Page 159 of 10 Days to Ruin

“You framed Dragan. Let my family grieve for a decade. For what? A fuckingalliance?”

“For survival.” His jaw ticks. “Same reason I did everything.”

“Bullshit. You had a dozen chances to tell me the truth. On our dates. In Paris. Even when you—” The words get caught in my throat.When you said you loved me.

Sasha steps closer into my space, crowding me against the carrel wall. “Would you have believed me? That first night? The second? How about the third, Ariel? Would you have believed me then?”

“I don’t know!” I lower my voice to a venomous hiss. “But you didn’t even try. You just… You let me fall for a fairy tale.”

His nostrils flare. “It wasn’t all a lie.”

“Wasn’t it?” I gesture around us. “The library date? The spa? The goddamnlingerie? All part of the long con, right? Keep the little wife happy while you?—”

He kisses me.

It’s not like before—no slow burn, no teasing dominance. This is pain. Punishment. His teeth catch my lower lip hard enough to draw blood as his hands cage me against the wall. I bite back a whimper, nails digging into his biceps through the ruined tuxedo shirt.

When he pulls away, we’re both shaking.

“Eto ne lozh.” His breath scalds my cheek. “None of that was a lie.”

I swipe at my stinging mouth and spit, “Prove it.”

“How?”

“Marry me.”

He stills. “What?”

“Right now. No contracts. No witnesses. No political gain.” I yank my mother’s engagement ring off my finger and hold it up between us. “Just you and me in front of some city clerk who’ll file the paperwork between coffee breaks.”

His gaze drops to the ring. “Ariel?—”

“If you mean it—if any of this was real—you’ll do it.” My voice cracks. “Otherwise, walk away from me and never look back.”

He says nothing for a while. In the distant guts of the library, a clock ticks toward oblivion.

I watch the calculations flicker behind his eyes—thepakhanweighing risks, the boy raised by a tyrant recoiling from vulnerability.

“Give me time to make things?—”

My heart shrivels to ash. “That’s your answer then. At least it’s an honest one.”

“Ariel. Ariel, wait?—”

He grabs for me again but I’m already moving, sprinting past fiction and romance and history and science. The library’s rear exit looms ahead, winter light bleeding through frosted glass.

“Ya tebya lyublyu!”

The Russian stops me cold. I turn slowly. He’s ten paces back, chest heaving, hair wild. Atsarbrought to his knees.

“I love you,” he repeats in English, raw as an open wound. “But marriage… It’s not just vows. It’spower.Over each other. Over everything.”

I shake my head. “That’s your father talking.”

“He wasn’t wrong.”

“So that’s it?” The exit sign blurs through my tears. “You’d rather be alone than risk someone having power over you?”

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