Page 11 of 10 Days to Ruin

Ariel’s face flickers in the aftermath—green eyes blown wide, lips bitten raw. I wrench my attention back to the present and grind my boot into the kid’s shattered knee. He howls.

“Second opportunity. I cannot promise a third.”

“F-fu-fuck you!”

Another swing. Ribs cave like rotten timber.

Her gasp against my mouth. The hitch in her breath when I slid inside her.

I drop the crowbar. It clatters, loud as a gunshot.

Feliks raises an eyebrow but says nothing.

The spy wheezes, pink foam on his chin. Lung puncture. He’ll drown in his own blood soon.

I crouch to eye level. “Last chance to die useful.”

In response, he spits. A weak arc of blood and saliva grazes my cheek.

I exhale and wipe it off. “Poor choice.”

My knife finds his throat before he blinks. Steel parts flesh—a hot, red smile. He gurgles. Twitches. Stills.

And just like that, another little bird dies.

In the corner, I hear the rasp of gears and the burble of flame as Feliks finally lights his cigarette. “Messy,” he comments.

“Efficient,” I correct.

But my hands stutter as I clean the blade.Her fingers, trembling as I bandaged her cut. The way she laughed—reckless, bright, a lit match in a oil well.

I sheathe the knife, and with it, I put away those distractions.

Blood cools sticky between my fingers as I light a cigarette of my own off Feliks’s flame. At our feet, the corpse leaks onto linoleum.

For a moment, I’m twelve again—watching my father gut a traitor in our kitchen. Mother scrubbed crimson from grout for days.

“Folks at the gala are whining,” Feliks informs me, smoke curling around his jagged face. “They’re asking when you’ll make your rounds.”

They. The vultures. The ones who’ll clap like seals when I complete my deal with the Greeks tonight. They won’t quite understand what it means, what will change, but they’ll still applaud and cheer like the good little puppets they are.

I drag the smoke into my lungs until they burn. “Tell them to hold their standing ovation until after I sign my life away.”

He snorts. “Don’t sound too eager,brattan.” He taps the ash off his cigarette. “Heard your bride-to-be’s got fangs.”

“Don’t they all.” The ember between my fingers pulses like a dying star. “The first Makris girl did, too. Look how it served her.”

Something flickers behind his milky eye. “Leander is running out of spares.”

My pulse hiccups.Green eyes. Nips at her lower lip when she’s seething. Orgasms like a wildfire catching. And when she moans, it’s?—

The cigarette snaps between my fingers. I grimace, then drop it and crush it beneath my heel. “I don’t keep track of their litter. As far as I’m concerned, one is as good as the next.”

I start rolling my sleeves back down, smoothing my hair back in place. I walk a fine line between the shadow and the sunlight, and the civilians at the gala can only handle so much darkness before they shrink away in fear. Best to keep things buttoned-up.

Even when I’m reassembled, though, and Feliks has helped me back into my suit jacket, I feel filthy.

I need a shower. A scalding one. To strip this stink of fear sweat and cheap cologne.

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