dropped. “That’s unconstitutional. ”

Charles raised his glass in solemn agreement. “Tell me about it.”

Max leaned in conspiratorially. “Is that why you committed arson on Carlos’ house?”

Charles blinked innocently. “No. I did it for fun.”

Max made a sound that might’ve been a whimper. “That’s so fucking hot.”

Charles tilted his head like a curious crow. “Are you fine with dating a vampire?”

Max paused. Then, with the kind of grave, thunderous seriousness that should’ve come with dramatic orchestra stings and war drums, he said:

“No.”

Charles’s smile faltered.

Something in his face went still. Not cold. Not upset. Just—still. Like someone had pulled the wind out of his sails.

“Oh,” he said softly.

Max leaned forward and poked Charles in the chest with one finger. “I’m only fine with marrying vampires.”

Charles blinked.

Max grinned.

Big. Dumb. Gleaming with the sincerity of a man who had absolutely been drugged and was still somehow too stupid to lie.

The kind of grin that might’ve saved kingdoms. Or burned them down.

Charles stared at him. Mouth twitching.

“…You’re serious,” Charles said, and it wasn’t even a question.

Max nodded solemnly. “Terminal.”

And then, finally, Charles laughed again.

Not wild this time. Not chaotic.

Just soft.

Soft like the inside of his smile, like the way his hand reached out and brushed Max’s knuckles without asking, like maybe—just maybe —the world would be better off if Max Verstappen did, in fact, marry a vampire.

Charles shook his head. “You’re unbelievable.”

Max beamed. “And you’re undead.”

Charles sighed. “Perfect match.”

“Want to get married in Monaco or Vegas?”

“I think you should survive the night first.”

Max blinked. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

Charles gave him a look. “Because I said that.”

“Oh,” Max said, and made an 'oh' face, mouth rounding out like a small, confused fish just discovering the existence of bowls.

Without missing a beat, Charles reached behind the counter and pulled out a tiny vial. Clear glass, iridescent liquid, suspicious as hell. He poured it casually into Max’s drink, swirling it around like he was just adding some lemon juice and not potentially counteracting a recreational bar sedative.

“Antidote,” Charles said. “You’ll be good as new.”

Max didn’t question it. He downed it like a man on a mission from heaven—or at least a man in love with someone who may or may not have roofied him earlier. He set the glass down with a flourish and gave Charles a slow, wide, lovesick grin.

Charles chuckled and reached out, gently wiping a bead of drink from the corner of Max’s mouth with his thumb, like it was a routine thing he did for all poisoned Dutchmen he half-loved.

“You’re insane,” Charles said, softly, like it was an unfortunate medical fact and also somehow his new favorite thing about Max.

Max tilted his head. “You liked me back pretty freaking easily.”

Charles blinked.

Max gestured broadly at himself. “And like, I know I’m super fucking hot, obviously, that’s not the issue— everyone knows it—but nobody falls for me this fast.”

He leaned forward, nose almost bumping into Charles’s. His voice dropped into a drunken whisper, conspiratorial and suspicious.

“…Is this your attempt at killing me?”

Charles made a face like he was offended and delighted at the same time. Then took Max’s half-finished glass and sipped it again like he wasn’t the one who’d poured poison and antidote into it mere seconds ago.

“You’ll have to survive one night with me to get a proper answer,” Charles said, smirking.

Max squinted thoughtfully. “That’s fair.”

Then, as if the previous conversation had simply evaporated from his mind like condensation on a vampire’s wine glass, Max tilted his head again and started talking about his dreams. At length. In Dutch.

Untranslated. No subtitles. Just beautiful, chaotic babble in a language Charles barely knew enough of to order pancakes.

Charles blinked slowly, like an owl having a slow realisation. “That’s not English.”

Max nodded enthusiastically, still talking. He gestured with his hands. It was very dramatic. Possibly a dream about flying. Or sharks. Or maybe shark-flying. Max was very perfectly sedated. A normal Max would have killed a normal Charles by now.

Charles put a hand gently on Max’s shoulder. “You can start walking now.”

Max looked down at his legs like they were strangers he just noticed had been attached to him this whole time. Then nodded. Stood up. Wobbled slightly.

And then— so proudly —he threw Charles a thumbs up.

