Page 53 of 10 Days to Surrender

“I think all the security guys are too scared to tell you you aren’t supposed to be down here.”

Jasmine’s flats click against the tile stairs. She joins me sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, skirts pooling around her like ink. For fifteen years, I’ve only seen her in flickers of daydreams. I told myself she was happy, whole, free, because my conscience needed to know I’d done the right thing. Now, here she is: in a fucking morgue while her sister meets God knows what kind of fate upstairs.

How’s your conscience feel about that one, eh, Sashenka?

Her fingers wrap around my crimson-smeared hand. The gesture is so pure, so unthinking. It floors me. “What do we know?”

“Not much. They’re gonna be okay, I think.” The words rasp my throat raw. “For now. Alive, if nothing else.”

The scent of her steams between us. “And you?” She squeezes until I meet her gaze. “Are you alive, Sasha Ozerov?”

The refrigerating motors hum. Twelve-year-old me screams into the blank steel doors.

“I love her, you know.”

She brushes my knuckles. “I know.”

“I love her so much it fucking terrifies me. She makes me want to be… better. Different. More than just Yakov Ozerov’s son with his hands full of blood.” I swallow hard. “But look what I’ve done to her. To both of you. Look how close I came to?—”

“Stop.” Jasmine’s voice carries iron I’ve never heard before. “You are not him. You will never be him.”

“No?” I gesture at our surroundings: the morgue, the shadows, the guilt heavy as a coffin lid. “I put her here, just like he put my mother in the ground. The same violence. The same legacy.”

“The difference,” she says quietly, “is that you’re sitting here hating yourself for it. Where is he?”

“Burning in hell, if there’s any justice in this universe.”

“Hell is a place in your mind,” she murmurs, with the quiet of someone reciting something they’ve dwelled over for too many long nights. “You can walk out of it any time you like. All you have to do is?—”

The door bangs open. We both look up the stairs to see a timid nurse. “Signore? Tua moglie…”

Jasmine’s grip on my hand tightens as I bound to my feet. “Sasha.”

I pause. The freezer at my back exhales frost. Jasmine is looking up at me. Her face is so like Ariel’s and yet so different, like someone drew one from the memory of the other.

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me.

I wish I had her confidence.

I cover her hand with mine for a moment, unable to speak. Then I let go and follow the nurse up towards the light, leaving the ghosts of my father’s legacy behind in the morgue where they belong.

Upstairs, Ariel is waiting.

21

SASHA

I pause outside the door. I’m half-tempted to go back to the waiting room and borrow that old woman’s rosary. If there were ever a time for prayers, this would be it.

Then I remember who the fuck I am, and I walk inside.

The beeping hits me first. Three distinct rhythms merging into a symphony that makes my knees weak: two rapid flutters accompanied by a slower, steadier pulse.

Our children.

Their mother.

All still breathing.

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