10 Days to Surrender (Ozerov Bratva #2)

34. Sasha

34

SASHA

Late nights are when the past rears its ugly head. The familiar jitter in my feet that drives me to walk, pace, plan, patrol. I steal a cigarette from Kosti, with every intention of smoking and brooding while I did my usual laps of the perimeter, searching for threats.

But the jitter fades before I even begin. It’s not the first time they’ve faltered—lately, those instincts aren’t as urgent as they once were. The voices in my head—one voice, really, just Yakov’s, a broken record of Pathetic-Ssyklo-Pathetic-Ssyklo— aren’t as loud.

I’ve got new voices keeping me company now. These are far more pleasant. They sound like Ariel’s breathless moans, her laugh, the delighted Ahh when I finally find the itch on her back that she can’t reach herself anymore. The images with it are pleasant, too: her belly pressing through a sheer white gown. green leaves poking up through rich, black earth.

I don’t mind the change as much as I thought I might.

Perhaps that’s why I’m halfway to the door, gun in hand, ready to patrol, when I decide that maybe it’s okay to rest for a night. I set the gun back where it lives and retreat to my study. The unlit cigarette in my hand gets tucked back into Kosti’s pack.

That doesn’t mean I have to be useless. I could still work for a while. Feliks sent me a packet of documents tracking Dragan’s movements, and it needs attention. All signs say he’s circling something big; it’s best for everyone involved if I figure out what that something might be before it’s too late.

But when I slip in my study, it’s not my laptop I see open on my desk.

It’s Ariel’s. She must’ve left it in here when she was borrowing the room for a bit of privacy earlier. The screen pours out in a sea of blue light.

I step around to close it—then stop. My own name catches my eye.

Dear Sasha,

They have your nose.

I should close it. Walk away. This is her space, not mine, and I have no right to invade it. I’m halfway to the door when I growl and turn back around. I drop into the chair and start to read.

Dear Sasha,

They have your nose. I keep staring at the ultrasound, trying to convince myself if I’m imagining it. I wish I was. We left you behind, after all. You’re an ocean away now, and I’d like for you to stay there forever.

Because there’s no telling what else of yours they’ve inherited, and we can’t outrun it all. I’ll give them fire; that’s a certainty. But will you give them ice? I wonder if you know how frigid it is to be near you sometimes. I feel my fingers and toes slipping away from me, like they’re dissolving. It’s frostbite of the heart.

And the heart is too wild of a thing to live locked up in a cage of ice.

The cursor blinks like a dare. I know I shouldn’t be reading this. I’m a thief in her mind, stealing thoughts she’d never give me freely.

But even though I’m a changed bastard, I’m still as greedy as I ever was.

And when it comes to Ariel Ward, all I want is more .

So I read on.

Lately, your tenderness terrifies me more than your cruelty ever did. When you rub my swollen feet, I forget what else those hands have done. When you whisper lullabies to my belly, I don’t hear the same tongue that ordered a murder before we’d ever said hello.

The screen blurs. I grip the desk until the wood creaks.

I want to believe the man who kisses my stretch marks is real. But which version of you gets to claim him? The killer or the caregiver? The monster or the ? —

The sentence dies mid-thought. Unfinished.

Guilt curdles in my throat as I sit back in my chair. This is worse than catching her naked—this is like sawing her open and turning her inside-out. She sees the rot in me, the same decay that hollowed out Yakov. She’s asking the same questions I’ve spent weeks asking myself.

What infections do I carry?

What will she catch? What will our children catch?

She’s wrong about one thing, though: Frostbite of the heart is no death sentence . Cold preserves. Ice keeps things intact. Cold is necessary, goddammit.

But when I press my forehead to the desk, I feel the phantom heat of her burning through.

A gasp jerks me back upright. I raise my head to find Ariel framed in the doorway, one hand clutching her belly, the other white-knuckling the doorframe. Her eyes dart between me and the laptop I’m still touching, horror dawning like a slow bleed.

“How much did you read?” When I don’t answer fast enough, she repeats it louder. “How much , Sasha?”

I sigh. “Enough.”

She crosses the room in a few quick strides and snatches the laptop, clutching it to her chest. “Those were my private thoughts. My journal. You had no right?—”

“Your thoughts—about me. About our children.” I rise from the desk, hands spread. “I think that gives me some right.”

“Wrong.” She backs away, shaking her head. “If you wanted to know how I felt, you could have asked me. Like a normal person. Instead of—of sneaking .”

“Would you have been this honest if I had?”

“We’ll never know now, will we?” She bares her teeth. “Because you couldn’t resist playing spymaster. Always watching, always calculating. God forbid you just talk to me.”

“I’m talking now.”

“No. You’re justifying.” She shifts the laptop to one hip, using her free hand to stab a finger at my chest. “There’s a difference.”

