Page 232 of Marrying My Ex's Brother
Kirill fires once into the ceiling. “Stop!”
The sound stills the room again, but only barely. Everyone is breathing hard now. Everyone is one wrong movement from finishing this with bodies piled across the staircase.
I press one hand to my side. Blood warms my fingers.
Not fatal. Not even close.
Annoying.
Kirill looks at Dmitri with disgust, then back at me. “He always lacked discipline.”
“He shot my wife.”
“And now he has shot you.” Kirill’s eyes move over me, cold and assessing. “Yet you are still standing.”
“I’m going to kill him tonight.”And you too.
Kirill steps down one stair. “He is my son.”
“So was I.”
For the first time, something changes in his face. Recognition, maybe. The smallest acknowledgment that the thing between us is not only about territory, men, or blood spilled tonight.
Then it disappears.
“You were a complication,” he says.
There it is. The truth, finally spoken without velvet around it.
I move up one step.
Alexei shifts behind me, but I lift a hand to stop him.
Kirill notices. His mouth curves faintly. “You want this to be between us?”
“It always was.”
He comes down the stairs slowly, handing his gun to one of his men.
A murmur moves through the hall.
Dmitri appears again near the upper corridor, breathing hard, one hand braced against the wall. His gun is still in his hand.
Coward.
Kirill reaches the middle landing and takes off his jacket. “You think beating an old man will make you whole?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Because you are in my way.”
For a second, he almost looks amused.
Then he moves.
For his age, he’s fast. He comes down the last steps with a short, brutal punch aimed at my injured side. I turn enough that it glances, but pain flashes bright through my ribs. He follows with an elbow. I block it and drive my fist into his stomach.
