10 Days to Ruin (Ozerov Bratva Book 1)
10 Days to Ruin: Chapter 5

The door clicks shut.

My knees hit the bathroom tile before I even realize I’m falling. But even when I land, it’s with a pathetic “Oh.” Just that sad sound, Oh, like a limp balloon letting go of its last breath of air.

The hem of my stolen dress pools around me like white melted wax. I stare at my reflection in the stall door’s black lacquered steel—green eyes dilated wide, lipstick smeared into a clownish grin, that one braid still stubbornly determined to unravel all the way.

It’s almost kinda artsy. Like, disheveled, but make it fashion. Someone alert Vogue.

The incense diffuser on the countertop coughs to life and starts oozing lavender smoke everywhere. Part of me wants to go unplug it, because with every wisp it releases, the smell of him goes away.

Less cedar.

Less mint.

Less dark, oiled machinery.

I can still taste him, though, hot and tingling on my tongue. And I can still feel him, both the ache and the stickiness he left behind in me.

My thighs throb. My hand throbs. My head throbs as it keeps replaying, again and again and in 4K Ultra HD, the moment of him grazing my earlobe with his teeth as he drove into me, complete with the Dolby Surround Sound of my own mortifying whimpers.

“You just had hate-sex with a man who probably uses human skulls as shot glasses,” I tell the girl in the steel. “Congratulations. Your therapist’s yacht fund thanks you.”

I wince and tear my gaze away. Self-loathing is a bottomless pit and, in theory, I still have a job to do tonight, so I can’t waste time wallowing.

I fish my phone out of my clutch. Three missed calls and a text from Gina: U alive????

I try to type out a reply, but the letters on the keyboard start to swim and blur before my eyes.

This isn’t me. The real Ariel Ward doesn’t have panic attacks in Met bathrooms. The real Ariel Ward files FOIA requests at 2 A.M. and drinks cold brew strong enough to strip paint.

But the real Ariel Ward also hasn’t seen her father in person since the night she climbed out her bedroom window with a backpack full of protein bars and a switchblade she’d stolen from his study.

Fifteen years, I think, pressing my forehead to the cool tile on the wall. Fifteen years, and he’s twenty feet away, hobnobbing with congressmen in the same building where I just let a Russian mobster’s tongue⁠—

My stomach lurches. I run to the toilet and try to vomit, but nothing comes up.

When I finally stumble back to the sink, my reflection mocks me: Lois Lane cosplaying a Real Housewife after a bender. I splash water on my face, but the mascara streaks just smear into Rorschach blots. What do you see here, Doctor? A woman who just came for a stranger on a bathroom sink? Hm, I think you might be right.

The door whines open.

“Occupied!” I cry out, voice cracking.

“Not for long.”

Leander Makris fills the doorway like a storm rolling over Brighton Beach. Black tuxedo, snowdrift beard, eyes the same poison-green as mine. As hers.

The air thickens with his cologne (Creed Aventus, four hundred and fifty dollars a bottle, the signature scent of every childhood car ride to “business meetings” that left blood on his cufflinks).

“Hello, neraïdoula mou.”

My little fairy. I used to think it was cute. When I got older, I started to wonder if he was mocking Mama, mocking me. A little fairy, not fit for this world, not brave enough or big enough to survive in it without his help.

Jasmine used to call me the same thing. But when she said it, it was never cruel or condescending. She’d whisper it to me in the darkness of our shared bedroom when the shouting downstairs got too loud. Don’t cry, neraïdoula mou. I’ll sneak you Oreos once he passes out.

“Hi, Baba.”

His gaze flicks to my bandaged hand. “Still accident-prone, I see.”

“A good father might ask if I’m okay.”

He steps inside, rolling a cigar between his fingers—Cuban, unlit, another ever-present prop in the Leander Makris Production of Gentleman Gangster. In the brief instant before the door closes, I hear a snatch of sound from the ballroom. The string quartet is butchering Dvořák’s American Quartet, which I only recognize because Mom used to play it on vinyl while she cleaned—back when we still had a mom, and vinyl, and things worth cleaning.

Then it closes, and quiet takes over again.

“Then tell me,” he rumbles. “Are you okay, Ariana?”

“It’s Ariel now. You know that.”

He sighs and drums his fingers on the sink. When he looks down, his eyes narrow and I wonder for a moment if he can see the imprint of my ass on the marble. I’m so mortified by all of my terrible decisions tonight that I can’t even replace it in me to care if he does.

