Page 154 of 10 Days to Ruin

“Listen to me!” I roar over the gunfire.

Her elbow cracks against my ribs. “Youlied!”

Across the ballroom, Feliks drags Gina behind a marble column. Pavel’s got Lora slung over his shoulder, sprinting for the service exit. Good. My men know their roles. But my role—the one that matters—is crumbling in real time beneath my hands.

Ariel bucks against me. “Let megoto him!”

“He’s gone,” I tell her. “Your father’s gone,ptichka.”

She stills. For one second, I think she’s finally hearing me. Then her palm cracks across my cheek.

“You don’t get to call me that.” Her eyes are twin supernovas—green fire collapsing into black voids. “You don’t get to call me anything ever again.”

A bullet shatters the ice swan beside us. Shrapnel peppers my neck.

“You want the truth?” I snarl, ducking us behind an overturned banquet table. Silverware skitters across the floor, dancing with the thunder of the crowd’s panicked footsteps. “Your sister begged me to do what I did. Cried on her knees on that dock, terrified Dragan would track her down if I didn’t set her free. Your father would’ve sold her back to that animal to keep his precious alliance. She had to die in order to be free.”

Her breath hitches. “You don’t know that.”

“I saw the bruises!” The memory surges unbidden—Jasmine’s trembling hands unbuttoning her blouse in that safehouse, mottled fingerprints circling her throat like a necklace as she showed me what he did. “You think I enjoyed lying to you? Letting you mourn? Don’t you think I wanted to tell you? I tried to bring you as close as I could without risking her life. Ariel…who do you think played the violin in Paris?”

Another volley of gunfire. I count the shooters by the cadence—half a dozen Serbians ready and waiting. Dragan’s voice booms over the din, rallying his men in that guttural mother tongue of his.

Ariel’s fingers dig into my forearms as she sobs silently. “You could’ve told me.”

“And risk your father finding out?” I crush her closer, shielding her body with mine as bullets chew through the table. “He’d have torn Europe apart to drag her back. Dragan, too. No one could know. This was the only way.”

Her laugh scrapes raw. “The only way to manipulate everyone. Touseus.”

She’s not wrong. I open my mouth—to apologize? To justify?—when a shadow looms behind her.

Instincts override thought. I spin us, taking the bullet meant for her heart.

The impact punches through my left shoulder. Ariel screams. The shooter—some Serbian grunt with a face like spoiled meat—smirks as he racks another round.

He doesn’t get to fire it.

My pistol barks twice. His smirk dies with him.

“Sasha—” Ariel’s hands flutter over the wound. “You’re?—”

“It doesn’t matter.” I shove her toward the service corridor. “Move!”

She stumbles, heels catching on her ruined dress. I catch her elbow, propelling us forward. Blood slicks my fingers—hers or mine or the Serbian’s, I can’t tell.

Her chest heaves. For a heartbeat, I see the girl from the bathroom stall—wide-eyed, trembling, so fucking alive that it hurt me to look at her.

Then her gaze hardens.

“Go to hell.”

She knees me in the thigh. Not the groin—a mercy or a mistake, I’m not sure—and bolts.

“Ariel!”

Chaos swallows her. Society wives are busy trampling each other for the exits. Gunmen duel between ice sculptures. Somewhere, Feliks is shouting my name.

By the time I spot her again, Ariel is halfway up the grand staircase, scarlet train billowing behind her. She glances back once—hair tumbling from its pins, mascara bleeding down her cheeks—before vanishing out onto the mezzanine.

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