Page 30 of 10 Days to Surrender

I step into the blade of moonlight cutting through the rubble. She’ll hate me for forcing her down this path, but what choice do I have? Every other road leads to ruin. So let her hate me.

At least she’ll be alive to do it.

“You’ll stay at the villa until the babies are born. I’ll handle Dragan.”

Ariel looks me up and down and snorts. “You look like you couldn’t handle a grocery list right now.”

Jasmine touches her arm. “He’s right, Ari. With your blood pressure, and the twins… We have to think through this.”

“I’ve had enough of men deciding what’s right for me.” Her face screws up into a furious scowl before smoothing out into exhausted resignation. “But fuck it, fine. I’m outnumbered on this one and I clearly don’t have a choice. I’ll say this, though: the second these babies are born and I’m cleared to travel, we’re gone.”

It’s a lie. We both know it’s a lie. We both feel in the marrow of our bones that, once those two little lives join our world, nothing will ever be the same.

But I don’t even know how to say those words out loud. And Ariel surely has no intentions of saying them, either. With one last skewering glare at me, she storms out, sundress snapping like a battle flag in the wind.

Kosti re-lights the Virgin’s candle, then ignites a cigarette off that flame. “She’ll come around.”

“Will she?” I watch through the broken window as Ariel paces the overgrown graveyard, muttering under her breath.

I’m not so sure.

11

SASHA

The gravel crunches beneath our tires like broken bones. I kill the engine and stare up at the villa through the dusty windshield.

It’s exactly as Kosti described: a pigeon-shit-stained tomb, a stucco sarcophagus, crouching in the Tuscan hills like a stone gargoyle with its wings clipped. Vines strangle the stone walls and shutters dangle by single nails.

Under different circumstances, it might be idyllic.

Right now, it just looks like a prison.

“Home sweet home,” Kosti announces, popping his door open. The smell of rosemary and damp stone invades the car.

Ariel doesn’t move. Six months pregnant and she still looks like she could cut my throat with that jawline. I get the feeling she wouldn’t mind trying to do exactly that.

I step out into the oppressive heat. Cicadas scream in the olive groves. My wound pulses in time with their shrieks—a fresh blossom of pain with every heartbeat. I probably ought to be in a hospital. Instead, I’ve been smuggling a pregnant woman andher fugitive sister across Europe in a car that smells like fear, sweat, and blood.

My father would’ve laughed at the weakness.

If you can stand, you’re not broken,Yakov’s ghost whispers through the churning heat.And yet you waver? Pathetic.

Ariel’s car door creaks open. She moves like tectonic plates shifting—slow, inevitable, earthshaking. Her sundress strains across the curve of her belly. Our eyes meet through the dust haze. I see the twins in that look—twenty pounds of future squirming between us, binding us tighter than any ten-day vow ever could.

“Don’t,” she says when I reach for her bag. “I’m pregnant, not crippled.”

Kosti shoulders past with two suitcases in hand. “If you two are going to stand out here and bicker, I’m going to take the best bedroom for myself.”

Ariel looks at me. Scowls. Then drops her bag at my feet and stomps her way inside.

The villa’s interior is rich with mildew. Sunlight slants through cracked shutters, illuminating dust motes dancing above a threadbare rug in the living room. Jasmine drifts toward the stone fireplace, trailing fingers across the mantel. Her smile fades when they come away black with soot.

“Four bedrooms upstairs.” Kosti drops the luggage with a thud.

Ariel plants herself in the arched doorway. “Which one’s furthest from his?”

“Ari—” Jasmine starts.

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