Blood already drips down my arm and it hurts like hell. Thinking fast, I drop into a fighting stance and use my other fist to punch his stomach, surprising him. I knock the knife from his hand. I waste no time before I dive for the abandoned gun.
“Bitch,”he spits and catches my ankle.
The intruder grips my leg hard enough to make me cry out, but I kick with a fury, another blow to his already bloodied face. This one lands on his jaw and only serves to make him angrier.
I make another reach for the gun, but he yanks me across the polished wood toward him and crawls over my body, pinning my thighs under his knees.
Blood from his broken nose drips onto my cheek and I fight like hell to get out from under him, but the man ismassive,nearly as tall as Maxim and just as muscular. The trick to beating men his size is never letting them get the upper hand like this, and as his fingers clamp around my throat, I realize he has.
I try to claw at his face, his neck, any part of him that I can reach, but he just squeezes my neck tighter, cutting off my air entirely.
My fight weakens as black spots grow around the edges of my vision and all I can think is that I’m going to die here. Maxim is going to come home and find my dead body in the hall. I wonder if he’ll try to resuscitate me, if he’ll find the man who did this, if the scratches I left on the man’s jaw will make it easier for Maxim to locate him.
And then, it stops.
The man is ripped away from me, and he’s gripping my neck so tightly that he pulls me up with him before finally releasing me. I double over and cough, sputtering and choking while I try to get air back in my lungs.
Meanwhile, I hear a loud roar before a sickening crack. The man’s body drops to the ground next to me, his eyes still open but now unseeing. His neck is broken, and sits all wrong, but before I can really ingrain his grisly visage in my memory, a red-faced Maxim drops to his knees in front of me.
“Marianna,” he says, voice breaking as he runs shaky hands down my face, my shoulders, my upper arms, and then back up.
“You killed him.” I point out the obvious, but my voice sounds like a croak. I want to thank him, but Maxim crushes me against his chest and holds me tight.
He holds my face in between big hands and kisses my forehead hard.
“Malysh,” he says, like he always does. I looked it up after the second time.Baby, he’s saying.
“I’m okay.”
“All clear,” Sasha reports as he comes in from checking the rest of the floor. He points to me. “She’s bleeding.”
Maxim’s eyes go wider still and he looks between us to the arm that’s hanging limp at my side. The long gash left by the attacker’s knife is bleeding heavily now, blood flowing onto my bare legs and onto the wood floor.
“What happened?” Maxim demands as he strips out of his expensive suit coat and presses it to my wound. I wince at the sting of pain up my arm.
“I’m fine.”
“Lev is on his way,” Sasha reports of the family doctor.
From the kitchen, I hear a gasp and we turn in the direction automatically. It’s Elise viewing the scene, a hand against her head where a bump is forming.
Before I can say anything, she faints again, her body hitting the kitchen tile with a slap. Sasha rushes to her side, tending to her, but Maxim keeps his place directly in front of me, fussing and fretting.
“Maxim, I’m okay,” I repeat. “Call your cleaners for these two.”
“What happened?” Maxim says, louder this time, almost yelling as he grips me like I might not actually still be alive in front of him. His eyes are crazed, wild, and his hold on my upper arm is tight enough to bruise.
He’s terrified, I realize.
I lift my uninjured arm and touch his jaw.
“Maxim.”
“Who—”
“Maxim,” I repeat, and he stops talking, his eyes still searching my face for a sign of fatal injury. I lightly touch beneath his head wound that’s still healing near his hairline. “I’m okay. It’s just a cut. Like yours.”
My touch on his face seems to ground him and he settles marginally.
