Page 129 of 10 Days to Surrender

Then she stands. The lingerie slides from her lap and lands with a plop in a patch of mud. Black earth staining the white. Sucking up the muck, the filth, the ugly reminder that nothing in my world can ever remain pure for long. Not even for one night.

The letter goes next. It flutters out of her hand like a dying bird and lands at her feet. I’m close enough to see the same handwriting on it as the words written on Kosti’s notepad.

No. Not like this. Not again.

Ariel’s eyes find mine. “Not again,” she whispers. “Not again.”

Then her horrified face gets hit with a lightning bolt of pain. She plummets to her knees with a hand pressed to her womb.

The scream she lets out shatters my world.

50

ARIEL

Koukla,

You’re reading this because I’m already gone. Don’t look for me. By the time your tears dry on this page, I’ll be halfway to a place where men like me don’t get to die old.

I’ve told you this before, but I was there the day you were born. I held you, pink and squalling, in my arms. As I did, I promised I would keep you safe.I swore it on the saints, even though we both know I stopped believing in anything but the weight of a gun years ago.

So you must believe me on this point: I tried.

Koukla, I swear to you I tried.

When Leander betrothed Jasmine to that Serbian dog, I thought,This is how it starts. The rot. The slow bleed.But I was a coward. Told myself it wasn’t my place to interfere. That the Makris girls were born to be bargaining chips, and who was I to question the currency of our world?

But it didn’t take long to show me how wrong the rules of our world truly are.

Your sister came to me once, in those ugly first weeks. Eyes bruised like overripe plums. I cleaned the blood from her split lip and thought,This is where loyalty gets us. This is the cost of silence. I tried to stop it. I told Leander that Dragan had a taste for cutting up girls who talked back.

Your father merely shrugged. “Jasmine knows her duty.”

Then he sent her back to the beast.

It was Sasha who came to tell us that Jasmine was dead. He said the Serbian brute had done what brutes like him do—gone too far. Put her in a grave she did not deserve. I beat myself senseless and I swore that, next time, if there was a next time, I would not sit by idly. I wouldact.

But, as you know, your sister wasn’t dead. For fifteen years, we thought she was. We were wrong.

Everything changed the night of your engagement party.

I’d been digging, Ariel—digging and hunting and searching, because something in my heart said the story did not add up. I was right! You cannot imagine how good it felt to learn that I was right. When I heard Jasmine’s voice… It was like she was born again. That she, like you, was once again a pink and happy baby in my arms.

She told me what Sasha had done. How he learned of her suffering and offered her a way out. How he snatched her from Dragan in the dead of the night, framed him for a “murder,” and gave her a new lease on life.

You might still think that’s what happened. You might still believe he saved her. My God, what a story it is! The noble Bratva prince, smuggling Jasmine to Marseille like some fairytale knight!

But then I learned otherwise.

You see,koukla,some knights raise the dragons they slay. Sasha didn’t merely discover Dragan’s cruelty—hecultivatedit. He fed the man’s worst impulses during long nights playing chess and sipping rakija. Laughed when Dragan bragged about breaking his last woman’s ribs. “A man who can’t control his woman is no man at all,” Dragan would say, and Sasha would raise his glass. “To control.”

He needed the alliance to fracture. Needed your father desperate enough to handyouover next—because he knew that, when the time came, Sasha would be the one who received the Greek’s alliance. So he made sure Dragan’s hands were around Jasmine’s throat before he ever laid eyes on her.

Sasha did not save Jasmine from her marriage.

Hecondemnedher to it.

At first, I wanted to kill him. To toy with the lives of innocents like that… it is beyond the pale. But as I sat with the thought, it occurred to me that killing Sasha would not be enough. As long as men like him exist—men like Dragan, men like your father—they will keep using the people around them as pawns. The only way to truly protect you both was to bring down the whole game. To set the kingpins ateach other’s throats.

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