Page 110 of 10 Days to Surrender

“Who what?” He crowds me against the villa wall, hands caging my hips. “A man who stays? Who tends gardens? You think that’s who I am?”

Tears in my eyes blur his face. “I think you’re terrified to find out.”

The silence is devastating. His eyes search mine like he keeps hoping I’ll take mercy on him. But I’m not the one doing the torturing here—he is. I can’t even be mad, because I’m the one who handed my heart to a killer and told him to do with it as he pleased.

I have only myself to blame for where we’ve ended up.

“I don’t even know if I can do this without you,” I croak. “These babies… God, Sasha, what if I’m terrible at this? What if something goes wrong during the birth and you’re not here? What if—” He reaches for me again, but I step back, wrapping my arms around my belly. “No. You don’t get to comfort me right now. You’re choosing to go. You’re choosing to leave us here alone. So you have to live with seeing exactly what that does to me.”

“Ariel—”

“Just go,” I whisper. “Go back to New York. Go fight your war. But don’t expect me to pretend I’m okay with it. Because I’m not. I’m really, really not.”

For one heartbeat, I let myself believe he might stay. His eyes soften at the corners, his fingers twitch toward me, and hope blooms like a dangerous flower in my chest.

But then he turns and walks away.

My knees give out and I slide down the villa wall, unable to hold back the sobs anymore. They tear out of me like living things, these fears I’ve been carrying. Fear of being alone. Fear of raising our babies without him. Fear of him dying out there inthe cold streets of New York while I’m trapped here in the sun-drenched hills of Tuscany, miserable in paradise, powerless to save him.

The burglars died first this morning.

The garden died second.

My hope is the last thing to go.

42

SASHA

The Hudson smells like diesel and dead fish when we slip off the cargo ship. New York’s breath hasn’t changed. But her face…

Feliks whistles through his teeth as we cruise down Brighton Beach Avenue. “Looks like Dragan redecorated.”

Eight months gone, and already, New York feels both achingly familiar and jarringly wrong, like coming home to find all your furniture rearranged by a stranger’s hands.

I lean forward between the seats as Feliks drives, drinking in every detail. The streets are still mine in my head—every corner, every alley mapped out in perfect clarity. But what fills those spaces has shifted.

“Serbian flag,” I mutter as we pass Dmitri’s old bar. The red-blue-and-white stripes mock me from where they hang, limp and damp in the autumn air. “Dmitri would rather die than fly that.”

“He did,” Feliks says quietly. “Two months ago. Dragan’s men made an example.”

My fingers curl into fists. Dmitri was no saint, but he poured me my first shot of vodka when I was sixteen. He deserved better than dying for a fucking flag.

We turn onto Coney Island Avenue, and the wrongness only deepens. Where Nikolai’s bakery used to fill the street with the smell of fresh bread, there’s now a Serbian butcher shop. The neon sign is garish, bloody red reflecting off puddles in the street. Three young thugs lounge outside. They track our car with predatory eyes.

“Keep driving,” I tell Feliks when his foot twitches toward the brake. “Not yet.”

He obliges, but I can feel the tension radiating off him. Pavel shifts in the backseat, his hand never far from his weapon.

Block after block reveals more changes. More Serbian businesses. More of my people’s livelihoods destroyed or corrupted. The boarded-up storefronts tell their own stories—Misha’s pawn shop sealed behind corrugated metal, Oleg’s garage stripped down to its concrete bones. Even the fucking bodega on the corner of Ocean View and 7th sports new Serbian ownership, if the crates of Jelen Pivo stacked outside are any indication.

“Like cockroaches,” I growl. “Everywhere I fucking look.” My knuckles ache around the Glock in my lap.

“Boss?” Feliks glances at me in the rearview. “Where to?”

I consider our options. The warehouses will be watched. The docks are no doubt compromised. But there’s one place Dragan won’t expect me to go.

“Take us to Babushka’s Lap.”

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