Page 91 of 10 Days to Surrender

Lately, your tenderness terrifies me more than your cruelty ever did. When you rub my swollen feet, I forget what else those hands have done. When you whisper lullabies to my belly, I don’t hear the same tongue that ordered a murder before we’d ever said hello.

The screen blurs. I grip the desk until the wood creaks.

I want to believe the man who kisses my stretch marks is real. But which version of you gets to claim him? The killer or the caregiver? The monster or the?—

The sentence dies mid-thought. Unfinished.

Guilt curdles in my throat as I sit back in my chair. This is worse than catching her naked—this is like sawing her open and turning her inside-out. She sees the rot in me, the same decay that hollowed out Yakov. She’s asking the same questions I’ve spent weeks asking myself.

What infections do I carry?

What will she catch? What will our children catch?

She’s wrong about one thing, though:Frostbite of the heartis no death sentence.Cold preserves. Ice keeps things intact. Cold isnecessary,goddammit.

But when I press my forehead to the desk, I feel the phantom heat of her burning through.

A gasp jerks me back upright. I raise my head to find Ariel framed in the doorway, one hand clutching her belly, the other white-knuckling the doorframe. Her eyes dart between me and the laptop I’m still touching, horror dawning like a slow bleed.

“How much did you read?” When I don’t answer fast enough, she repeats it louder. “Howmuch, Sasha?”

I sigh. “Enough.”

She crosses the room in a few quick strides and snatches the laptop, clutching it to her chest. “Those were my private thoughts. My journal. You had no right?—”

“Your thoughts—about me. About our children.” I rise from the desk, hands spread. “I think that gives me some right.”

“Wrong.” She backs away, shaking her head. “If you wanted to know how I felt, you could have asked me. Like a normal person. Instead of—ofsneaking.”

“Would you have been this honest if I had?”

“We’ll never know now, will we?” She bares her teeth. “Because you couldn’t resist playing spymaster. Always watching, always calculating. God forbid you just talk to me.”

“I’m talking now.”

“No. You’re justifying.” She shifts the laptop to one hip, using her free hand to stab a finger at my chest. “There’s a difference.”

I straighten up and clench my jaw. “Words are words, Ariel. Even if you think they’re true, they never tell the whole story. It’s actions that say it all. Because the man you describe there?” I point at the laptop. “You fuckinghatethat man. But the man you fucked in that classroom today—you loved him, didn’t you? So which is real? The words or the moans?” I advance on her, hemming her back against the closed door. “You think I don’t see you flinch when I touch you? That I don’t hear the ‘what-ifs’ in every silence? Tell me I’m wrong. Look me in the eye and say it.”

She trembles—not from fear, but from fury. From the same desperate hunger that keeps drawing us back to this same desperate precipice time and time again.

“I don’t know if I love you or hate you,” she whispers. “That’s the problem.”

“If you love me, then love me. If you hate me, then hate me.” I lean down until our breaths tangle. “But do it out loud.”

“What’s the point?” she asks, her breath trembling as she hides her face from me. “This might be news to you, Sasha, but you’re not exactly the easiest man to talk to. You… you hide. You lie. You don’t know how hard it is to look at you and not know whatyou’re thinking. I just want to know what’s going on in your head. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

I open my mouth to argue—then I think better of it.

Frostbite of the heart.It’d be easy to be insulted by that, wouldn’t it? Pride is one of my many faults, and Ariel’s always known where to stick that particular knife.You’re a cold fucking bastard,she’s saying. I could let that anger me.

Or I could do what she’s telling me to do: step outside of my own skin for one fucking second and look through her eyes instead.

So I do. What do I see?

I see a tall, dark-eyed, miserable son of a bitch who’s clenched his jaw for so long that every smile feels like cracks skittering in the frost, dangerous cracks, the kind that come right before the iceberg sinks underwater, never to be seen again.

Giving up my rage and my past is a kind of death, yes.

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