Page 109 of 10 Days to Ruin

He drives for a while without saying anything. The only sound is his breathing as it slows.

His shoulders heave. Steam coils off his skin in the freezing air. Blood trickles down his wrist.

Finally, when we’ve gone far enough, he parks on the ground floor of an empty parking garage.

When he turns to me, I flinch.

Something awful and human flickers behind his ice-blue eyes.

“Ariel.” Ragged. Hoarse.

His hands are on me before I can speak—palming my cheeks, tilting my face for damage.

The copper tang of carnage clings to him. I should be repulsed. Instead, I lean my face into his touch and let out the first sound I’ve made since this whole nightmare began.

“Sasha.”

“Are you hurt?” His thumb dabs across my lip. Later, I’ll realize it’s where Dragan’s ring split the skin. For now, all I feel is the heat of his touch.

I shake my head. He exhales sharply through his nose—a bull moments before the charge.

Then his mouth descends onto mine.

Fireworks detonate behind my closed lids. His kiss is brutal, aggressive, all teeth and desperation. He pulls me halfway onto him, his thigh slotting between mine. Breathing is optional. Survival is irrelevant. All I want is?—

Suddenly, he breaks away like I bit him.

“Fucking hell.” He pushes me into the passenger seat and leans back, pupils cranked wide open. One hand claws through his hair. The other fists against his mouth like he can shove the kiss he just gave me back in. “What the fuck am I—?Blyat’.”

My lip quivers. “Sasha?—”

“Don’t.” He throws open his door and climbs out.

I follow suit, jogging around the front of the car to meet him. “Sasha?—”

“I saiddon’t.”He whirls on me, looking wilder than I’ve ever seen him before. His beard, his hair, his eyes are all positively feral. But it’s the tremble in his mouth that undoes me.

I’ve never seen fear on him before. This is what it looks like.

But not fear for himself. Never, ever for himself.

I know without asking that this is fear forme.

“I thought he might have— I was afraid he was going to—” He breaks off and looks away, raising that hand to his mouth again like those words, too, can be repressed back into wherever they came from. “Fuck.Fuck. Fuck!”

I scream when he punches the brick pillar. I’m sure his hand will come away absolutely mangled, but it’s a smear of mortar dust, not blood, that’s left behind. He rips away in another circle, stops halfway, looks at me again. He looks possessed, like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do with himself.

“I thought he was going to fucking kill you,” he croaks. “And I realized as I came as fast as I could that if he did, he might as well kill me, too.”

Then he turns and looks to a patch of shadows I can’t see into. “Get her out of here, Feliks. I can’t look at her anymore.”

His second steps out, cigarette clamped between his lips, face unreadable. “Boss?—”

“Now. Take her home. Lock her in the apartment. Post three men on the door.”

Feliks sighs. Then he shifts his gaze from Sasha to me. He comes closer, though slowly, cautiously, as if I might get spooked if he moves too fast. Taking a grip on my elbow, he starts to steer me toward a car pulling up at the exit to the garage.

I shake him off. “Sasha, talk to me!”

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