Page 5 of My Wedding Night Massacre

The south corridor is darker than the ballroom, and the emergency lighting here is either cut or never triggered. We clear it by instinct and memory, Misha taking the left side, me on the right, both of us moving fast and quiet through the dark. There are sounds from further in the building, shouting, something heavy falling, the distant crack of another shot. The attack is still running, coordinated and merciless.

I’d had this ballroom swept twice. I’d had the guest list vetted. I’d had Bogdan’s security team reviewed, approved, and cross-referenced. And still something got through. That kind of failure doesn’t happen by accident.

It happens by design.

I don’t let myself finish that thought yet. Pavlina first. Everything else after.

We hit the south end. I’m already scanning and moving through the overturned furniture, broken glass, and people who didn’t make it to an exit in time. I’m looking for dark hair and white fabric.

She isn’t here.

“She was here,” Misha says, checking the room the same way I am. “That’s her wrap.” He nods toward a chair. The silk wrap she’d had over her shoulders is draped over the back of the chair, as if she’d set it down and stepped away for a moment. Like she’d be right back.

My ribs hurt from what is beginning to look like obvious failure. My father’s missing, and my wife isn’t where she should be.

I’ve got a weapon with eleven rounds left, a man I trust completely at my back, and enough cold fury to burn this building to the foundations and start looking in the ash.

“We move through the east exit,” I say. “If she got out, she went east, it’s the closest exit.”

Misha nods.

We move.

The stairwell looks clear. It isn’t. The shot comes from the landing above, it grazes across the left side of my neck, burns like a brand, and begins to bleed immediately, warm and fast down into my collar. I don’t stop. I find the bastard on the landing and put him down, then press the back of my hand to my neck for one second to gauge how bad it is. It’s bad, but not bad enough to stop. I wipe the blood from my jaw and keep going.

The exit is thirty feet ahead. The night air’s coming through a door that’s already open, which means someone went through it, which means there’s a trail. I hit the door at a run, and then the second shot finds me, and this one’s not a graze.

The second shot doesn’t feel like a shot. It feels like something inside me is giving way, like the world has reached into my chest and crushed something vital without asking permission. There’s no sharp crack in my ears this time, no clean divide between before and after. Just impact, sudden and deep, followed by a silence inside my own body that shouldn’t exist.

My legs stop working. That’s the first thing I register. Not pain. Not fear. Just the simple, undeniable fact that my body is no longer responding the way it should. The ground rises to meet me, hard and final, and for a second I think I’ll push up. I’ve been hit before. I know how to move through pain, how to force my body to obey when it resists. That’s what I’ve built myself on. But nothing answers. My arm doesn’t move. My fingers don’t tighten around the gun. There’s a delay between command and response, and then nothing at all.

My chest feels wrong. Heavy, tight, wet. I try to pull in a breath, but something catches, something thick and broken that doesn’t belong inside a living body. The air comes in shallow and uneven, like it’s being dragged through something already shutting down. There’s a sound in my ears. At first, I think it’s the chaos behind me, the shouting and movement from the attack still tearing through the building. But it isn’t. It’s internal. A low, dull rush, like blood moving where it shouldn’t. I know that sound. I’ve heard it from other men. Men who didn’t get back up.

Misha’s hands are under my arms. I feel the drag of my body across concrete, the friction through my suit, the dead weight of myself being pulled like something already halfway gone. He’s saying something, his voice tight and urgent, but the words don’t land. They slide past me, meaningless. I try to answer him. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. There’s blood in my throat. I taste it when I try to speak. Metallic. Thick.

My vision blurs at the edges. Not fast. Not dramatic. Just softening, like the world is stepping back from me one layer at a time. I know what this is. There’s no panic in it, which surprises me. I thought there would be. I thought dying would come with fear, with resistance, with something violent clawing its way up from inside me. But it doesn’t. It comes with clarity. Clean. Quiet. Certain.

This is the end for me.

Not a wound I walk off. Not something I recover from. Not a story I come back to finish. This is where it stops.

Pavlina.

She was obviously in on this plan. I’d miscalculated, and the more my mind loops back to it, the more one detail keeps surfacing, cold and clear through the fog of blood loss. She wasn’t there. Not fled in the chaos, not crouched under a table, not pressed against a wall with her hands over her mouth. She was gone before any of it started. Before the lights went out. Before the screaming.

She was gone because she knew.

My chest tightens further. The next breath doesn’t come as easily. The one after that is worse. Something inside me is failing in real time, with systems shutting down in an order I can’t control. My fingers go cold. I no longer feel the ground. Misha is still moving me, still trying, still fighting something that’s already decided. He’s a good man. Loyal. But loyalty doesn’t matter where I’m going.

My vision narrows. Not darkness, not yet. Just less. Less light. Less movement. Less world. I focus on one thing, holding onto it with the last piece of control I have left.

Pavlina. My Pavlina sold me out.

The bitter reality settles in my mind as I embrace my death.

My breath is shallow. The next one barely exists. My body tries to take another and fails. There’s a brief, suspended moment when everything holds, and then something releases. Not pain. Not fear. Just release. The tension leaves first, then the weight, then the need to stop fighting the process.

The world slips. Sound goes. Light follows.