Page 150 of 10 Days to Ruin

It’s all so fucking perfect.

Which is why I don’t see the blade coming.

New Year’s Eve arrives with a blizzard. The Met’s ballroom glitters like a snow globe shaken by God Himself. Ice sculptures drip tears and chandeliers weep diamonds. In every corner of the room, waiters circulate amongst the hundreds of guests: every crime lord, politician, and socialite that Sasha and my father, by virtue of this marriage treaty, have now cowed into utter submission.

I’m wearing the dress Sasha commissioned just for this: a blood-red Valentino with a neckline that dips to hell and back. The slit stops just shy of indecency.

Sasha’s knuckles kiss my hip as we pause at the entrance. “Nervous?” he asks, lips grazing my ear.

“Of you? Never.”

That’s a lie. I’m nervous of everything tonight. Not just Sasha, but of all of this. In less than an hour, I’m supposed to pledge my forever to a man who once swore to break me or die trying? I’m supposed to announce an engagement to the world, just a few hundred feet from where Sasha first found me hyperventilating in a bathroom stall?

It’s too neat and dainty. Too seamless. Full-circle moments are for celebrity memoirs, not for real life. I want to believe. I want so, so badly to believe in happily-ever-afters.

I’ve just been scarred too many times to fall for that again.

“Jesus,” Gina breathes when she sees me. She’s here as my other plus-one under protest, swathed in a silver pantsuit that makes her look like a shooting star. “You’re sex on wheels, Ari.”

“Look who’s talking!” I cast around for our missing third wheel. “Where’s Lora?”

Gina points with her champagne glass to a far corner of the room, where Lora, decked out in a pink ball gown with puffy, tulle sleeves, is deep in conversation with Pavel, the Bratva tech whiz Sasha assigned to work with us at The Phoenix. She’s blushing shyly as she giggles at some joke of his.

“It’s disgusting,” Gina says flatly.

I smack her hand. “It’s adorable.”

She rolls her eyes, but then her gaze flits over my shoulder. “Speaking of disgusting…”

When I turn, I see Feliks sauntering in. Sasha even coerced him into wearing a tuxedo for the occasion, which is a miracle in and of itself. Honestly, he looks great. It’s weird to see him not dressed in head to toe tactical gear, but the good kind of weird.

“You clean up nice, Regina,” he remarks as he joins us, eyes raking up and down Gina.

“Call me that again and I’ll castrate you here and now.”

“You shouldn’t talk so dirty in public,” he croons. “Nor should you stare so much. Keep gawking and I might even start to think you’ve got a pulse under that ice queen act of yours.”

“In your dreams, Vasiliev.”

“Every night,ogonyok.”

I can’t possibly roll my eyes hard enough to keep up with Mr. and Mrs. Romantic Denial here, so I turn around to find where Sasha might’ve snuck off to while they were bickering.

It takes me a moment to spot him and Baba talking by the piano. Both men are wearing smiles that, from this distance at least, look innocent enough. But beneath the surface…

Hush, you psycho. Don’t look for things that aren’t there,I tell myself.This is normal now. This is what happily-ever-after looks like.

My father has a hand clapped on Sasha’s shoulder. But his free hand twitches toward his inner jacket pocket. He pulls out a silver pill case. Even from here, I see two tablets disappear under his tongue. His throat bobs with the dry swallow.

I’m still watching when Baba turns his head… and looks straight at me. When he does, his smile jitters, stutters, almost like a wince. Then he coughs and paints it back on in proper order again.

I shudder and pretend I didn’t see that. I’m being absurdly paranoid; I know that. It’s a big night and I’m understandably nervous. But I’ve got Sasha and Gina and Lora here to celebrate with me. Everything is great, grand, wonderful. Church bells soon to be ringing, fa-la-la, all that good stuff. It would be perfect if I just had my?—

“Mama!”

With exquisite timing, my mom floats up to me like the fairy queen I always swore she was. The string of pearls at her throat—the first thing she bought herself after leaving Baba—glows beautifully underneath the chandeliers.

“You came,” I breathe when she’s close.

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