Page 48 of The Russian's Revenge Bride

Too bad for him that Maxim had practiced too.

What followed wasn’t a fight so much as an execution. Maxim disarmed him with brutal efficiency, sending the gun spinning away across the pavement. Then he was pulling something from his boot, something that caught the light like liquid mercury.

A blade. Thin, sharp, perfectly balanced for killing.

The assassin tried to run. Tried to scream. Tried to beg in broken English that dissolved into panicked Russian when he realized who he was facing.

Maxim showed him the same mercy he’d shown Viktor and the other guards. None at all.

The blade opened the man’s throat like a crimson smile, and he dropped to the pavement in a spreading pool of his own blood, his final breath escaping in a wet gurgle that would haunt my dreams.

Then silence. Absolute, deafening silence broken only by the sound of my own shattered breathing.

Maxim straightened slowly, the bloodied blade still in his hand, and turned to look at me. This was him. The real Maxim Voronov, not the controlled businessman or the carefulhusband, but the killer who’d carved his way through fifteen years of Bratva violence.

His gray eyes found mine across the carnage, and I saw something in them I’d never seen before. Not just rage or violence, but fear. Raw, desperate fear that I was hurt, that I was broken, that he’d failed to protect the one thing that mattered.

I should have been terrified. Should have been disgusted by the casual way he’d ended two lives, by the blood that stained his hands and spattered his pristine shirt.

Instead, I felt something deep and primal unfurl in my chest. Something that recognized him as mine, as the man who would paint the streets red to keep me safe.

I crawled out from behind the wreckage of our car, ignoring the cuts on my palms and the ache in my shoulder. My legs shook as I stood, but I forced myself to walk toward him, toward the monster who’d married me and the man who’d die for me.

When I reached him, I lifted my hand to his cheek, feeling the tension in his jaw, the rapid pulse at his temple. His skin was warm despite the December cold, alive despite the death he’d just delivered.

“Eleanor.” My name on his lips sounded like a prayer and a confession rolled into one.

“I’m here,” I said softly. “I’m okay.”

“You shouldn’t have left. You shouldn’t have….” His voice cracked, and I saw the careful control he’d maintained for so long finally starting to fracture.

“But I did. And you came for me.”

“Always. I will always come for you.”

I looked into his eyes, those storm-gray depths that had haunted my dreams since the night he’d taken me, and I saw him. Really saw him. Not the polished facade he showed theworld or the distant stranger he’d been playing at home, but the man beneath it all.

Bloodied. Vicious. Dangerous.

And completely, utterly mine.

“You’re bloodied, brutal, and mine,” I whispered, the words coming from someplace deeper than conscious thought.

Something shifted in his expression, something that might have been relief or surrender or the beginning of acceptance.

“Yours,” he agreed, and the single word carried the weight of vows and promises and everything we’d been dancing around since the night I’d walked down that chapel aisle.

Around us, Chicago moved on, oblivious to the violence that had just unfolded on its streets. But here in this moment, with blood on his hands and truth finally spoken between us, I felt something settle into place.

I wasn’t just Eleanor Beaumont anymore, the designer who’d stumbled into a world of violence and power. I wasn’t the victim who’d been kidnapped and forced into marriage.

I was Eleanor Voronov. Wife to a monster, partner to a killer, and the one person in the world who could look at Maxim covered in his enemies’ blood and see not a nightmare, but a man worth loving.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

He nodded, his free hand finding mine, and I let him lead me away from the carnage toward whatever came next. Behind us, sirens began to wail in the distance, but I knew we’d be long gone before they arrived.

That was the Bratva way. Clean, efficient, and utterly ruthless.