Charles caught it.

Actually caught the thumbs up mid-air like it was a gift. He held Max’s hand and, very gently, very intentionally, pressed a kiss to the pad of his thumb.

Max gasped like he’d just been proposed to.

“ Holy shit, ” he whispered.

Charles just smiled.

And then, without saying anything, he took Max’s hand in his own—firm, certain, no games—and led them out of the club, into the night, out of the haze and lights and half-dreamed poison into something realer. Stranger. Better.

Possibly undead.

Max didn’t care. Max was in love.

Max was doomed.

This was a well-documented fact now. Clinically observed. Peer-reviewed by both his liver and his heart, neither of which were working in harmony at the moment because one was chemically overwhelmed and the other was completely, devastatingly occupied with the man currently dragging him through the kaleidoscopic madness that was Monaco nightlife. Charles’ grip on his hand was tight, firm, secure in a way that said you’re mine now, Dutch boy, and Max? Max was very okay with that.

They emerged from the neon-drenched velvet chaos of the VIP section into the main part of the club, music pounding like a war drum in Max’s chest cavity. His thumb was already flying across his phone screen, a tiny digital betrayal typed out in all lowercase because Max’s brain-to-thumb coordination was twenty percent in love and eighty percent fried.

ur boy is mine now
sorry carlos
actually not sorry
he's mine
he said yes
MAX OUT 💥

“Are you mine now?” Max shouted over the music, looking up at Charles with the kind of open, dangerous hope that should only be worn behind bulletproof glass.

Charles laughed, a glittering sound like breaking champagne. He nodded.

“Oui.”

SEND.

Max looked up again, triumphant—and immediately noticed that they weren’t heading out the front door like normal people. No. They were veering to the side, where an EXIT sign flickered with the kind of suspicious dimness that suggested illegal things happened here often. A security guy gave Charles a respectful nod. The door clicked open.

“Oh, we’re going the shady way,” Max muttered, as the alley swallowed them up.

Charles didn’t say anything. Just reached into his pocket and handed Max a small, pale green thing. Looked like a mint. Or gum. Or a microchip designed for intercontinental espionage.

Max held it between his fingers and blinked. “Is this a tracker?”

Charles shrugged, completely unapologetic. “Would you still take it if I said yes?”

Max thought about it for precisely 0.2 seconds, then chucked the thing in his mouth and swallowed like a seagull snatching a hot dog at the beach.

Charles stared. “That was just a mint. You didn’t have to swallow it.”

“Oh,” Max said. “Cool.”

Charles handed him another. Max held it reverently, then grinned. “Are we wilding out tonight?”

Charles smiled back and clutched Max’s hand tighter as they crossed the glossy, midnight-lit Monaco road, weaving between Ferraris and mopeds and the smell of expensive cologne and low-key crime.

“Yes,” Charles said.

Max grinned like a kid about to break into a theme park after dark.

They made their way down toward the sea, where the lights turned cool and silver and the sky bled into the bay like a spilled secret. The air smelled like salt, champagne, and danger. Max blinked at the line of yachts like they were alien spacecrafts waiting to beam him into the next poor life decision.

Charles stopped in front of a particularly beautiful one. Sleek. White. Slightly smug in shape.

The name etched on the side read: Perceval .

Of course it did.

“That yours?” Max asked, awed.

Charles whistled sharply.

A light turned on inside the yacht. Shadows shifted.

“You’re beautiful,” Max said, with the full sincerity of a man who had recently swallowed a mint like it was a marriage proposal.

Charles tilted his head and smiled down at Max like he was considering where exactly to bite him. “You’re also beautiful,” he said. “But in a more... mine kind of way.”

Max gasped like someone had just knighted him with a sword made of emotions. “That’s smooth.”

“I try.”

They stood in perfect silence for a moment, staring at each other like idiots in love and/or about to start a cult.

Then Charles tilted his head again. “What are you like with kids?”

Max froze. Visibly. Like a deer spotting a clipboard.

He didn’t say I have a two-year-old named Ollie waiting in Switzerland, where we relocated after the Dutch mafia boss aka my dad imploded our last safehouse and now I raise him in hiding like a secret super soldier toddler, because Charles did not seem like the type who would take kindly to secrets . Especially not ones that had brown curls and gummy smiles and liked throwing spaghetti on ceilings.