Then he sighs and looks at me. “I’d be a father to you if you’d let me, you know. You think I like being apart from my children? You think I want to see you hurt? You think I enjoy seeing you bleed?”

He reaches for me.

I flinch.

His hand freezes mid-air. Thick fingers, gold pinky ring. God, the things I’ve seen that hand do to people who displease him…

Then he withdraws it and I can breathe again.

“You look…” His voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “… tired.”

“And you’ve lost hair,” I fire back. “Guess the universe has a way of balancing itself out.”

He chuckles and passes a palm over his thinning scalp. A beat passes. Two. A faucet drips. “You’re here to report on the event, I assume?”

I nod, not trusting myself with words just yet.

“Would you like a quote? I can⁠—”

“Got everything I need, thanks.”

That’s a lie, but I’ll be damned if I let him claim some leverage over me that cheaply and easily.

Leander’s face screws up in a pained grimace. “This doesn’t have to be so hard, Aria—Ariel.” He keeps rolling the cigar back and forth in his grasp. Back and forth, back and forth. “I want to be a part of your life. Let me help you.”

I wobble to my feet, using the wall like a crutch, and glare at him. “After fifteen years under your roof, I got all the ‘help’ I needed. So did Jas. So did Mom. So I think I’m good in that regard, too.”

“Very well.” He sighs, the sound weary in a way I don’t remember. “You’ll stay for the midnight toast, at least.”

“I have a deadline.”

“You have a life.” His eyes narrow. “One I’ve allowed you to play at long enough.”

Allowed. As if my shitty studio apartment and my coffee-stained notebooks and the Gazette job I fought tooth and nail for are just unremarkable toys he’s let me borrow.

“You don’t ‘allow’ me anything.” My voice shakes. “I walked away. I built⁠—”

“A pseudonym. A house of cards. All for a paycheck that wouldn’t even cover my dry cleaning.” He steps closer, cigar tapping against his palm. “Tell me, Ariel Ward—do they know everything at your precious paper? Does your editor sip his latte wondering why a mousy little nobody knows so much about the docks? The warehouses? The shipping manifests?”

“I’m a reporter,” I croak.

“You’re a ghost.” His laugh is bitter. “Chasing your sister’s shadow.”

The bathroom walls press closer. I see her everywhere now—in the auburn hair of strangers, in the smell of jasmine rice at the bodega, in the hollows of Leander’s cheeks that deepen whenever someone mentions “daughters” in the plural.

“Don’t.” My throat burns. “Don’t talk about her.”

“You give me no choice, neraïdoula mou!” he roars suddenly, rearing up from his old man’s stoop into the tall, grizzled bear who terrorized my adolescence. “Not in that. And not in what is coming next.”

The first icy trickle of dread starts winding through my stomach. It’s from something in his eyes, in the rasp of his voice, in the way that posture crumbles back down and he suddenly looks older than he’s ever looked before.

Not in what’s coming next.

I shouldn’t ask. I won’t ask. I can’t ask. Asking the question implies wanting the answer, and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of me knows that that answer that Leander will give me is nothing I want to hear.

Fuck one door closing and another opening. This would be one cell door opening, throwing me inside, and shutting that same door again.

I shouldn’t ask. I won’t ask. I can’t⁠—

“What’s coming next, Baba?”

He tucks the cigar into his breast pocket and scrubs both flat, wide, meaty palms over his face. Knuckles at his eyes like he’s so tired he can barely stand. Then he looks at me again. “I will say it one more time, not because I think you’ll believe me, but because⁠—”

“—what’s coming next, Baba?—”

“—but because I’ve always had your best interests at heart, whether you or your mother or your sister believed that or not⁠—”

“—what’s coming next, Baba?—”

“—and everything I do, everything I’ve done, it’s always been for you, for my girls, my loves⁠—”

“Tell me what the fuck is happening!” I scream.

He stops. His eyes are rimmed in red. “I’ve arranged for you to be married.”

For a moment, all I hear is the drip of the faucet, the distant murmur of the gala’s string quartet. They’ve left Dvořák behind and I don’t recognize whatever they’re playing now.

But I recognize this scene. A version of it, at least—because I watched Leander do this to Jasmine fifteen years ago.

“Married,” I whisper, touching my swollen lip like that’ll help make sense of the word. “You’ve arranged for me to be… married.”

He steps closer, his shadow swallowing mine. “A union with the Ozerov Bratva. A merger of interests. Stability for both our families.”

“What part of this is ‘stable’ for me?” I ask aloud, though I know he doesn’t know the answer and couldn’t care less about it.

