Page 108 of 10 Days to Ruin

“You can’t have her!” I screamed, planting myself in front of her. Baba peeled me away, hauled me upstairs, tossed me in my room. Jasmine could only watch.

We’d always known that arranged marriages were a possibility. But it had always seemed so abstract. What does “one day, you’ll be wed off” mean to a little girl? Nothing, of course.

But little girls grow up. “One day” gets closer and closer.

And today was Jasmine’s day.

An arranged marriage. The link between the Greek mob and the Serbians. Jasmine as the sacrificial lamb to make the whole thing come together. Did she want it? Who cared? None of the men striking the deals ever asked our opinion.

As I stood in my room in horror, I heard those same men thumping downstairs. Their voices felt like the earth shaking. I ran to the window and watched in blurry-eyed horror as my father and the bearded man carried Jasmine down the sidewalk. They put her in a black van. The door closed.

I never saw her again.

“Relax,pticica,” he croons, brushing a stray hair out of my face. “I just want to talk.”

34

ARIEL

Blood roars in my ears. His fingers dig into my jaw, tilting my face up toward the sickly glow of the streetlamp to expose my throat in a way that feels way too intentional for comfort. The acrid stench of his cologne—something musky and too-sweet, curdled by body heat—makes my stomach heave.

“Haven’t you taken enough from me?!” I spit.

Dragan Vukovic’s grin splits his brutal face like a scar. “Not even close.”

One of his thugs yanks my head back by the ponytail. Stars burst behind my eyes. Dragan pulls out a syringe filled with murky liquid. My pulse goes atomic.

And then a black blur detonates the night.

“I’ll kill any man who lays a finger on her.”

Bone cracks. The arm holding my hair snaps like a tree branch in a hurricane. The thug screams, but Sasha’s fist plows into his throat mid-shriek, silencing him.

The second enforcer’s knife flashes, but Sasha pivots, seizing the guy’s wrist and slamming it down on his own raised knee. A shard of bone pops through the skin.

“Bastard!” Dragan snarls, lunging for me.

True to his word, Sasha intercepts him before he lays a finger on me. His left hand fists in Dragan’s beard while his right slams upward, knuckles burying into the Serb’s breastbone in a sickening crunch. Dragan’s eyes bulge.

Sasha shakes blood off his hands. It’s not his.

“You don’t touch her,” he growls. “Youdon’t lookat her.”

He headbutts Dragan. The cartilage in the Serb’s earlier-broken nose definitively gives up the ghost. When Dragan drops to his knees, Sasha kicks his ribs in—once, twice—before slamming a boot into his chest. Vukovic skids five feet across the pavement.

I scramble backward until my spine hits cold brick. Sasha stalks toward Dragan. Each step echoes like a death knell.

Brass knuckles glint as he pulls them from his pocket. My breath hitches. “Wait, Sasha?—”

He drives them into Dragan’s mouth. Teeth skitter across asphalt like discarded Chiclets.

The Serbian gurgles, “Your gutter-whore mother would weep?—”

Sasha raises his foot to stomp—but just before he reverses direction and brings an end to the Serbian boss’s life, the crack of a gunshot rings out.

I look down the mouth of the alley to see half a dozen burly men charging towards us. Two of them have guns raised at Sasha.

Again, he moves faster than I thought possible. He lunges to me, scoops me up like I weigh nothing, and bundles me into his waiting car. I find myself hurled across the center console as he punches the gas and, with a wail of tires and burning rubber, we peel away down the street.

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