So Max just said, “I’m... alright?”

Charles smiled like a man about to commit to long-term parenting. “Good.”

Max squinted. “Why?”

Charles pointed up at the deck of the yacht. The lights had shifted. A figure had appeared at the top of the stairs.

Slim. Sharp. Headphones on. Laptop under one arm.

The silhouette didn’t scream toddler.

Max blinked. “Is that Arthur?”

Charles laughed under his breath, shaking his head. “That’s Oscar.”

Max’s jaw dropped. “Oscar?”

Charles nodded proudly. “My son.”

“Your secret son?” Max gasped. “You have a secret son too?”

Charles looked intrigued. “Oui. Wait. What do you mean by too ?”

Max blinked. Then immediately betrayed the last one year of covert parental secrecy.

“I have a two-year-old named Ollie.”

Charles’s entire soul paused. Visibly.

“You what. ”

Max looked away. “It’s a long story.”

Charles raised a brow. “You didn’t think to tell me this before we left the club?”

Max made a helpless hand gesture. “You were drugging me and holding my hand and looking at me like I was a crème brûlée, there wasn't really time!”

Charles looked up at Oscar, who was now scrolling casually through something on his laptop, completely unbothered.

Then back at Max.

Then exhaled slowly. “...You named him Ollie?”

“Short for Oliver,” Max muttered, suddenly shy.

Charles stared at him a moment longer.

Then: “That’s adorable.”

Max blinked. “You’re not mad?”

“No,” Charles said with a grin that could melt cities. “I just want to meet him.”

Max made a breathless sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke. “That’s probably the hottest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Oh?” Charles tilted his head again, predatory and delighted. “Then you haven’t heard me sing yet.”

Max might’ve blacked out for a second.

Not in a scary way. Not in a someone call an ambulance, the Dutch one’s down kind of way. More in a brain bluescreened because Charles Leclerc just said something obscenely romantic and Max’s body short-circuited in real-time kind of way. There was something about the phrase that had shorted a wire deep in his central nervous system. He could still hear the static.

He blinked himself back into existence.

Charles was watching him, amused, as if mild boyfriend-induced comas were an expected reaction to being loved.

Then Charles spoke again, voice like silk and violence and truth.

“The real test is Oscar.”

Max blinked. “Wait—what? What about the drug test?”

Charles shrugged, completely unbothered. “That wasn’t a test. I just did that for fun.”

Max narrowed his eyes. “Fun?”

“And to see your reaction to unexpected stressful situations.”

“That wasn’t stressful,” Max said, deadpan.

“I noticed.”

Max wanted to scream and kiss him simultaneously.

“I’m an ace with kids,” Max said instead, puffing up like a golden retriever who just got promoted to Head Babysitter.

Charles gave him a look . “Two-year-olds are very different from six-year-olds.”

Max paused. Squinted. “Oscar’s six?”

“Six and a half,” Charles corrected. “He programs in Python.”

Max swallowed. “Oh.”

“If you pass this test…” Charles trailed off, voice gone soft.

Max leaned in like a criminal desperate for a sentence. “Yes?”

“You get to marry me.”

Max staggered . Emotionally. Maybe physically.

“You’re serious?” he gasped.

Charles nodded, that same small smile that made Max feel like a rare collectable being placed gently on a velvet pedestal. “No one else has ever seen him except my family and his nannies. You’re the first. I want this to work out. Like, desperately. You’re—” he paused, searching for words. Then finished softly, “You’re my soulmate.”

Max made a sound that wasn’t entirely human.

“I—what—I—” he stammered. “Excuse me? I—”

Charles raised a hand like a traffic cop stopping a spiritual car crash. “It’s a long story.”

“I want the long story,” Max said immediately, eyes wide and hands trembling slightly with the kind of devotion that usually results in cult formation.

Charles led him up the short, elegant gangplank of the Perceval like a vampire king leading his chosen bride into their shared crypt.

“It involves me waking up after Carlos bit me and me realising that I love the name Max Emilian Verstappen more than I love blood.”

Max screamed internally.

“You’re telling me you broke up with Carlos because you—because of me?” Max wheezed.

