Page 149 of 10 Days to Ruin

“I’ve taken everything I can possibly handle from you tonight,” I say with a lilting laugh.

He tweaks my nose and follows it with a kiss. “You’ll like this. I promise.”

He slips from bed despite my protests and vanishes down the hall. When he pads back naked a moment later, he’s holding an unmarked package wrapped in black velvet, with a red ribbon holding it together.

“I’m gonna guess it’s not a pony.”

Sasha laughs. “Not quite.” Then he gives it to me.

I yank the ribbon. The lid falls away to reveal a book. Bound in supple black leather, title gold-embossed:A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME.

And beneath that… a byline.

By Ariel Ward.

My breath catches.Holy shit.Blank pages whisper as I flip through. Untouched. Unwritten. Waiting.

“You have so many stories to tell. Butyourstory is the most important one of all. Your whole life, it’s been written for you. Not anymore.” He touches my chin to make me look up at him. “Write a better story. Write your story.Ourstory.”

Words clog my throat. All I can do is stare at the space where the first words of my story will go when I’m ready to write it. Unmarked territory, all mine to conquer.

I look up at him. “I love you, Sasha.”

It comes out before I can second-guess the instinct. Sasha goes statue-still. For one heart-stopping moment, I think I’ve miscalculated. That I picked the wrong moment. That “not yet” really meant “not ever.” That this is where the fairy tale ends.

Then—

“Ariel Ward… I love you, too.”

51

ARIEL

The next three days blur into a kaleidoscope of us.

Morning sunlight filters through bulletproof glass as Sasha hand-feeds me blini smeared with caviar off the blade of his knife. His free palm rests possessively on the swell of my ass, still sore from last night’s adventures, which involved him lifting me onto the counter for a midnight snack that had nothing to do with food.

“Eat,” he orders, black bathrobe hanging open to showcase the roadmap of bite marks I’ve left across his chest. “You’ll need your strength.”

That’s the understatement of the year. It’s a miracle that I’m still vertical—because we’ve spent that much time horizontal.

We’ve christened all of the rooms in his penthouse like we’re on a holy mission to desecrate every possible flat surface. The shower flooded halfway through the fourth round of the morning when I spent a little too long teasing him from my knees. His office chair will carry a squeak for the rest of its life after I rode him through two back-to-back investor calls he barely pretended to pay attention to. Let us not speak of the bedroom, living room couch, or the armchair in the foyer.

It’s not all sex, though. Gifts appear like offerings at my shrine: a first edition Brontë wrapped in silk, diamond earrings shaped like windblown feathers, a handmade leather holster for my pepper spray. He cooks me meals and reads Dostoevsky to me while I soak in his clawfoot tub. When we’re too tired to make love again, he cuddles me in his arms and tells me stories about the tiny moments of stolen happiness he hoarded in his childhood.

The night before New Year’s Eve, he traces constellations on my bare shoulder as snow parades past the windows. “You ever think about having kids?” he murmurs, breath warm against my ear. “Not because we have to—but because wechooseto.”

I go rigid. “Why? Trying to move up the timeline for your precious Bratva heir?”

“Don’t be so combative, you little spitfire.” His teeth close gently on my earlobe. “I was just wondering if you’d ever want a tiny you with my temper.”

I flip to face him, knees bracketing his hips. Moonlight catches the silver in his stubble. “Watch yourself, Ozerov. That almost sounded romantic.”

“You prefer transactional?” His hands slide up my thighs. “That’s fine. I can work with transactional.”

But when we crash back onto the pillows forty panting minutes later, he presses a kiss to my forehead so tender it cracks my ribs open.

We’re perfect. He’s perfect.

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