Page 47 of Marrying the Savage

His eyes widen.

I twist his wrist until the knife falls. Then I hit him.

The first punch knocks him sideways into the aisle. The second catches him before he can fall properly, cracking against his cheekbone with enough force to send blood across his mouth. Someone shouts. A woman screams. One of Dmitri’s men makes the stupid mistake of stepping forward, and Mikhail’s gun is against his head before he completes the movement.

“Stay,” Mikhail says.

The man stays.

Dmitri tries to rise again. I kick the knife away, grab the front of his jacket, and pull him up just enough to hit him a third time. There is no elegance in it. No performance. Only the blunt satisfaction of putting my fist into the face of a man who has called Sofia used, filthy, less.

His head snaps back. Blood marks my knuckles now.

Dmitri groans, sagging in my grip, but rage still keeps his mouth alive. “She’ll never be yours,” he chokes.

I hit him again. This time, his knees almost give out completely.

“Damir.” Sofia’s voice cuts through the room.

I stop.

My fist is still drawn back. Dmitri hangs half-conscious in my grip, blood running from his mouth and nose, one eye already swelling. I could finish this. Part of me wants to. A simple twist. A final strike. The Sokolov heir broken permanently at the altar where he expected to own her.

But Sofia has spoken.

I look back. She stands exactly where I left her, one hand pressed to her stomach, veil slipping from her hair, eyes wide but steady on mine. There is horror in her face, yes, but not for Dmitri. Not exactly. It’s for the room. For the children. For the way violence grows once fed.

“Stop,” she says. The word enters me more deeply than it should.

I hold Dmitri for one breath longer. Then I let him drop. He hits the stone with a broken sound. “Take him away,” I say.

Two of my men move immediately.

Sokolov’s guards protest until Mikhail lifts his gun half an inch. Then they remember wisdom.

Dmitri is dragged back, howling now, half from pain and half from the humiliation of being moved like a ruined thing in front of his own guests. His fingers scrape across the stone once before one of my men kicks his hand away.

Sofia doesn’t look at him. She looks at my hand. Blood runs from the cut across my palm, dark against skin, gathering at the base of my thumb before dripping onto the church floor.

Her lips part. “Your hand,” she says.

“It’s still attached.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

I step back toward her. Every eye follows me. The priest looks as though he might faint. Sergei looks as though he might age a decade from hatred alone. The Sokolovs look like men discovering too late that power borrowed from Dmitri is worth less now that he’s bleeding and being dragged from his own wedding.

Sofia watches me approach with a wary expression, but she doesn’t move away.

Smart enough to fear me.

Proud enough not to show too much of it.

I stop in front of her and lift my injured hand. Blood shines across my palm.

For one second, I simply look at her. White dress. Pink mouth. Marked throat. Furious eyes. The sight does something ancient and brutal inside me.

I press my bloody thumb beneath her lower lip, and her breath catches.