Page 72 of 10 Days to Ruin

“No,youwent too far,” she hisses back. “You abandoned your son to die.”

“If you don’t stop interfering with his training right fucking now?—”

“What?” Her head snaps to the side, glaring daggers in her husband’s eyes. “You’ll kill me?”

For an endless moment, Yakov says nothing. “I’ll protect my legacy,” he answers in the end, cold, clipped. A block of ice shaped into a man. “Whatever it takes.”

I thrash in my bed, trapped between sleep and wakefulness. The dreams won’t end, no matter how much I want them to.

The boy runs out of his bedroom. “Mom!” he cries out. “Mom!” He calls and calls, but no one answers.“Mom! Mo?—”

“Your mother is gone, Aleksandr. She isn’t coming back.”

The scene morphs. The home becomes a warehouse. The boy becomes a young man. Taller, stronger—but still not strong enough.

“Fight it,” Yakov grits, the barbed wire in his hands tearing into his gloves as he tightens it around my throat. “For fuck’s sake, fight it! What kind of heir are you?!”

Still not strong enough.

“Fight it! Fight it, goddammit!”

At seventeen, I finally am.

CRACK. Yakov’s body falls to the ground. His neck skewed in the wrong direction. His heart slowing, slowing, stopped.

“Am I strong enough yet,Otets?” I kick the body. “Am I strong enough yet?” Then I kick it again, and again, and again. “Am I strong enough yet, you fucking piece of shit?!”

CRASH!

I wake up with a start. My head snaps towards the sound—it’s the glass on my nightstand, shattered on the floor.

Water spreads everywhere. It fills the cracks in the hardwood floor, pooling like tears.

Belatedly, I realize my face is wet, too.

I wipe at it like it’s filthy. “Blyat’.Fuckingssyklo.”

24

ARIEL

Gina’s waving a lemon poppyseed muffin in front of my face like a dog treat. “Earth to Ariel. Hello? You’re zonked and it’s scaring me.”

I blink, my fingers still absently tracing the dip of my spine where Sasha’s hands had pressed into me yesterday.

Too much?he’d purred.

Barely felt it,I’d lied.

“Sorry. Just… thinking about work stuff.”

“Bullshit. No article is that interesting. Especially not an article about bakeries.” She leans in, nostrils flaring like a bloodhound. “You’re doing the post-sexual-tension stare, and I sense some tea. I command thee to spill.”

I duck so she doesn’t see the blush pinking my cheeks, the same blush that’s stayed stubbornly in place since I left the spa in self-loathing shame yesterday. “There’s no tension. There’s… annoyance.” I stab the straw into my iced latte hard enough to crack the plastic lid. “I’m annoyed that he just dismissed the masseuse like that. Annoyed that he barks orders like a fucking drill sergeant all the time. Annoyed that?—”

That when he pinned me to that table, steam curling around us like sin itself, I wanted to let him undo every stitch of my resolve.

Gina’s smirk widens. “Annoyed that you didn’t ride him into the sunset, you mean?”

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