“In a twisted way,” Charles admitted.

“I’m not sorry.”

Charles smirked. “I didn’t think you would be.”

They stepped onto the deck.

The door to the main salon creaked open.

A small figure stood there, silhouetted by the golden interior lights, holding a laptop in one hand and a half-finished Lego spaceship in the other like a tiny CEO who had just completed a hostile takeover and was now preparing for war.

Max blinked.

Oscar blinked back.

For a full three seconds, there was silence. Then—

“Do you have any children?” Oscar asked, voice crisp and curious, like a six-year-old who had already written a full dossier on Max and was now just cross-checking the facts.

Max lit up like a firework. “Yes! I do! His name’s Ollie. He’s two. Very dramatic. Once cried because I cut his pancake into triangles and not squares. I have a video. He likes frogs, hates broccoli, and thinks I'm an actual superhero. But I’m not bragging or anything—”

Oscar’s eyes widened with interest. “Does he like Lego?”

Max nodded solemnly. “He builds towers. Then knocks them down. Then apologises to the Lego men like he’s their creator.”

Oscar stared for a beat. Then, without another word, he stepped aside and waved Max in like a security guard admitting a VIP.

Charles looked like he’d been holding his breath the whole time.

Max followed Oscar inside, already kneeling down onto the soft carpet like it was sacred ground, surrounded by Lego kits and Star Wars sets and small crayon-drawn diagrams of complicated architectural layouts.

Oscar sat cross-legged and handed Max a half-assembled spacecraft.

“I was trying to make a TIE fighter but it keeps becoming a toaster.”

Max examined it, brow furrowed. “Easy fix. We just need to sacrifice this wheel and these four unholy technic pieces.”

Oscar nodded. “You know things.”

They got to work.

Charles sat on the couch nearby, watching them with wide eyes and a hand clutched over his chest like he was witnessing a historical event. His voice was hoarse when he finally spoke.

“Oscar doesn’t even like his nannies.”

Oscar didn’t look up. “They smell like lavender and capitalism.”

“You don’t like any of my friends either,” Charles added softly.

Oscar immediately looked up and squinted at him. “You don’t have any friends.”

Charles gasped, scandalised. “I do too!”

Oscar made a show of waiting. “Go on, then. Name one.”

“I have Lorenzo.”

“Family doesn’t count.”

“I have Maman.”

“Family.”

“Arthur?”

“Still family.”

Charles sputtered. “I do have friends!”

Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Name three.”

There was a long pause.

Charles stood up. “I’m going to drink some water.”

Oscar smirked. Max snorted.

They kept building. The toaster slowly became a spaceship. Max handed Oscar a lightsaber from one of the mini-figs. Oscar stuck it into the cockpit and declared it a turbo thruster.

Then, as casually as someone asking about the weather, Oscar said, “Is Max going to be my new dad?”

Charles, halfway to the water pitcher, tripped on air.

Max blinked, pausing mid-piece. Then he turned to Oscar with wide eyes and a tentative smile. “Do you want me to be your new dad?”

Oscar looked at him seriously. “Yes. But only if I get a baby brother too.”

Max choked. “Are you—do you mean Ollie?”

Oscar nodded. “Yes. That’s the intention.”

Max smiled. Warm and wide and full of that slow-blooming thing that had been crawling up his chest since he’d first seen Charles that night. “Then yes. Ollie can be your baby brother.”

Oscar nodded like a king accepting a treaty.

A few minutes later, Charles turned toward the galley to grab something, humming.

Oscar immediately leaned in, expression dead serious. “If you hurt my dad,” he whispered, barely loud enough for the Lego bricks to hear, “I’ll fucking drown you.”

Max looked at him, stunned. “Six-year-olds shouldn’t swear.”

Oscar leaned closer. “Sorry.”

Max nodded solemnly.

Oscar tilted his head. “If you hurt him, I’ll fucking skin you alive .”

Max blinked. “Fair.”

Oscar held his gaze.

Max grinned slowly. “You can have the Dutch empire when you’re older if you want it.”

Oscar's eyes lit up like he’d just been told he could be King of Legoland and also drive a Ferrari made of solid gold.

“Deal,” he said, extending his pinky.

