Page 41 of 10 Days to Ruin

His irises are so pale blue they’re almost translucent. I look back as long as I dare before I wrench my gaze away. But he doesn’t let me go far. The hand that’s not cuffing my wrist comes up to redirect my face—gently, tenderly, almost reverently—back towards his.

“Breathe,” he croons.

“I am.”

“Yes, but you’re doing it like you’ll never get the chance to do it again.”

He is not, strictly speaking, wrong. I let out a reluctant exhale, followed by a tentative sip of air. His fingers are burning on my cheek, resting there butterfly-light.

Another inhale. Another exhale. Slowly, my heart rate descends back toward something resembling normal.

Then his face gets closer. Closer. It takes me a long, dumb moment to understand the implications. To kiss me? Surely not. But here he comes, closer, more dangerous, closer,closer?—

And then he lets go of my face, reaches past my waist, and undoes the latch of the balcony door.

The rush of December air is enough to extinguish all the Bad Idea Heat™ that was turning my insides to melted mush. I shiver, this time from the cold, and clutch my torso as goosebumps prickle up and down the backs of my arms.

Turning, I step out onto the balcony?—

And my breath catches in my lungs.

New York glistens below like coins tossed into a fountain for good luck. Black and neon and silver and gold, motion and light everywhere, cars and people crawling the streets below.

You live in a city like this because it astonishes you every time. It does for me, at least. That’s why I’ve never been able to bring myself to run quite as far as I should have.

Another blast of cold breeze makes the vista blur as tears prickle my eyes. But no sooner do I start to feel like a popsicle in Prada than Sasha once again comes up behind me. His arms cage me in as he grabs the wrought iron railing. Instantly, I relax, soaking up his warmth, even though I know it’s poison.

“You like heights?” he asks.

“I like knowing I could jump if I had to.”

A beat. His chest brushes against my back. “You say that like I wouldn’t go after you.”

The shiver that wracks me this time isn’t from the cold. It’s from the impossible fucking enigma of the man currently pinning me to the thin edge of one of the world’s most expensive lookout points.

He’s like one of those optical illusions: You look and you see two faces eye-to-eye. Then you blink and it’s a vase. Faces, a vase, a good man, a bad man—it all blurs together and it’s so hard to tell what’s what or who’s who or what’s real or what’s not or why I should or shouldn’t let him do anything he wants with me.

“You’d chase me down there?” I gesture at the glittering streets below. “Through all that?”

“I’d burn this whole city to find you.”

“That’s not romantic; that’s psychotic.”

His laugh rumbles through his chest and into my spine. “They’re one and the same,ptichka.”

“Stop calling me that.” I spin to face him, which is a mistake. Now, I’m trapped between his body and forty stories of nothing. “I’m not your little bird.”

“No?” His eyes drop to my throat, where my pulse hammers against my skin. “You’re certainly dressed like one. All these feathers. All this delicate silk.”

The dress was supposed to be part of my strategy. I bought the most expensive thing I could find at Bergdorf’s—yards of crimson-colored silk charmeuse that floats around my body, with white ostrich feathers trimming the high collar neckline.

But the way he’s looking at me now makes me feel like I didn’t dress to kill; I dressed tobekilled.

His fingers trace one of the feathers, barely grazing my skin. “Did you wear this to tempt me? Or to torture me?”

“Maybe I didn’t think of you even once while I got dressed. Ever think of that?”

He presses closer. “The restaurant is closed. The staff is gone. The city is asleep.” His finger trails down my arm. “There’s no one here but us, Ariel. No one to perform for.”

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