Page 105 of 10 Days to Ruin

I press my back against the brick wall of my building and watch Sasha’s black Aston Martin disappear around the corner. My fingernails dig semi-circles into my palms. Every nerve ending under my skin crackles like live wires, still sparking from that godforsaken fake baby and Sasha’s hands spanning my hips. All my oxytocin-drunk, oxygen-starved brain cells were screamingkiss me, kiss me, KISS ME?—

“Fuck.” I peel myself off the wall. The bright glass doors of my apartment beckon, but I set off in the opposite direction instead. The thought of going upstairs is depressing. It’s gonna be empty and quiet up there, and house plants make for shitty company.

Besides, I feel like walking.Motion is lotion,as the overly peppy personal trainer that Gina drags me to every now and then likes to say.

Although the thought of lotion makes me think of Sasha and the spa room, and that makes my cheeks burn and my thighs clench, so maybe I’ll stick to motion just being motion after all.

But motion for motion’s sake is a good thing. Motion means going away from one thing and towards another, right? And that’s what I’m trying to do.

Awayfrom Sasha Ozerov.Awayfrom my dad and all the many twisted things he’d like to shape my life into.

As for what I’m headed towards? Excellent question. Do not have an answer.

For now, lacking a true ethical north to orient myself, I head geographically west instead, cutting through Bedford-Stuyvesant with a vague plan of making it to see the East River sparkling in the night.

My reflection bounces off darkened boutique windows as I pass them—messy auburn ponytail, flushed cheeks, dreamy eyes gazing into a future that isn’t really there. I look like I just sprinted through a romance novel.

“Get a grip, Ari. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

It’s cold as all hell outside, but the remnant aura of Sasha’s heat is keeping me warm enough not to mind. So is putting one foot in front of the other, again and again.

There’s a nice rhythm to this, to walking. I’m pleasantly lulling myself to sleep with a thing that humans have been doing since we first descended from the trees.

Then my phone vibrates against my thigh. I yank it out, ready to scream profanities at whoever’s interrupting my fragile grip on sanity.

But I crack a smile when I see the burly mustache lighting up the screen.

“Uncle Kosti? As in the one and only Konstantin Makris? To what do I owe the rare pleasure? You never call this late.”

“My little night owl.” His gruff chuckle crackles through the speaker. Static hisses between us—probably calling from one of his encrypted lines. As warm as his smiles are, he’s still my father’s brother, and with that DNA comes heaps and heaps of paranoia. “You think because I’m old, I go to bed with the pigeons?”

I lean against a dumpster, the metal frigid against my lower back. “You told me the Metamucil knocks you out by nine.”

“Metamucil is for frightened little schoolgirls. I drink ouzo and piss excellence. Doctors hate me.”

“And men fear you and women throw themselves at your feet, I’m sure.”

I can hear his smile. “That’s why you’ve always been my favorite niece,koukla.You know how to make this old man feel special.”

“Is that why you called? To fish for compliments?”

“I’ll never say no to them,” he declares. “But… no. No, that’s not why I called. I mean, yes, of course, I want simply to check on you. But, given… everything… well, there’s no point keeping you in the dark. You’ve been given a big enough bite to chew on anyway. Unfairly so, in my opinion, but then again, that brother of mine has never given much of a rat’s ass about my opinion in the first place.”

I grip the edge of the dumpster for support. “Get to the point, Uncle Kosti. What’s going on?”

He hesitates. “Your father is getting… cranky, Ari.”

The scowl that rips across my face is withering. “Because I’m not spreading my legs fast enough for his favorite mobster? What happened to ‘ten days’?”

“Because his enemies are getting bold.” The playfulness bleeds out of his voice. “Serbians hit two of Sasha’s warehouses this week. They’ve begun sniffing around the Makris docks, too. Your wedding’s supposed to unite the families, shore up alliances… but every day you stall?—”

“Is a day someone tries putting Leander and Sasha in early graves?” I kick a pebble into the dark. It pings off a fire hydrant and goes rolling into the nearest storm drain. “Let them. Maybe one’ll get lucky and solve all my problems.”

The silence throbs like a fresh bruise.

“You don’t mean that,” Kosti says finally.

Don’t I?

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