Page 158 of Marrying the Savage

I see a door at the end of the corridor.

Service exit. Almost there.

I reach for the handle.

A hand clamps over my mouth. Another arm locks around my waist and yanks me backward.

I try to scream, but the sound dies against the glove pressed over my face.

22

DAMIR

Dmitri’s second man reaches inside his coat, and Nikolai moves before the weapon fully appears.

The gun hits the floor with a hard crack a second later, kicked loose from a broken grip while the man screams through clenched teeth and drops to one knee beside a collapsed rack of coats. Glass scatters under someone’s shoes. One of the saleswomen cries out from behind the counter. Marina grabs Sofia and pulls her back behind the fallen rack, and I register that she’s there, behind cover, before Dmitri makes the mistake of stepping toward me again.

He’s still limping, though pride keeps him upright. Pain should teach him something, even if intelligence never will.

“You brought her here like a prize,” Dmitri spits, his face pale and damp with sweat. “You think putting a ring on her makes this anything but pathetic?”

I move toward him. He takes one step back before he can stop himself.

Everyone sees it.

His mouth twists with rage because he knows everyone sees it too.

“Careful,” I say.

He laughs too loudly, the sound strained around pain and fear. “Careful? You are the one who should be careful. Men are talking, Volodin. They are laughing at you. The great Damir Volodin stealing a girl from the altar because his cock got the better of him.”

The room goes dangerously quiet. Even Nikolai stills for half a second.

Dmitri sees it and mistakes restraint for weakness, because men like him always confuse the two until the moment they are choking on the difference.

I step closer. One of his remaining guards shifts toward me, and Lev catches him by the back of the neck before he can get more than a foot forward. The guard swings blindly, elbow catching Lev in the ribs, but Lev absorbs it with a grunt and drives the man face-first into a mirrored display case. The mirror cracks in a silver spiderweb behind his head.

Dmitri flinches.

“You should have stayed in your clinic,” I tell him.

“You should have stayed away from what was mine.”

“Sofia was never yours.”

His face hardens in a way that tells me the truth still humiliates him more than the bullet in his leg.

“She would have been,” he says. “She would have learned.”

I hit him. My fist catches him across the jaw, and Dmitri stumbles sideways into a table full of folded silk scarves, scattering them across the polished floor as he grabs for balance. He tries to recover quickly, tries to make it look like the limp didn’t almost take him down, but his injured leg buckles and the pain tears a sound from him that he turns into a curse too late.

“Don’t talk about my wife,” I say.

He wipes blood from the corner of his mouth and smiles as though he has achieved something. “Your wife. Listen to yourself. Does she know what happened to the last one?”

I see Nikolai move from the corner of my eye. Toward the left side of the gallery, where the second Sokolov man is trying to reach the fallen gun with two broken fingers and more determination than sense.

“Nikolai,” I say without looking away from Dmitri.