Page 13 of 10 Days to Ruin

It’s almost kinda artsy. Like,disheveled, but make it fashion.Someone alertVogue.

The incense diffuser on the countertop coughs to life and starts oozing lavender smoke everywhere. Part of me wants to go unplug it, because with every wisp it releases, the smell of him goes away.

Less cedar.

Less mint.

Less dark, oiled machinery.

I can still taste him, though, hot and tingling on my tongue. And I can still feel him, both the ache and the stickiness he left behind in me.

My thighs throb. My hand throbs. My head throbs as it keeps replaying, again and again and in 4K Ultra HD, the moment of him grazing my earlobe with his teeth as he drove into me, complete with the Dolby Surround Sound of my own mortifying whimpers.

“You just had hate-sex with a man who probably uses human skulls as shot glasses,” I tell the girl in the steel. “Congratulations. Your therapist’s yacht fund thanks you.”

I wince and tear my gaze away. Self-loathing is a bottomless pit and, in theory, I still have a job to do tonight, so I can’t waste time wallowing.

I fish my phone out of my clutch. Three missed calls and a text from Gina:U alive????

I try to type out a reply, but the letters on the keyboard start to swim and blur before my eyes.

This isn’t me. The real Ariel Ward doesn’t have panic attacks in Met bathrooms. The real Ariel Ward files FOIA requests at 2 A.M. and drinks cold brew strong enough to strip paint.

But the real Ariel Ward also hasn’t seen her father in person since the night she climbed out her bedroom window with a backpack full of protein bars and a switchblade she’d stolen from his study.

Fifteen years,I think, pressing my forehead to the cool tile on the wall.Fifteen years, and he’s twenty feet away, hobnobbing with congressmen in the same building where I just let a Russian mobster’s tongue?—

My stomach lurches. I run to the toilet and try to vomit, but nothing comes up.

When I finally stumble back to the sink, my reflection mocks me: Lois Lane cosplaying aReal Housewifeafter a bender. I splash water on my face, but the mascara streaks just smear into Rorschach blots.What do you see here, Doctor? A woman who just came for a stranger on a bathroom sink? Hm, I think you might be right.

The door whines open.

“Occupied!” I cry out, voice cracking.

“Not for long.”

Leander Makris fills the doorway like a storm rolling over Brighton Beach. Black tuxedo, snowdrift beard, eyes the same poison-green as mine. Ashers.

The air thickens with his cologne (Creed Aventus, four hundred and fifty dollars a bottle, the signature scent of every childhood car ride to “business meetings” that left blood on his cufflinks).

“Hello,neraïdoula mou.”

My little fairy.I used to think it was cute. When I got older, I started to wonder if he was mocking Mama, mocking me. A little fairy, not fit for this world, not brave enough or big enough to survive in it without his help.

Jasmine used to call me the same thing. But when she said it, it was never cruel or condescending. She’d whisper it to me in the darkness of our shared bedroom when the shouting downstairs got too loud.Don’t cry, neraïdoula mou. I’ll sneak you Oreos once he passes out.

“Hi, Baba.”

His gaze flicks to my bandaged hand. “Still accident-prone, I see.”

“A good father might ask if I’m okay.”

He steps inside, rolling a cigar between his fingers—Cuban, unlit, another ever-present prop in the Leander Makris Production ofGentleman Gangster. In the brief instant before the door closes, I hear a snatch of sound from the ballroom. The string quartet is butchering Dvorák’s American Quartet, which I only recognize because Mom used to play it on vinyl while she cleaned—back when we still had a mom, and vinyl, and things worth cleaning.

Then it closes, and quiet takes over again.

“Then tell me,” he rumbles. “Are you okay, Ariana?”

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