Max linked theirs together.

From the kitchen, Charles shouted, “What are you two talking about?”

Max and Oscar chorused back, “Nothing!”

Then Oscar grinned.
Max grinned back.

And just like that, the world settled. Like a jigsaw piece slotting into place, or a yacht gently rocking into its berth on a quiet Monaco night. There was a strange serenity in the space between them now—Max and Oscar sitting cross-legged, surrounded by a battlefield of Legos and soft lamp light, with the soft hum of the sea pressing against the hull like a lullaby only the Riviera could write.

Oscar yawned.

A heroic, earth-shaking, whole-body yawn, as if building Lego ships and swearing vengeance had drained every single bit of energy from his little form. His head lolled against Max’s arm a second later, with all the casual trust of a child who’d already decided this stranger was safe, and not just safe but his .

Max blinked down at him.

“Dude’s out,” he whispered.

From the kitchenette, Charles padded back in barefoot, holding three mugs of something that smelled like vanilla and dangerous levels of sugar. He paused when he saw them—Oscar half-slumped over Max like a barnacle, Max frozen like someone had just handed him a nuclear warhead disguised as a toddler.

Charles smiled. A soft, private thing.

“I can take him,” Charles whispered.

But Max shook his head, careful not to jostle Oscar’s weight. “Nah. He’s good here.”

Charles sat beside them on the floor anyway, crossing his legs with a quiet little sigh like this was just another Sunday night for them. He handed Max a mug. “It’s warm milk. With honey and cinnamon.”

Max sniffed it. “That’s the most domesticated sentence I’ve ever heard from you.”

“I’ve said more,” Charles said, taking a sip of his own. “Ask me about my hand-stitched duvet covers.”

Max chuckled, glancing at the tiny human dozing against him. “When did you have him?”

Charles blinked, then looked down at his son. He reached over and gently tucked a curl behind Oscar’s ear. “When I was around seventeen.”

Max turned to look at him. “You’re—what, twenty-three now?”

“Oui.” Charles nodded. “October sixteenth.”

Max’s jaw dropped. “No way.”

“What?” Charles asked, amused.

“I’m September thirtieth.”

Charles blinked. “We’re only sixteen days apart?”

Max grinned. “Soulmates and zodiac neighbors.”

Charles laughed quietly. “That’s stupid.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “But also kind of romantic.”

And it was . In the strangest, most chaotic, most heart-tilting way, it was romantic .

Not the candlelight-and-roses kind. Not the serenading-on-a-balcony kind either. But the real kind—the one made of Lego spaceships and swearing six-year-olds, of private back-alley exits and white yachts named Perceval , of mints mistaken for trackers and a Frenchman who woke up after being bitten by his ex and decided the name “Max Emilian Verstappen” was the most beautiful string of syllables in the world.

Max sipped the milk. It was sweet. Just like Charles.

Oscar stirred a little in his sleep and muttered something about lightsabers and taxes.

Charles leaned his shoulder against Max’s and whispered, “He talks in his sleep. Sometimes about his investments.”

Max stared. “He’s six.”

Charles shrugged. “He's always been advanced.”

They sat like that for a long moment—quiet, close, surrounded by the scattered chaos of a new beginning.

Max turned his head slightly to look at Charles. “You serious about that soulmate thing?”

Charles looked up at him, eyes soft and a little shy for the first time all night. “Yeah. You?”

Max nodded. “Yeah.”

Charles smiled. “Then I guess you're stuck with me.”

Max glanced down at Oscar, then back at Charles, then back at the sea through the wide salon windows.
The moon painted the water silver. The stars blinked like they were in on some enormous cosmic joke.

He looked back at Charles and said, “Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Charles bumped his shoulder against Max’s, fingers curling around Max’s free hand.

And that was it. That was the start of it all.

Of Ollie meeting Oscar and immediately asking to play pirates. Of Oscar presenting Max with a child-sized sword and declaring him “Dad Admiral of the Verstappen-Leclerc Navy.” Of Charles rolling his eyes but laughing, because somehow—somehow—this was now his life.

But it didn’t stop there.

Because Oscar and Ollie, by some divine comedy or catastrophic universal experiment, clicked instantly. Not in a quiet way. Not in a normal way. They clicked in the way two nuclear bombs might click if you pushed them into the same cardboard box and said “play nicely.”

