Fated Series. Book #2
"Be possessive of me, own me, keep me, because if you do then nothing and no one else can." - Maddox.
My name is Maddox Vallero, and I'm dead.
Well, that's not quite true. I'm alive in the breathing, walking, talking sense-but...
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Chapter 42 Plane ride to happiness Maddox
If you told me half a year ago that I'd be sitting on a private plane with Jax drifting off in my lap—his little hands wrapped around a bottle I'm helping him hold—and my brilliant girlfriend just a few feet away schooling Kirsan in a rematch of their earlier chess game, I'd have called bullshit. I might've believed the plane part. Everything else? Not a chance.
And yet, here I am.
Every time Sophia's bright eyes flick up—narrowing on Jax and me for the hundredth time over the past six hours—I feel it. The reality I wasn't sure I'd ever get to have... settling quietly into place.
Because when Sophia looks at me, I know I'm here.
I want to be here. And nothing, absolutely nothing, will make me leave.
Jax shifts, his little body curling tighter into my side as his eyes finally flutter shut for good. He's tired—and fair enough. From the second we took off, he had his nose pressed to the window, pointing out every single cloud with excitement. At some point, I started doing it too. Not to humor him, but because it was genuinely the most wholesome thing I've ever witnessed. A normal thing. A domestic kind of thing. Something I didn't know I needed until I had it.
Sophia's now three hours deep into this chess match, and when I say I'm over it, I mean it with every fiber of my being. And I'm not even the one playing. But damn, I want my girlfriend's attention back. Kirsan's been hogging it with his obsessive need to win, and while I get that this is a bonding moment for them, I'm dangerously close to dragging her away for myself.
Yeah, my attention-whore side is showing. I'm aware. Unashamed, too.
So I sit here, sipping on every glance I steal from her while holding my little boy close. She looks so damn good locked into the intensity of the game—blooming in the competition—and somehow that makes it harder to wait my turn. I was still watching her when Mateo stirred beside me, pulling my attention with a tired blink and a wide yawn. He'd only been out for about an hour, while Jax was still on cloud patrol. Definitely not enough sleep, judging by the bags under his hazel eyes. Lina, still curled up in his lap, was wrapped in a blanket and looking pale. She's been off all day—throwing up for the first couple hours of the flight and insisting she's fine ever since. But that sickly flush hasn't faded, and of course Mateo's been losing his mind about it.
While everyone did their own thing on the plane, I stayed tucked away in the back with Mateo beside me, just... resting. We still had a decent stretch of sky between us and Abu Dhabi. "Go back to sleep," I muttered, shifting to rest my leg on the seat across from me in hopes it'd ease the pressure building in my back.
Mateo sat up straighter, wrapping his arms more securely around Lina. "When you do the same."
I chuckled. "Me? My love, look at yourself. Plus, I can't sleep—not when I've got my whole world passed out on me and Sophia locked in a high-stakes, nerdy warfare over a chessboard. I'm here to make sure those two don't start World War Three."