“You’ll want for nothing. You’ll be wealthier than that gossip rag could ever make you, and free of that roach-infested apartment you call home. Most of all, you’ll be safe. Safe from⁠—”

“Go to hell.” I back into the sink, the marble edge biting into my ass. Fifteen minutes ago, a man’s hands held me there, hot and huge, strong and safe. Now, all I feel is cold, lifeless stone. “Go to fucking hell.”

“In so many ways, I’m already there, neraïdoula mou.” He smiles, but it’s a cracked thing. “You think I want this? You think I enjoy groveling to that Russian malákas?”

“Then don’t! Call it off!”

“And lose the docks? The warehouses? The respect?” He barks a laugh even as he shakes his head sadly. “Your sister spat the same naïveté. Look where it got her.”

“I told you not to talk about her.”

“Why?” He crowds me, the cigar in his pocket crinkling. “Because you’d rather pretend she’s sipping mai tais in Miami? That she isn’t rotting cold in some unmarked⁠—?”

My palm cracks across his cheek before I realize I’ve moved. The sound echoes.

A slap thirty-three years in the making.

Baba doesn’t flinch, though my handprint is red and stark on his bearded cheek. “Feel better?”

I’m quivering with rage. “Go. To. Hell.”

“In due time, my daughter.” He grips my wrist, pressing hard against the bandage Sasha wrapped. Blood blooms through the gauze as he squeezes. “But first, you’ll walk out that door. You’ll smile. You’ll take Sasha Ozerov’s hand. And you’ll thank him for the honor.”

I wrench free. “Or what? You’ll kill me?”

“Kill you?” He tuts. “No, koukla. You are my daughter. But that little friend of yours—Gina, is it? The one who lent you this dress?” His smile widens as I freeze. “How long do you think she’d last in Hunts Point?”

That dread is back worse than ever, clutching my innards in its cold fingers and squeezing, squeezing. “You… you wouldn’t.”

Leander rises up as tall as he can. “There are no limits to what I would do to keep my family safe.”

The walls close in. My reflection fractures in the steel stall doors—a dozen trapped Ariels, wide-eyed and trembling. Fight, they scream. Fight!

But every single one of them knows I lost this war a long time ago.

“I’ll give you a moment to gather your thoughts,” my father says. “Meet me by the ice sculpture when you are ready to proceed. And Ariana… don’t try to run. I’d hate to have to chase you. This is hard enough on me already.”

He leaves, the door sighing shut behind him.

In the mirror, the girl in the stolen dress stares back. Green eyes. Loose braid. A cut she can’t stop reopening.

“Okay,” she whispers.

“Okay,” I echo.

Then I walk out to meet my cage.

Baba is standing by the ice sculpture in the middle of the ballroom when I emerge. It’s a swan, wings spread wide, though they’ve started to look like they’re drooping as they melt.

My dress and hair are mostly back in order. Not much I can do about my missing earring, but that’s low on my list of concerns right now.

It’s midnight. The clock begins to strike.

First toll: twelve sharp peals. A sound like a death knell. A sound like shattering cages.

Second toll: I feel him before I see him. A prickle across my skin. My blood remembers his hands better than my brain does.

Third toll: I turn.

Fourth: He’s watching me. The man from the bathroom. Sasha Ozerov. Suit pristine, hair perfect, mouth set in that same brutal slash. But the tendons in his neck stand out like tension cables. His pupils swallow the Arctic blue of his eyes whole.

Fifth: My knees unlock. My stolen Valentino heels don’t wobble. Small miracles.

Sixth: My father steps between us, grinning like this is his wedding day. “Sasha, meet my daughter, Ariel. Your fiancée.”

Seventh: The ice sculpture weeps. I don’t. Can’t. Won’t.

Eighth: Sasha’s eyes darken to black.

Ninth: I want to laugh. Or scream. Or maybe book a one-way ticket to whatever dimension Lois Lane retired to after Smallville got canceled.

Tenth: Instead, I arch a brow. “We really need to stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

Eleventh: His thumb brushes my bandaged palm—just a flicker, just enough to make my pulse hammer. “Our story’s just getting started, ptichka.”

Twelfth: The clock falls silent. The room holds its breath. And I realize, with the clarity of a bullet between the eyes, that happy endings are bullshit.

Some princesses get poisoned apples. Some get glass coffins.

Me? I get six feet of Russian nightmare wearing Brioni and a wedding ring.

“Well?” My smile could flay skin. “Ready to ruin each other’s lives?”

He doesn’t blink. “I was born ready.”