Page 4 of 10 Days to Surrender

“How’d you find me?”

“Kosti,” I tell her. “You called him; he gave me the tickets and told me where I could go. Honestly, I just didn’t know what else to do. So I came.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “I didn’t know what I was doing, either, when I called. I just saw that newspaper article and I freaked.”

“That makes two of us,” I mumble. “Honestly, it’s felt like a bad dream ever since Baba told me what he’d done. About the marriage.”

“Like mine?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “He wanted to do it just like yours.”

Her lip twists in a disgusted sneer. “He didn’t learn anything, did he?”

“No. No, he didn’t.”

Another lull follows before she looks at me again. “Why are youhere,though? If you’re pregnant, that means you must have?—”

“I’m here because I can’t be there.” It’s hard enough to say the words. I feel like I’m betraying something, although I have no idea what that something might be. Sasha? My baby? Myself? “I can’t be with him. Not after…”

Not after everything.

Jasmine studies me—the reporter-turned-runaway, the little sister she left behind. Her eyes narrow. “What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“He saved me, in a way,” I croak. “Over and over. But he lied, too—over and over. And… and…”

The apartment goes hazy at the corners. I grip the table’s edge.

“Ari?”

“I can’t.” I press my forehead to the cool wood. “Not yet.”

Silence. Then her chair scrapes back. She rounds the table and crouches beside me. Her hand finds my hair—gentle, like when I was a little girl with a skinned knee. My big sister again.

“Just tell me this: Did he hurt you?” she asks.

At that, I recoil. “Sasha? No. God, no. He just…” My words falter again as I search for what to say and how to say it. “He was supposed to bebetterthan them.”

Jasmine shakes her head as she returns to her seat. She runs a finger round and round the lip of her tea mug. “They’re all likethat, Ari. Even the ones who play hero. Maybe evenespeciallythose ones.” She frees a long, shuddering exhale. “I’ve had a long time to think about everything. It’s hard to hate them. Well, hard to hate Sasha and Baba. Dragan is pretty easy to hate.”

“Yeah,” I mutter, feeling at my throat where he’d held me in that alley, before Sasha came to the rescue. “I don’t have any problem hating that one.”

“He’s a violent, cruel, sadistic son of a bitch,” Jasmine snaps. Hints of venom seep into her face and the whites of her knuckles where she’s clutching the table’s edge. “If he’d had it his way, he would’ve beaten me senseless, then hung me out to dry. Just a used-up husk of myself that he could move here and there like a doll. I’d have been a leash in his hand that connected to a noose around Baba’s throat. That’s what Dragan wanted.” Her eyes flit to mine. “If it weren’t for Sasha, he would’ve gotten it.”

It’s my turn to close my eyes. That prickly, complex pain is rinsing through me again.

You knew.

You knew and you lied.

“He’s not a good man, Jasmine. Better than Dragan, maybe, but if that’s the standard of comparison, Satan’s not so bad, either.”

She laughs bitterly. “‘Good’? Maybe not. Not in the ways we’re used to thinking about that kind of thing.”

“Not in anyway.”

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