10 Days to Ruin (Ozerov Bratva Book 1)
10 Days to Ruin: Chapter 50

The limo’s partition stays up.

Sasha’s hands don’t.

His teeth scrape my collarbone as he tears the slit in my dress wider, calloused palms mapping every shiver. “You looked like a queen in there,” he rasps against my throat. “Cutting yourself open just to watch him bleed.”

I claw at his belt. I’ve never hated anything more and I want it gone, gone, gone. The limo hits a pothole that throws me into his lap, which is fine, because that’s where I was headed anyway. As I grind on him shamelessly, my head cocked back to cast moans up toward the ceiling, I whimper, “One of these days, you’re going to stop talking so much and just fuck me.”

Sasha’s growl sets me on fire. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

Then he shoves me onto all fours on the floor of the limousine and hikes my dress up over my hips. He starts to eat me out from behind. I see instant stars.

Two fingers replace their way inside me, pulsing and writhing as I do the exact same thing. “I’m gonna— I’m gonna⁠—”

“Not yet, you’re not.” Sasha’s hand clamps down on the back of my neck as he drags me upright and pushes me to my knees in front of him.

He frees his cock from his suit pants and pushes me down on it. I let him—no, I beg him to let me, because if I don’t taste him right now then I might just fucking die.

My lips part around the slick head of him as I take him as deep as I can go. The moan when Sasha hits the back of my throat vibrates through me and into him, coaxing out a moan of his in response.

It’s a drug. Hearing him moan like that, for me? Nothing and no one has ever made me feel better. My king. My man. He is my rabid wolf and I’m his little bird, and the rest of the world, as far as I’m concerned, can go fuck itself.

I suck on him, two hands gripping his shaft, until he pries me off with a wet pop. I know spit is dangling from my swollen lips and my makeup is probably running because “waterproof mascara” is the world’s greatest lie, and if I had to guess, I’d say my carefully braided hair is now a shitshow, too.

But Sasha looks at me like I’m fucking holy.

“You, Ariel Ward, are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Then he pushes me back down on his dick.

By the time Klaus parks outside Sasha’s building, we’ve both brought each other right to the edge half a dozen times each. I’m an utter mess and yet every nerve ending is singing songs I’ve never heard before. Sasha’s growls keep getting deeper and darker.

He drags me through the lobby without breaking stride. The elevator doors barely shut before he’s on me.

My back hits polished steel, his knee nudging my thighs apart as the numbers climb. 42. 57. 68. His teeth graze the claiming mark he left earlier this week, right above the choker. I palm his hardness through his pants.

“You’re shaking,” he observes.

“So are you.”

The elevator dings. Penthouse.

He pulls me down the hallway by my hand, both of us laughing, our footsteps echoing through the vaulted space. Moonlight pools around the floating bed where he’s taken me before—but tonight feels different. Final. A drumroll crescendo before the guillotine drops.

“Clothes off.” He growls it against the shell of my ear, fingers already working the zipper of my dress. “Now.”

I spin in his arms, pressing my half-bare back to his chest. “I’ll need your help, Mr. Ozerov.”

He takes his time dragging down the zipper. As if every new inch of skin revealed needs to be properly worshipped. By the time the dress is a puddle of black silk around my ankles, I’m a puddle in my own right.

I hear the clink of his belt hitting marble. The rustle of fabric. The wet heat of his mouth on my shoulder as his palms slide up my ribs to cup my breasts.

“Better?” he asks.

I arch into his touch, watching our reflection warp in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Two monsters silhouetted in lust. “Getting there.”

“We’ve got a long way yet to go, ptichka.”

The possessive rasp undoes me. I turn, crashing our mouths together as we stagger toward the bed. His cock presses against my stomach, urgent and lethal as the rest of him.

I bite his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. “Say it again.”

He spreads me across cold silk sheets, eyes glittering like icebergs in the dark. “Ptichka. My little bird. Mine. My wife. My queen. My vengeance made flesh.” His tongue licks a stripe up my inner thigh. “Now, lie still while I worship what’s mine.”

I thread fingers through his hair—too hard, just how he likes it—as he drags the flat of his tongue over me. I revel in the way his groan vibrates against my clit. “You’re… fucking… deranged.”

His chuckle is pure sin. “But you’ll scream for me anyway.”

Then he pulls me on top of him. The first stroke is always the one I remember best. The last moment of clarity before the moments start melting together into one heat-soaked blur. But this first stroke—this moment, when his tip splits me open and then the rest of him slowly pushes in, stretching me wide, making me gasp and drool onto his chest…

This is one I’ll remember forever.

He takes it slow at first, though I’ll be damned if I know where he replaces the self-control. Lord knows I left all of mine seventy stories below us.

But slow he goes. One stroke. Two. Savoring every millimeter of motion and friction and tightness. I’m bearing down on him as the first orgasm breaks over me like I’m being baptized into a new world. It’s a splashing, relieving kind of thing and it consumes all of me.

Then he flips me beneath him and the speed picks up. Before long, his balls are slapping at me as each fuck spears deeper and deeper than ever before. I’m sweating, he’s sweating, but when I lick a droplet from his scarred neck, it’s as sweet as nectar to me.

Sasha can do no wrong now. When he puts me on my knees and fucks me from behind, it’s perfect.

When I taste myself on his cock as he licks my pussy at the same time, it’s perfect.

Whether he is behind me and beneath me and above me and within me, I’m just coming endlessly, no division between one orgasm and the next, just a long, breathless fugue that takes us higher and higher until at long last, with a guttural roar, Sasha says, “I’m almost there.”

I lock my legs behind the small of his back and pull his forehead down to kiss against mine. Then, staring into the blue windows of his soul, I beg him, “Come in me, Sasha. Make me yours in every way that counts.”

Then his mouth replaces mine again, and sound becomes irrelevant.

Afterward, we lie sprawled in thousand-thread-count sheets that’ll never be clean again. My head rests over the scar at his throat, rising and falling with each breath. He traces idle patterns on my hip.

“I have something for you,” he says at last.

“I’ve taken everything I can possibly handle from you tonight,” I say with a lilting laugh.

He tweaks my nose and follows it with a kiss. “You’ll like this. I promise.”

He slips from bed despite my protests and vanishes down the hall. When he pads back naked a moment later, he’s holding an unmarked package wrapped in black velvet, with a red ribbon holding it together.

“I’m gonna guess it’s not a pony.”

Sasha laughs. “Not quite.” Then he gives it to me.

I yank the ribbon. The lid falls away to reveal a book. Bound in supple black leather, title gold-embossed: A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME.

And beneath that… a byline.

By Ariel Ward.

My breath catches. Holy shit. Blank pages whisper as I flip through. Untouched. Unwritten. Waiting.

“You have so many stories to tell. But your story is the most important one of all. Your whole life, it’s been written for you. Not anymore.” He touches my chin to make me look up at him. “Write a better story. Write your story. Our story.”

Words clog my throat. All I can do is stare at the space where the first words of my story will go when I’m ready to write it. Unmarked territory, all mine to conquer.

I look up at him. “I love you, Sasha.”

It comes out before I can second-guess the instinct. Sasha goes statue-still. For one heart-stopping moment, I think I’ve miscalculated. That I picked the wrong moment. That “not yet” really meant “not ever.” That this is where the fairy tale ends.

Then—

“Ariel Ward… I love you, too.”