10 Days to Ruin (Ozerov Bratva Book 1)
10 Days to Ruin: Chapter 34

Blood roars in my ears. His fingers dig into my jaw, tilting my face up toward the sickly glow of the streetlamp to expose my throat in a way that feels way too intentional for comfort. The acrid stench of his cologne—something musky and too-sweet, curdled by body heat—makes my stomach heave.

“Haven’t you taken enough from me?!” I spit.

Dragan Vukovic’s grin splits his brutal face like a scar. “Not even close.”

One of his thugs yanks my head back by the ponytail. Stars burst behind my eyes. Dragan pulls out a syringe filled with murky liquid. My pulse goes atomic.

And then a black blur detonates the night.

“I’ll kill any man who lays a finger on her.”

Bone cracks. The arm holding my hair snaps like a tree branch in a hurricane. The thug screams, but Sasha’s fist plows into his throat mid-shriek, silencing him.

The second enforcer’s knife flashes, but Sasha pivots, seizing the guy’s wrist and slamming it down on his own raised knee. A shard of bone pops through the skin.

“Bastard!” Dragan snarls, lunging for me.

True to his word, Sasha intercepts him before he lays a finger on me. His left hand fists in Dragan’s beard while his right slams upward, knuckles burying into the Serb’s breastbone in a sickening crunch. Dragan’s eyes bulge.

Sasha shakes blood off his hands. It’s not his.

“You don’t touch her,” he growls. “You don’t look at her.”

He headbutts Dragan. The cartilage in the Serb’s earlier-broken nose definitively gives up the ghost. When Dragan drops to his knees, Sasha kicks his ribs in—once, twice—before slamming a boot into his chest. Vukovic skids five feet across the pavement.

I scramble backward until my spine hits cold brick. Sasha stalks toward Dragan. Each step echoes like a death knell.

Brass knuckles glint as he pulls them from his pocket. My breath hitches. “Wait, Sasha⁠—”

He drives them into Dragan’s mouth. Teeth skitter across asphalt like discarded Chiclets.

The Serbian gurgles, “Your gutter-whore mother would weep⁠—”

Sasha raises his foot to stomp—but just before he reverses direction and brings an end to the Serbian boss’s life, the crack of a gunshot rings out.

I look down the mouth of the alley to see half a dozen burly men charging towards us. Two of them have guns raised at Sasha.

Again, he moves faster than I thought possible. He lunges to me, scoops me up like I weigh nothing, and bundles me into his waiting car. I replace myself hurled across the center console as he punches the gas and, with a wail of tires and burning rubber, we peel away down the street.

He drives for a while without saying anything. The only sound is his breathing as it slows.

His shoulders heave. Steam coils off his skin in the freezing air. Blood trickles down his wrist.

Finally, when we’ve gone far enough, he parks on the ground floor of an empty parking garage.

When he turns to me, I flinch.

Something awful and human flickers behind his ice-blue eyes.

“Ariel.” Ragged. Hoarse.

His hands are on me before I can speak—palming my cheeks, tilting my face for damage.

The copper tang of carnage clings to him. I should be repulsed. Instead, I lean my face into his touch and let out the first sound I’ve made since this whole nightmare began.

“Sasha.”

“Are you hurt?” His thumb dabs across my lip. Later, I’ll realize it’s where Dragan’s ring split the skin. For now, all I feel is the heat of his touch.

I shake my head. He exhales sharply through his nose—a bull moments before the charge.

Then his mouth descends onto mine.

Fireworks detonate behind my closed lids. His kiss is brutal, aggressive, all teeth and desperation. He pulls me halfway onto him, his thigh slotting between mine. Breathing is optional. Survival is irrelevant. All I want is⁠—

Suddenly, he breaks away like I bit him.

“Fucking hell.” He pushes me into the passenger seat and leans back, pupils cranked wide open. One hand claws through his hair. The other fists against his mouth like he can shove the kiss he just gave me back in. “What the fuck am I—? Blyat’.”

My lip quivers. “Sasha⁠—”

“Don’t.” He throws open his door and climbs out.

I follow suit, jogging around the front of the car to meet him. “Sasha⁠—”

“I said don’t.” He whirls on me, looking wilder than I’ve ever seen him before. His beard, his hair, his eyes are all positively feral. But it’s the tremble in his mouth that undoes me.

I’ve never seen fear on him before. This is what it looks like.

But not fear for himself. Never, ever for himself.

I know without asking that this is fear for me.

“I thought he might have— I was afraid he was going to—” He breaks off and looks away, raising that hand to his mouth again like those words, too, can be repressed back into wherever they came from. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”

I scream when he punches the brick pillar. I’m sure his hand will come away absolutely mangled, but it’s a smear of mortar dust, not blood, that’s left behind. He rips away in another circle, stops halfway, looks at me again. He looks possessed, like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do with himself.

“I thought he was going to fucking kill you,” he croaks. “And I realized as I came as fast as I could that if he did, he might as well kill me, too.”

Then he turns and looks to a patch of shadows I can’t see into. “Get her out of here, Feliks. I can’t look at her anymore.”

His second steps out, cigarette clamped between his lips, face unreadable. “Boss⁠—”

“Now. Take her home. Lock her in the apartment. Post three men on the door.”

Feliks sighs. Then he shifts his gaze from Sasha to me. He comes closer, though slowly, cautiously, as if I might get spooked if he moves too fast. Taking a grip on my elbow, he starts to steer me toward a car pulling up at the exit to the garage.

I shake him off. “Sasha, talk to me!”

He won’t look at me. Won’t even face my direction. “Get her away from me, Feliks.”

I’m wobbling. It’s a miracle I’m still upright. If it weren’t for Feliks clamping me around the waist in brotherly fashion, I probably wouldn’t be.

“Come on,” he says softly. “Let’s get you home.”

Mute and stumbling like a zombie, I let Feliks turn me toward the exit. We shuffle slowly to the waiting car. He opens the door and helps me into the backseat, then closes it and takes his place up front.

As we peel away from the curb, piloted by a stone-faced man with Russian tattoos littering his scalp, I twist in my seat. Sasha stands amidst the concrete bones of the parking garage, backlit by a throbbing fluorescent pulse.

His mouth moves. I’m probably imagining things—hell, I must be—but I could swear he’s saying to himself, I thought for a moment I lost you.