Page 93 of Forced Plus-Size Bride of the Bratva

The sound slices through the tension like a blade.

Matías’s smile falters.

A voice follows the clap. Smooth. Sharp. Amused in a way that carries weight beneath it.

“Are you sure Maxim died?”

Matías freezes.

The color drains from his face—not all at once, but in stages, like his brain refuses to understand what it’s hearing.

From the dark corner of the room, a figure steps forward.

Tall, broad and fark-haired. He’s scarred across the jaw.

Familiar. So familiar it steals the breath from my lungs, the spitting image of Andrei.

Maxim.

Alive.

Andrei stares. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. His expression goes hollow—like the floor has vanished beneath him and he’s still falling.

His gun lowers a fraction more. His eyes are wide, the lines of pain forgotten. For the first time since I’ve known him, he looks completely unprepared.

Like he’s staring at a ghost.

I gasp, the sound involuntary.

One of Matías’s men stumbles backward and drops his weapon, the clatter deafening in the dead air.

Matías’s mouth opens—then closes again. His fingers twitch around the grip of his gun.

Maxim stops a few feet from him. His face is hard, unreadable. There’s no warmth in his eyes—no relief, no reunion. Just a quiet, glacial fury that makes the air itself feel sharper.

He looks straight at Matías. “You should’ve made sure.”

The room explodes.

Matías turns to fire—too slow.

Maxim moves like a weapon fired from a string—his gun already up, already aimed. One shot punches through Matías’s shoulder. He screams, stumbling back, the pistol dropping from his grip as blood sprays against the crumbling wall behind him.

Then the rest of the room ignites. Gunfire. Shouting.

Men scrambling, shooting blindly. A second of chaos.

I hit the ground instinctively, pulling Andrei down with me. He curses, half in pain, half in disbelief. His eyes are still on Maxim, like he hasn’t blinked.

Maxim doesn’t flinch. He moves through the chaos like a machine—cold, relentless, precise. There’s no hesitation in him, no wasted motion. Each step is calculated, every shot fired with deadly intent. He doesn’t fire to wound. He doesn’t fire to scare.

Matías’s men scramble to react, but they’re already too late. Some hesitate—stunned by Maxim’s face, by the impossibility of it. The man they buried in the sea has returned with steel in his spine and a kill order in his eyes. Others tryto rally, shouting in Spanish, dragging rifles into position—but their disarray is fatal.

Andrei groans beside me, pushing himself up from the floor, one hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder. He grabs a weapon off a fallen man, his movements slower than usual but still deadly. The look on his face is unreadable—shock, rage, disbelief all layered together—but his hand is steady when he raises the gun.

I stay low, tucked behind the broken remnants of a metal cabinet, heart racing but hands clenched tight. I’m wide-eyed, but not frozen.

Not when I’ve come this far.

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