Page 132 of 10 Days to Ruin

I blink up at him. Snowflakes catch in his lashes, crystalline against azure irises. The raw hunger in his gaze scorches through my winter layers.

“I will keep you safe,” he says fiercely. “You are mine. You’re still getting that ring. Still taking my name. And anyone who thinks they can come between us… They’ll learn what Sasha Ozerov does to threats.”

I shiver, not entirely from the cold. “Is that what I am now? A tactical vulnerability?”

“No.” He walks us into the shadowy alcove beside the bodega, his security detail tactfully looking away to give us room. “You’re what matters to me. Theonlything that matters. That circus at the airport? That’s my world testing us. My enemies sniffing for weakness. My allies judging if I’m strong enough to keep you.” He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes. “But you are not some trophy on my mantelpiece. You’re what I’m fighting for. Do you understand the difference?”

“I want to,” I whimper. “I just spent so long trying to put this behind me, Sasha. For it to come back like this is terrifying. Fifteen years of running, and now, I’m front-page news because I’m stupid enough to…”

Love you.The unspoken words hang between us, fat and radioactive.

“You want to breathe,” he says. “I get that. But the answer is this: Trust me. Let me strangle everything that suffocates you. Let me be the knife in your shadow. The wolf at your door.” His forehead presses to mine. “I don’t ask you to love this life, Ariel. Only to let me love you through it.”

My heart is doing backflips. All this time, I’ve been seeing his violence as something to temper, to hide from. But maybe it’s been his way of showing devotion all along—the wolf’s teeth bared notatme, butforme.

“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll try.”

He kisses me again, slower this time, deep enough to make my toes curl in my boots. When he finally sets me down, his eyes are dark with promise.

Then he shrugs off his coat and settles it around my shoulders. The wool swallows me whole, rich with his mint-and-cedar scent.

“Keep that,” he orders. “So you don’t forget whose heat keeps you safe.”

I watch him stride back to the idling SUV, my fingers buried in coat sleeves that dangle six inches past my fingertips. He pauses at the car door and shoots me that roguish grin over his shoulder.

He winks. Just that. Not a word with it, nor a gesture, but a wink that says everything he claims he’s not ready to say quite yet.

Then the door slams. Tires scream. The cars disappear once more.

And I’m left to stand there in the middle of the sidewalk as snow falls around me in flurries, grinning like an idiot, wondering when hell froze over enough for me to fall in love with the devil.

43

SASHA

The first thing I notice when I wake is the silence.

No warm body curled against my chest. No soft snores puffing against my throat. Just stale air and pale winter light bleeding through the penthouse windows.

I roll over, hoping to find Ariel’s indentation still pressed into the Egyptian cotton. My fist closes around cold emptiness instead. Just yesterday, I woke up in a different country, with her tangled around me. The pang of missing that is a knife to the gut.

I trace the barbed wire line around my throat. Her fingertips danced here yesterday. Not recoiling. Not calculating.Loving. As if my scars were constellations instead of proof that I’m irredeemably fucked-up.

Madness.

Further proof of my insanity comes when my fingers wander higher—and I realize I’m smiling.Fuckingsmiling,like a lovesick fool, as I stare at my bedroom ceiling and think about the broken little bird who fluttered into my life.

Molodets, Sasha. How domestic you’ve become.

Three months ago, I’d have bashed that paparazzo’s head in and left him to gurgle and die on the tarmac, and I’d never have thought about it again. I wouldn’t have even gotten angry.

But when I saw the fear on Ariel’s face, the whitest, hottest rage I’ve ever felt ripped through me. And it was only her interference that kept me from tearing him limb from limb, then beating the rest of his colleagues with the bloody pieces.

Touchher?Touch what’s mine?

I don’t fucking think so.

It’s a marvel how good it feels to fightforsomeone.

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