10 Days to Ruin (Ozerov Bratva Book 1)
10 Days to Ruin: Chapter 55

I spit red onto the snow. It takes mere seconds for the fresh flurries to bury it. Another bloodstain for this godforsaken city to swallow forever.

Ariel’s footsteps fade around the corner. Her scent lingers, though. Peaches. Always fucking peaches.

Pridi obratno ko mne, I want to roar. Come back to me.

But she won’t. Not after this. And who could blame her? I thought I could play this game, balance these secrets, keep each one hidden from the next. But you can only juggle fire for so long before it sears your skin.

I press my forehead to the bricks of the building. When I glance down at my watch, I see with a hollow laugh that it’s a minute past midnight. A new year. A fresh start. The city is blanketed with white snow like a clean, blank canvas for us to write a new story on.

But what story do we have left to write? Ariel is the reporter, not me. I’ve tried to bury everything, and look where that’s gotten me: dripping cold blood in a dark, empty alley all by my fucking self.

Then metal clinks behind me, and I realize that I’m not by myself after all.

I turn too slow.

The first bullet catches me before I even hear the shot.

It spins me around like a fucking ballerina. I try to stagger, to stay upright, because a man on his back is a dead man. But my feet slip out from under me on the ice and I go sprawling with a pained grunt. Two more shots ring out. One in the gut, one in the thigh. Pain. So much fucking pain. My world coalesces to an inch-wide tunnel.

Into that tunnel of my vision steps Dragan. That smug Serbian bastard is grinning from ear to ear. Behind him, his goons fan out—Kalashnikovs slung low, faces hidden by balaclavas.

“Ozerov.” Dragan’s voice grates. “You look like shit.”

“Likewise.”

He kicks me in the injured thigh. I scream.

“Fifteen years, I waited,” he sighs. “Fifteen years watching you think you’d gotten me so fucking good. You thought you were so clever, young Sasha. A clean swoop of the girl—and why would Leander believe me when I tried to tell him what had truly happened? No, no, of course not. Your story was so much prettier.”

I want to tell him that nothing about this has ever been pretty. Barbed wire around my throat wasn’t pretty. The bruises around Jasmine’s weren’t pretty, either. Even when I was handing her her life back, her face was streaked with horrified tears. Where will I go? What will I do?

That’s for you to decide, I told her.

Dragan’s face screws up and he kicks me again, this time in the torso. Ribs crack. Two? Three? It’s hard to tell. All the pain is blending into a single inferno burning me alive.

“It’s best that it ends this way,” he decides. “I’ve never been much of one for speeches, so I’ll leave it there, I think. Live like a dog, die like a dog. Gentlemen… hurt him.”

I try to struggle up, but it’s no use. They’re on top of me before I can even draw a breath.

Boots. So many boots. They kick the ribs Dragan already broke. They stomp the bullet wounds until I’m screaming through clenched teeth. One mudak grinds his heel into my scar—the one around my neck—and suddenly, I’m twelve again, Dad’s wire biting into my throat as he snarls, Weak, weak, weak.

So this is how it ends. Like my mother—dying in a broken mass of limbs on cold, hard ground. I give up the fight and wait for the city to swallow me, too.

Then, to my surprise:

“Enough.” Dragan’s voice cuts through the haze. “Put him against the wall.”

They stop the beating to drag me upright and prop me against the alley bricks. Blood drips into my eyes, hot to the touch, but the rest of me is as cold as the grave.

Dragan squats down and lifts my sagging chin off my chest with one gloved hand so I have no choice but to look him in the eye. “You took everything from me. My reputation. My bride. My empire.” He pulls a knife from his coat—antique, curved. Ottoman steel. “Now, I take your heart.”

He raises the blade.

But before he can bring it down—lights arc down the alley. Red and blue.

“Boss!” One of the Serbian goons nods toward the alley entrance. Headlights sweep across brick walls. “Five-O.”

Dragan stands, wiping my blood on his slacks. “Bah! Give me your gun! I’ll finish him before we go.”

Police are shouting at the end of the alley as Dragan swipes a gun from one of his goons. The rest of the Serbians fire their weapons toward the cops to hold them at bay. Meanwhile, Dragan kisses the tip of the pistol to my forehead.

I can only laugh. Saved and condemned, saved and condemned, again and again… I’m sick of the carousel. Just end it, I think. A man can only take so many rolls of the dice.

Dragan’s sneer deepens. His finger slides to the trigger. And…

Click.

Empty chamber.

I don’t think; I just move. My hand replaces the knife Dragan dropped and slashes blindly upward. The blade sinks into Dragan’s groin. He screams. I yank it sideways, severing arteries, and roll as his goons open fire. Bullets stitch the wall where my head was.

Chaos.

Dragan shouts in Serbian. Tires screech. Cops descend.

Amidst it all, I crawl behind the dumpster, that knife still clutched in my bloody, shaking fingers. Dragan and his crew go sprinting to the far end of the alley and disappear from sight.

Snow falls.

Blood pools beneath me, steaming.

Get up.

My arms buckle.

Get up, ssyklo.

I claw at the dumpster, leaving red smears. Vertigo hits hard. The alley blurs—two dumpsters, four, eight.

Teeth chattering, I fumble for my phone. The screen is cracked. Blood makes the touchscreen glitch, but eventually, I get it to obey.

Feliks’s number. Ringing. Ringing.

“Sasha? Sasha! Fuck, where are you?”

“Lib… Lib… Library…”

“Fuck. Hold on, I’m⁠—”

The phone slips from my numb fingers before I can hear what he says. Darkness creeps in.

Not like this.

Ariel’s face floats behind my eyelids—laughing in Paris, furious in the library, coming apart beneath me in that goddamn dressing room.

Ya tebya lyublyu.

I press a trembling hand to the gut wound, where I can feel the life draining away.

Pressure. Keep pressure.

Then a shadow falls over me.

“Oh, Sasha.” Kosti Makris tsks, adjusting his cashmere scarf. “You don’t look good.”

He kicks the knife out of my hand. Then he crouches, tilting my chin up with a gloved hand. “Don’t worry, my friend. I’ll take care of you, just like you took care of my niece.”

Blackness swallows me whole.