Page 160 of 10 Days to Ruin

“I’d rather keep you safe!”

“From what? Yourself?”

“From the world I built. The one that killed your father tonight.”

The words hang between us, poison gas in the musty air. I press a hand to my sternum, half-expecting to find a bullet hole.

“You think I don’t know what this life costs?” My whisper is a hoarse croak. “I’ve been paying that price since I was eight years old, Sasha. But I was willing to pay it—for you. Because I thought… Because I thought you were worth it.”

“Ptichka.” He takes a step forward. “Let me?—”

“No, Sasha. You had your chance. Ten chances, actually. Now, you’ve ruined them all.”

The door slams behind me with finality. Snow stings my cheeks as I stumble into the alley, but I don’t look back. Can’t.

Somewhere between the dumpsters and Fifth Avenue, the ring slips from my numb fingers. I don’t stop to retrieve it.

Let the sewer rats have their shiny trophy.

Let it rot with the rest of his crown.

55

SASHA

I spit red onto the snow. It takes mere seconds for the fresh flurries to bury it. Another bloodstain for this godforsaken city to swallow forever.

Ariel’s footsteps fade around the corner. Her scent lingers, though.Peaches. Always fucking peaches.

Pridi obratno ko mne,I want to roar.Come back to me.

But she won’t. Not after this. And who could blame her? I thought I could play this game, balance these secrets, keep each one hidden from the next. But you can only juggle fire for so long before it sears your skin.

I press my forehead to the bricks of the building. When I glance down at my watch, I see with a hollow laugh that it’s a minute past midnight. A new year. A fresh start. The city is blanketed with white snow like a clean, blank canvas for us to write a new story on.

But what story do we have left to write? Ariel is the reporter, not me. I’ve tried to bury everything, and look where that’s gotten me: dripping cold blood in a dark, empty alley all by my fucking self.

Then metal clinks behind me, and I realize that I’m not by myself after all.

I turn too slow.

The first bullet catches me before I even hear the shot.

It spins me around like a fucking ballerina. I try to stagger, to stay upright, because a man on his back is a dead man. But my feet slip out from under me on the ice and I go sprawling with a pained grunt. Two more shots ring out. One in the gut, one in the thigh. Pain. So much fucking pain. My world coalesces to an inch-wide tunnel.

Into that tunnel of my vision steps Dragan. That smug Serbian bastard is grinning from ear to ear. Behind him, his goons fan out—Kalashnikovs slung low, faces hidden by balaclavas.

“Ozerov.” Dragan’s voice grates. “You look like shit.”

“Likewise.”

He kicks me in the injured thigh. I scream.

“Fifteen years, I waited,” he sighs. “Fifteen years watching you think you’d gotten me so fucking good. You thought you were soclever,young Sasha. A clean swoop of the girl—and why would Leander believe me when I tried to tell him what had truly happened? No, no, of course not. Your story was so much prettier.”

I want to tell him that nothing about this has ever been pretty. Barbed wire around my throat wasn’t pretty. The bruises around Jasmine’s weren’t pretty, either. Even when I was handing her her life back, her face was streaked with horrified tears.Where will I go? What will I do?

That’s for you to decide,I told her.

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