Oscar fashioned an eyepatch out of duct tape and declared that Ollie had to wear it because “psychologists are meant to see with their third eye,” and Ollie, age five, solemnly accepted the role of spiritual guide-slash-chief cook aboard the V.L.S. Monégasque Disaster . Which was, of course, a cardboard box they’d stolen from Charles’ wine cellar.

Charles had raised an eyebrow when he’d discovered half his Bordeaux emptied and the other half being used to fuel “alchemy potions,” but all Max said was, “they’re bonding,” and took a photo.

The next week, Oscar and Ollie staged a heist at midnight—on Charles’ birthday, no less—by ziplining from the second-floor balcony onto the garden trampoline with pillowcases full of uncut diamonds that turned out to be Charles’ actual sapphire cufflinks. Charles had caught them mid-cackle. Max had applauded. They got away with it.

And by “got away with it,” Max meant Oscar cried strategically and Ollie gave a monologue about neglect, and somehow Charles ended up baking cookies for them while muttering in Italian and Googling ‘how to parent high-functioning psychopaths.’

Max had fallen in love with all of it. Every single, terrifying second.

Oscar never called him dad —not once—but when someone asked about his family at school, he’d gesture to Max and say, “That’s Max. He’s my Dutch word for dad.” And Max, who had been prepared to spend ten years earning the right to hear the sacred syllable, blinked for a full minute before going home and printing aprons that said “Max (noun): Dutch word for Dad.”

Even Charles wore one. Begrudgingly. But he wore it.

They got a dog. A ridiculous one. A miniature dachshund who thought he was ten feet tall and would bark at aircraft if allowed. His name was Leo, because Oscar said, “We need a lion in the family,” and Charles, in an emotional moment that was definitely not tears, nodded and said, “He is brave like us.”

They also got two cats—Jimmy and Sassy. Not because they needed them. But because Max and Charles had first made eye contact at a club called “Jimmy’z and Sassy’z” , and Charles had said, “Wouldn’t it be funny,” and Max had said, “If we owned the place, sure,” and two months later, they had adopted both the cats and the club. Now Jimmy the Bengal routinely slept in Max’s underwear drawer and Sassy had a vendetta against Max’s shoelaces. It was love.

And love, for all its chaos, never dulled.

Max didn’t mind being the semisentient presence in multiple crime syndicates, not really. It paid well, and also he got to say things like “send him to Ibiza” in a room full of mortals who had no clue he once cried to Ollie dancing to the rhythm of Peppa pig.

Charles didn’t mind being the trophy husband either. He smiled prettily, wore silks, hosted diplomatic evenings, and reminded people that he had no skills besides making cake from scratch and looking flawless in anything with red or baby blue stitching.

That was, of course, until the day someone leaked Charles’ Interpol file, and Max realised his delicate, soft-spoken, cat-owning husband had been wanted in nine countries for ten years under the alias “Vermilian.”

“ Vermilian?! ” Max had screeched. “That’s so dramatic!”

“I was going through a phase,” Charles had muttered, sipping blood from a Baccarat crystal glass.

But even with that— especially with that—Max had adored him. Adored the contradictions. The way Charles would kiss Oscar goodnight and then stalk off to coordinate diamond laundering schemes across three continents with a Bluetooth earpiece and a jumpsuit on. The way Charles would blush when Max brought him roses but would also throw a stake like a dagger across the room to pin a tax accountant against the wall mid-bite.

One morning, Charles had discovered something in an old, dust-covered book about reproductive anomalies in undead lineages. He was quiet for a week. Then he had made Max sit down and said, “Male vampires can have children.”

Max had blinked slowly, very slowly, like a machine rebooting. “What?” he had said, the word hitting the air like a shoe thrown through a stained glass window. His voice cracked halfway, somewhere between a squeak and a car crash. Leo let out a suspicious bark. Sassy twitched her tail. Charles didn’t even flinch. He just nodded solemnly, the corners of his mouth twitching like he was trying to keep the words from becoming a scream or a laugh or both. Max had fought literal international crime families with less stress than what was currently dawning on him like a radioactive sunrise.

