10 Days to Surrender (Ozerov Bratva #2)

1. Ariel

1

ARIEL

The sun is such an innocent thing.

It just hangs up in the sky, all cheerful and naive, happy to do what it’s always done. It doesn’t know much about much and it doesn’t care too much about that.

For instance, it doesn’t know that I’m a liar. My passport says I’m a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian named Emily Carter, but the sun doesn’t know that’s fake.

It doesn’t know that I’m a runner. My feet still hurt from sprinting through the Manhattan snow and the cut on my hand from the broken library window throbs constantly—but the sun doesn’t know those reasons.

It doesn’t know that I’m here to dig up one part of my past and bury the rest of it. The sun is just all bonjour and ca va and mon Dieu, quelle belle journée !

Thank God for that.

Because the thought of explaining myself to anything—person, plant, or inanimate object alike—is enough to make me sick to my stomach. Even as I pass by the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen, sipping cappuccinos at wrought iron tables outside the cafés of Marseille, I feel fear thrumming in me. When a Russian accent rises from the mix, it takes everything I have not to scream.

I’ve spent the morning asking around. Do you know a violin teacher with bright green eyes? American accent, maybe? A few years older than me?

That’s all Kosti gave me to go by. He didn’t know much more than that. She’s by the beach, I think. Then he pressed the tickets into my hand and told me I had to hurry if I was going to make it out.

Now, I’m left to wander and rely upon the kindness of strangers. Half the people I asked either didn’t understand English or didn’t care to speak it with me. Seeing as how my grasp of French is limited to the toast, the fries, and the braids, that was a non-starter.

Most of the rest didn’t know. But one said something about their cousin’s daughter’s friend or whatever who used to take violin lessons from a pretty lady in a blue building down by the water in Roucas-Blanc.

So I set off in search of that.

It’s not like I had anything else to do or anywhere else to be. I’m all alone in a foreign country, with a few hundred bucks in my pocket and a prayer in my heart.

Jasmine’s here. Jasmine’s close. That’s all I need to keep me going.

I spend the whole morning searching. Most of the afternoon, too. By the time the tourists have traded their cappuccinos and croissants for rosé and cheese boards, I’m exhausted, but no closer to finding my sister.

Until, suddenly, like it was waiting until I truly needed it, I turn the corner and see a blue building with a picture of a violin painted on the wooden sign.

I touch my belly in silent gratitude. Less than twenty-four hours since I found out there’s a baby in there, I’ve caught myself touching it again and again. When the plane took off without incident from JFK, I touched it. When we landed safely in France, I touched it.

Now, I’m looking up at the building that—hopefully—contains my sister, and I’m touching it again and again.

But I’m here—so unbelievably close—and yet suddenly, I’m terrified. What if she hates me for not searching for her? What if she wants nothing to do with me, with New York, with our family? How could I possibly blame her?

What if she shuts a door in my face, or screams at me that I never should have come here?

What if she doesn’t forgive me for giving up?

I don’t know how long I stand there, one foot in the street, one foot on the curb, weighing a thousand different possibilities in my head.

Then I see a figure pass behind the window, and my heart starts to strangle me from within.

A bell over the door jingles as I enter. There’s a small foyer, and then a flight of narrow, rickety stairs leading to the second floor. Another hand-painted violin points me up that way.

So up I go. One stair at a time. Each one is somehow more exhausting than the last, more exhausting than any of the other fifty thousand steps I’ve taken today. I reach the top landing and feel like I could curl up in a ball and sleep right here.

A curtain separates the stairs from the room within. Pretty green satin with a slight sheen to it. Like her eyes. Our eyes.

On the other side of the curtain, I hear the scratchings of an amateur trying to make their instrument do something right. A bit of it sounds like music, but most of it is fumbling and awkward.

Then: “ Bon travail, Alain! ” Chairs screech and pages flap. I hear the zippers of an instrument case open and close as Jasmine’s voice flows melodically, praising a little boy who mumbles back, “ Merci.”

Her French has gotten good. Good enough to my ear, at least, although that bar is admittedly very low.

I reach out to open the curtain. Before I can, it gets whisked open from within.

And for the first time in fifteen years, I’m eye to eye with my sister.

My throat closes.

Fifteen years.

Fifteen years of funeral-black dresses and phantom phone calls where I’d dial her old number, just to hear “ this line has been disconnected” in English and Greek. Fifteen years of wondering if her ghost resented me for staying with Leander. For becoming Ariel Ward instead of joining her in the grave.

“Jas,” I croak.

The violin in her hand hits the floor with a thunk. “Ari.”

Time takes on a funny quality. Molasses-slow and somehow taut at the same time. The girl in my memories—nineteen, trembling in fear as our father and Dragan bundled her into a black-tinted van—is gone. This woman has crow’s feet and calloused hands, a bolt of gray shot through her caramel hair. But her eyes…

Her eyes are still green, just like mine.

“Jas,” I say again.

“Ari?” Her voice is a shattered thing. “No. No, you’re?—”

“It’s me, Jas. I’m here.”

The boy at her side—Alain, I’m assuming—is baffled. He looks up at Jasmine and says something in rapid-fire French that means absolutely nothing to me, except for the very last two words: “Madame Morgane.”

My eyebrow raises. “‘Morgane?’”

Jasmine laughs and winces at the same time. “Like the fairy, yeah. It’s… I don’t know. Cheesy, obviously. I needed something to make me laugh when I picked it, because otherwise, I was going to cry.”

“I know the feeling.”

She bends down to touch the boy’s back and whisper back to him. He nods, grins, hoists his violin case, and scampers down the stairs and away.

The bell chimes.

Then we’re alone.

Jas looks at me sidelong. “Do you… I mean, you can come in if you want. But it’s my last lesson for the day, so if you’re tired, my apartment is?—”

“Let’s just sit for a second, if that’s okay. I’m… It’s been a very long few days.”

“Of course. Yeah, come in.” She holds open the curtain and I duck through.

I sit on the first thing I come across, which is an overstuffed armchair, formerly red, now faded to a pale pink by sun slanting through the windows. Jas takes a seat on a wooden stool across from me.

“You look awful,” she remarks.

I look at her. She looks at me. I look at her some more. She squints back at me…

And then we both burst out laughing. It pours out of us, fifteen years of laughs we were robbed of, laughs we should’ve gotten to share, that we would’ve gotten to share, if it weren’t for stupid, power-hungry men playing stupid, power-hungry games.

I’m laughing so hard that I slide off the armchair. Jasmine comes tumbling down off the stool and hugs me. We end up in a Chinese finger trap of crisscrossed limbs, hair tickling each other’s noses, as we laugh and laugh and laugh.

Eventually, though, the laughter fades. The inevitable tears start to well up.

I grimace and wipe my eyes. “I don’t want to cry.”

Jasmine, shoving herself to a seat against the wall, nods. “Done plenty of that.”

“More than plenty.”

“You can if you want to, though. It’d be okay with me.” She pulls my head to rest against her shoulder. We sit in the sun for a while as she strokes my hair.

I’m so, so tired. My whole body is one giant ache and the slice in my hand hurts as bad as it does the moment I got it. I don’t have a home anymore, or a fiancé, or a father, or faith that everything will always work out and love will win in the end, like Mama always said it would. I don’t know what the next hour holds, much less the next day or year or the rest of my life.

But I have my sister back.

That’s enough.