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Maybe it should have been.My father was the head of a family that had broken off from the Koalitsias years back. I had just assumed, with our wedding, that all of that had been put in the past. I certainly hadn’t kept up with that side of things. Hell, I’d avoided my own father so that I didn’t have to.
“I begrudge you?” Papa Koalitsia’s thick eyebrows lifted, incredulity lining his words as he turned his gaze back to me. “Would you call it begrudging, Manya?”
Where my voice had died before, it stayed stuck at his question. The words crowded thickly in the back of my throat, clawing and curling around one another as if they knew the danger that lay in me saying the wrong thing. I wasn’t sure which answer was safest to give: the one that might anger my father-in-law or the one that might anger my husband.
My husband.
My eyes turned unbidden towards Dmitry seeking some sort of guidance. But I was stopped short by the double doors we had come through, the ones Shura was still standing guard in front of, loudly bursting open, the sound of splintering wood accompanying the bang.
I didn’t have time to stare from the shock that seized me. My body was thrown almost sideways as Dmitry maneuvered me to suddenly somehow be behind him, blocked by his body.
“Shura, my wife—” Dmitry’s voice echoed in my ears, but the sound of encroaching gunfire out of the house drew more of my attention. All too quickly another set of hands was around my arms, pulling as if to move me again, but all I could see was Dmitry. Not the Dmitry who stood in front of me with a gun in his hands, checking the clip and lifting the barrel to face the sound of shots from the other room. But the Dmitry from the other night, blood streaking his body and his eyes hollow from his experience.
And that had been from a knife, not a gun.
Cursing and loud Russian sounded around me. The two byki who had left the room before suddenly appeared and surrounded Dmitry’s father. I shrugged out of Shura’s hands, centering my weight so as not to just be lifted and moved aside. Then, thinking better of it, I darted away from him entirely.
Apparently, I was even more of an idiot than I’d given myself credit for.