It was a good life. A full one. One bursting with too much noise, too many late-night runs to cover up Oscar’s grave-digging phases (“he’s exploring death as a concept,” Charles said once, exasperated), and a dog that routinely got banned from restaurants.

Oscar grew up. Oh, did he grow up. Tall, lean, whip-smart, and unshakably intense. A perfect storm of Charles’ instinct and Max’s bone-deep stubbornness. When he turned eighteen, he filled out a form labelled “Serial Killer Licensing Application,” handed it to Charles over breakfast, and said, “I’ve decided on my future.”

Charles did not blink. “Will you target ethically?”

Oscar nodded. “Always.”

Max gave him a new knife set for Christmas. Ollie cried from pride.

Ollie, on the other hand, grew into something Max called a “fuzzy menace in cashmere.” He studied psychology because he liked watching people twitch, because he could fake cry in under two seconds, and because Charles once told him he’d make a good cult leader and Ollie took that personally.

At age fifteen, he hosted a TED Talk titled “How to Gaslight With Grace.” Max made popcorn. Charles took notes.

At twenty, Ollie started dating a werewolf named Kimi. Charles and Max did not interfere, except for the time Max followed Kimi to the woods to see him shift and then cried because “he looks like a giant Pomeranian.” Kimi was deeply offended. Charles consoled him with deer meat.

Oscar, meanwhile, brought home a vampire named Lando. Who wore sunglasses indoors, drank his blood in milton cups, and told Max that Oscar had “the best clavicles in Monaco.” Max nearly stabbed him but refrained. Charles, however, asked Lando if he was related to Carlos. Lando said no. Charles didn’t believe him.

Charles waited until Max was halfway through restocking the fridge. It was late, quiet, and the cats were asleep on top of the microwave like judgmental loaves. Leo snored under the table. The waves outside lapped peacefully against the rocks as the kitchen overlooked the sea.

Max was muttering about the price of synthetics and complaining about how Oscar kept rearranging the condiments.

Charles stood by the sink, arms folded. “I’m pregnant,” he said.

Max turned. Blinked. The bottle of carbonated blood slipped from his hands and hit the floor with a loud, traitorous pshhhhh .

“…Okay,” Max said, staring at the spreading puddle. “I need to sit down.”

He cried for two hours. Then started designing onesies that said “Team Max” and “Product of a Soulmate Union.” He bought a jet. Again. Charles made fun of him, and Max didn’t care. He went to Oscar and said, “You’re gonna be a big brother. Again.”

Oscar looked up from his bone-cleaning hobby and said, “Only if I get to name it.”

“What are you thinking?” Max asked.

Oscar said, “Knife.”

They compromised with “Aura.” Somehow.

Ollie (the only sane human/non-human in the family) argued with “Austin” if it’s a boy and “Aurelia” if it’s a girl.

It was perfect. All of it. A life stitched together with sharp corners and soft edges, wild personalities and gentle domesticities. Max held it all. Every smile. Every threat. Every swearing child and every vampire heir.

And now, here he sat. In a room lit with overhead fluorescents and the big Interpol symbol at the back. Cold table. Stainless steel edges. Two men in suits blinking at him like he’d just described a fever dream that involved cats, blood, and Lando Norris in eyeliner .

One of them cleared his throat. “Mr. Verstappen. You realise none of this sounds—”

But Max wasn’t listening anymore.

He was already halfway across the room. The cuffs fell away like paper. The table cracked under his palm. One man screamed. The other tried to call backup but only got a line of static.

Because this— this —had all been a stall. A sweet, sappy story. A bedtime tale, really.

Not because Charles needed rescuing.

Heavens, no.

But because Max liked being heroic. And because Charles—three months pregnant, lips red, knife in garter—was waiting on the roof with Leo in a harness, two cats in a Gucci carrier, and a glowing bomb in his hand that said “Love you always xoxo 💋.”

They met at the stairs.

Charles grinned. “Took you long enough.”

Max kissed him, took the bomb, threw it out the window, and said, “Let’s go home.”

And they did.
With Oscar, Ollie, Leo, Jimmy, Sassy, and soon…little Aurelia Knife Verstappen-Leclerc.

Everything was lovely.

Simply fucking lovely.

fin.