Page 77 of The Russian's Revenge Bride

“Promise me, Eleanor.”

“I promise.”

He turned back to me, and the weight of whatever he was carrying was written across every line of his face.

“Your father was behind the car attack.”

The words didn’t register at first. They bounced off my consciousness like bullets off armor, too impossible to accept, too devastating to process.

“That’s not….” I shook my head, setting down my wine glass with hands that had started to tremble. “That’s not possible.”

“William Beaumont orchestrated the ambush that nearly killed you. He’s been working with our enemies, feeding them information, planning attacks designed to hurt me through you.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong, Eleanor. We have proof. Phone records, financial transactions, recorded conversations. Your father wants you dead.”

The last word hit me like a physical blow. I felt my breath leave my lungs, felt the world tilt sideways as the implications crashed over me like a wave.

“Why?” The word came out broken, barely audible.

“I don’t know yet. But there’s more.” Maxim moved back to me, kneeling beside my chair again. “Tonight, at your show. There were five assassins.”

“What?”

“Professional killers. Russian operatives. They were there to finish what the car attack started.”

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold my sketchbook. “How do you know this?”

“Because I killed them.”

The casual way he said it, like he was discussing the weather instead of taking human lives, made something inside me crack. This was the world I’d married into. This was the reality of being Eleanor Voronov.

“That’s why you couldn’t attend openly,” I said, understanding flooding through me. “You were protecting me.”

“I’ve been protecting you since the moment I realized how much you meant to me. But tonight was different. Tonight, I had to make a choice between being your supportive husband and keeping you alive.”

Tears were rolling down my cheeks now, hot and angry and filled with every emotion I’d been trying to suppress. “My father wants me dead.”

“Yes.”

“The man who raised me, who taught me to ride a bike, who supposedly loved me. He wants me dead.”

“Eleanor….”

“Why?” I wiped at my face with the back of my hand, anger replacing shock as the full scope of the betrayal settled in. “What could I have possibly done to make him hate me that much?”

“I don’t think it’s about you specifically. I think you’re collateral damage in a larger game.”

“Collateral damage.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “That’s what you called me when you first kidnapped me. Now my own father sees me the same way.”

Maxim’s jaw tightened. “You’re not collateral damage to me. You never were, even when I tried to pretend otherwise.”

“But I am to him.”

“Yes.”

The simple confirmation broke something inside me. All those years of trying to earn his love, of working harder and achieving more in the desperate hope that someday he’d look at me with pride instead of indifference. All of it had been pointless. Worse than pointless. He’d been planning my death.