10 Days to Ruin (Ozerov Bratva Book 1)
10 Days to Ruin: Chapter 8

I watch Ariel vanish through the exit, her dress swishing like a battle flag as she goes. Every step she takes is defiance. Every sway of her hips is a middle finger to everything her father and I have planned for her.

She isn’t going to make things simple.

Leander materializes beside me. “She’ll need time,” he says, squinting at the doors she’d stormed through.

“She’ll need a leash.”

“I tried that,” he says with a braying laugh. “Then I barely saw the girl for almost two decades. She’s not an easily broken filly, Sasha. Too much of her mother in her DNA for that.”

“No, not a filly. She’s feral. A stray. But even strays learn to heel.”

Leander’s jaw tightens, the vein at his temple throbbing. “Careful, boy. You’re not dealing with some dockside whore. This is my blood.”

I almost laugh. He wants to play Doting Daddy after offering me his daughter’s unwilling hand in marriage? Hell of a time to pick up the parental slack.

“‘Your blood’?” I step closer. “Your blood spent fifteen years running from you. You think she’ll kneel now just because you’ve dangled a diamond ring in front of her?”

For a flicker, his mask slips. Raw, rotting pride bleeds through, and I wonder for a minute if the Leander Makris of old, the one they used to tell stories about, is back.

Then he sighs and it vanishes, and instead of the stony mask of a mob boss, I see the lined, wearied face of a father. “No,” he concedes, “I know better than that. She won’t kneel for a ring, for a man, for a marriage. Not even for her own father.” His laugh is soaked through with misery. But when his eyes meet mine, they’re calmer. Resigned. “But there are better ways to earn compliance.”

“None so efficient as commanding it.”

In the back of my head, I see the Serbian boy wailing as his bones shattered. After all, what’s easier than taking what you need? What’s easier than demanding it be given to you? If my father taught me anything, it’s that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line drenched in blood.

But Leander just shakes his head. “There are better ways, Sasha. Take it from an old man who knows, who’s tried, who’s been in your shoes.”

I roll my eyes. “What ‘better ways’?”

“Time, for one. Patience, for another.” He looks at me again, head cocked to the side, a curious kind of compassion on his face that has no place in a frank business discussion between two precarious allies. “And best of all, persuasion. Don’t wrestle her. Woo her.”

The laugh rips its way out of me. I never had a chance to stop it. “Woo her? You’ve lost your fucking mind, old man. Did catering to her feelings do a damn thing for you? Tell me: how many floral arrangements and boxes of Sorry You Have A Fucking Beast For A Father chocolates did you send to her door over the last fifteen years, hm? How many times did you try to mend fences? How did that work out?”

Leander rubs a hand over his face, looking suddenly exhausted. Even the bowtie of his tuxedo seems to be drooping. “Mock it all you want; heaven knows I deserve the scorn. And heaven knows I’ve heard enough of it from Ariana, when she deigns to talk to me. But…” He clasps my shoulder in a way that’s so fatherly that I almost break his fingers just for the sheer audacity of it. “I can force her into this as well as you can, but we both know the mess that could be. There are… ten days until the New Year. Use them. Convince her this marriage isn’t a cage. Convince her that it’s… freedom. Power. A throne of her own.”

“And if she still says no?”

“It won’t come to that, will it? You’ve charmed harder targets.”

I study him—the slight tremor in his hand as he smooths his lapels, the way his eyes linger on the exit Ariel fled through. The man is a paradox: a kingpin with a father’s fraying nerves.

Pathetic.

Fascinating.

“Why the sudden mercy?” I ask. “The Leander I know would’ve sold her to the highest bidder by sunrise.”

His throat bobs. “The Leander you knew buried a daughter.”

Jasmine.

The name hangs unspoken between us. I keep my face stone, but memory flickers—Jasmine’s hands shaking as she clutched her forged passport, her voice raw from begging. Don’t let him replace me.

Leander stares at his reflection in the melting ice swan, his voice hollow. “I won’t lose another girl to pride. Not again.”

There it is. The weakness. The rot beneath the varnish.

“Fine,” I sigh. “Ten days. She’ll be begging for the altar after one.”

He doesn’t smile. “See that she does. But gently, Sasha. She’s not one of your Bratva rats. She’s…” He hesitates.

“Yours?” I finish. “No, Leander. She stopped being yours the day she learned to spell run.”

His knuckles whiten around the stem of his glass. For a second, I think he’ll swing. But then he exhales, the fight draining out of him. “Just… make her want this. Make her believe it.”

I turn toward the exit, my coat slicing the air behind me. “She will.”

Ariel’s scent clings to my jacket as I leave—peaches and panic. Even as the cold winter air of Manhattan rakes its talons over me, that summer smell lingers.

I shouldn’t have touched her. Shouldn’t have tasted her. Shouldn’t have let her crawl under my skin like a fucking parasite.

But when she looked up at me in that bathroom, all fury and fear and fight, I saw Jasmine. Saw the girl I smuggled onto a cargo ship fifteen years ago, her delirious laughter echoing over the Brooklyn docks. Thank you, she’d whispered.

I didn’t bother to reply.

A text lights up my phone. Feliks. Serbian problem handled. What next?

I stare at the text, then at the glittering Met. Next, I type, I play prince charming.

Ariel wants a fairy tale? Fine.

I’ll give her a goddamn epic.