Mafia Boss’s Arranged Bride by Bella King
Chapter 16
Annika
Ican’t hear a damn thing.
There is only ringing.
There is only my blood pounding my eardrums, playing a rhythm so fast that I feel like my heart might fail if it’s forced to endure much more of this.
I fall to the floor as my legs fail me once again; the people in the crowd begin to scatter and trample each other, climbing over their seats and colliding with each other like loose marbles.
There are no defined thoughts in my head at this moment, only that I am in complete disbelief. I can’t process what’s happening, and I’m unable to act out the panic I feel in my gut.
I can’t run. I’m stuck.
More shots ring out, and bodies start to fall. A woman in her late thirties falls in front of me as she takes two shots to the chest. She lands facing me, and we hold each other’s gaze in complete horror and confusion as her pink dress is soaked with deep crimson blood.
Just as quickly as the shooting begins, it’s met by opposing fire. Everyone at the wedding is armed except for me. I have become an unwitting hostage of a fire fight. I have no idea who is initiating it or why, and for now, I’m unable to respond to save my own life or anyone else’s.
I feel like I am involved in some kind of evil joke, already being forced to be here under the pretense of love, and now my life might also be stolen from me.
I turn around, finally able to free myself from my place on the floor. There are around twelve bodies scattered throughout the room, and the remaining guests have stampeded to the glass doors and bottlenecked themselves inside.
More shots ring out. Another person is struck, and lands face down on the floor just as they are stepped on by ten more people who are fighting to avoid the same fate.
“Dimitri!” I hear someone scream.
It is Katya. She is running against the grain of the panicking guests, violently pushing them from her warpath as she makes her way to the front of the altar, where her husband stands at attention, firing round after round into the crowd of strangers.
He is joined by twenty or thirty other men who, I can now see, are stationed at different points of the room, no corner left unguarded. I am now also aware of the fact that the Ivanov’s guests have been given a specific dress code to differentiate them from my parent’s guests.
They’re not the ones catching bullets.
We are.
We have all been set up.
The windows are hit by a stray bullet, and glass rains down on the floor and across the hysterical crowd. The shattering is absolutely deafening, and for a moment, I am frozen in my tracks again. People claw at one another to climb out of the window frames, cutting themselves on the shards from the remaining panes. I can see bloody handprints forming across the frame of the windows and glass doors as people shove each other through.
I’ve had dreams like this since I was a child, dreams where I was caught in a rage of gunfire and was too shocked to move. This feels a lot more like those dreams than I would have expected, though I never expected to be in such a position, even with my family history.
Despite the lengths of cruelty I had seen my father capable of, I never would have expected to be subjected to something like this. I have been made the center of attention in a war between powerful families, standing at the dead center without a clue whose side I should be on.
“Michail,” I exclaim as I see him disappear into the crowd, withdrawing a gun of his own from inside his jacket. I thought I was supposed to be with him, but he seems to have fled just as quickly as the others.
I’m somehow more horrified now than I thought possible. Could he have known this was going to happen? Would he have possibly done this to me knowingly to assist his father? Was this all just a fucked up show?
There are a lesser number of men scattered throughout the room who are returning fire. I see one of Dimitri’s men go down toward the front of the room, and immediately he is ravaged by the men in the crowd for his gun.
I need to leave this chaos and find safety.
Before I’m able to stand to my feet and run for my life, I am grabbed from the back by my arms and lifted to my feet.
“Don’t think and don’t let go of me, just run,” the voice growls from behind me as they grab my hand and pull me violently toward an emergency exit that had been missed by everyone else in their panic and haste.
My arm feels like it will dislocate and leave me behind to be shot the way they are pulling at me. I try to glance back and look for my family, but I am unable to see anybody I recognize amidst the chaos.
When I look at the person guiding me, I see that it’s Nikolai. He pulled me from this mess, not Michail, not the man who was supposed to be my knight in shining armor.
“Where’s Michail?” I ask, hoping he was the one who instructed Nikolai to take me. It would make more sense for them to be on the same side, working together instead of fracturing the second bullets started to fly.
As we make it through the emergency exit, Nikolai ignores my question entirely. “We need to get you out of that dress, or you’re going to slow us down and get killed. You need to trust me, okay?” he says, out of breath.
Before I can respond, more shots pop behind the door, and I can hear voices approaching.
“Why the fuck should I trust you? That’s your father shooting the fucking place up,” I hiss, trying not to be heard by anyone but Nikolai.
He grabs me hard by the face and stares into my eyes aggressively, his fingers pinching my cheeks all the way down to my tongue. “You need to listen to exactly what I tell you to do right now, or we are both going to get killed. Do you understand me?” he barks.
There’s smoke on his breath, and his eyes are vivid and wild.
I nod quickly, thinking only to trust him now that my life has been tossed up into the air like a coinflip.
Without a word, Nikolai turns me around and starts to tear at the laces on the back of my dress until it slips off my body effortlessly, leaving nothing but a corset and lace-lined panties to cover me.
“Leave the dress and follow me,” he orders.
I do as he says.