I straighten up and clench my jaw. “Words are words, Ariel. Even if you think they’re true, they never tell the whole story. It’s actions that say it all. Because the man you describe there?” I point at the laptop. “You fucking hate that man. But the man you fucked in that classroom today—you loved him, didn’t you? So which is real? The words or the moans?” I advance on her, hemming her back against the closed door. “You think I don’t see you flinch when I touch you? That I don’t hear the ‘what-ifs’ in every silence? Tell me I’m wrong. Look me in the eye and say it.”

She trembles—not from fear, but from fury. From the same desperate hunger that keeps drawing us back to this same desperate precipice time and time again.

“I don’t know if I love you or hate you,” she whispers. “That’s the problem.”

“If you love me, then love me. If you hate me, then hate me.” I lean down until our breaths tangle. “But do it out loud.”

“What’s the point?” she asks, her breath trembling as she hides her face from me. “This might be news to you, Sasha, but you’re not exactly the easiest man to talk to. You… you hide. You lie. You don’t know how hard it is to look at you and not know what you’re thinking. I just want to know what’s going on in your head. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

I open my mouth to argue—then I think better of it.

Frostbite of the heart . It’d be easy to be insulted by that, wouldn’t it? Pride is one of my many faults, and Ariel’s always known where to stick that particular knife. You’re a cold fucking bastard, she’s saying. I could let that anger me.

Or I could do what she’s telling me to do: step outside of my own skin for one fucking second and look through her eyes instead.

So I do. What do I see?

I see a tall, dark-eyed, miserable son of a bitch who’s clenched his jaw for so long that every smile feels like cracks skittering in the frost, dangerous cracks, the kind that come right before the iceberg sinks underwater, never to be seen again.

Giving up my rage and my past is a kind of death, yes.

But it’s the only way to make room for life to come in from underneath.

“You’re right,” I rasp.

Ariel freezes mid-tirade, her fury stuttering. “What?”

“I said you’re right.” I step back, hands raised in surrender. “I took what wasn’t mine. Again. Old habits. I’m sorry, Ariel. Not just for the man I am. But for… this. For all of it.”

She blinks. “I almost think you mean that.”

I laugh humorlessly. “I want to. Fuck, I want to so badly, Ariel. I just have to convince myself that it’s okay to love something I might one day lose.”

Surprised tears stud her eyes. “Why are you so sure you’ll lose me?”

“How can I not be?” I grit out. “One minute, you’re under my hands, screaming my name. The next, you’re halfway out the door, taking my unborn children with you. I needed?—”

“A cheat sheet?” Her laugh cracks. “Some secret code to tame me?”

“To understand you.”

Silence thickens. Owls hoot from the treetops outside.

“Writing… helps,” she says finally, tracing the laptop’s logo. “Sorting the mess in my head. What’s real. What’s fear. What’s just… you.”

I crouch before her, eye level with the swell of our children. “And what am I?”

Her fingertip grazes my scar. “That’s a question I’m still learning how to ask.”

I press my forehead to her knuckles. “Let me know when you figure it out. Maybe by then, I’ll know how to answer.”

Ariel laughs, though the sound is stained with unshed tears. Then she bends down to kiss my forehead. “You’re insane, Sasha Ozerov.”

“Utterly and irrevocably,” I agree. “I can’t promise that’ll change. But I can promise that I won’t look again where I shouldn’t. You have my word.”

A ghost of a smile touches her lips. “The great Sasha Ozerov, making promises about boundaries? Who are you and what have you done with my brooding Russian mobster?”

“I took the good bits of him and buried the rest in the garden. Though I do still wonder whether you’ll run when you put them all together and see what kind of picture it forms.”

Ariel tilts her head to the side. “What if I don’t hate it as much as you think I will? What if I’m starting to like the view, hm?” She laughs softly and touches my cheek. “Even the jagged parts.”

I move her palm to my scar. “Even this?”

“Especially this.” Her breath hitches as my lips touch her fingertips. “It’s where you end that matters to me, Sasha. Not where you begin.”

The leather chair creaks as we both settle onto it, Ariel nestled in my lap. The laptop’s glow illuminates her face in the predawn darkness as she opens it and scrolls back to the document.

“You don’t have to,” I tell her, but she shakes her head.

“I want to. Just… some of it. The parts I choose.”

I nod, and she begins to read. Her voice is soft but steady as she shares fragments of our story through her eyes—the first meeting in the Met bathroom. The night on the mountain. The moment in Paris when she realized she was falling for me despite herself, when Jasmine played violin for us long before Ariel knew just how close we were to perfection.

She falls asleep eventually, trailing off in the midst of a sentence, the laptop still lying open.

I could keep reading. Or I could do what I do instead:

Close it, leave it behind, and carry her to bed, where I hold her until the dawn comes. Right when it’s breaking through the windows, I whisper into her ear, “Marry me, Ariel.”

She’s asleep, so she doesn’t hear me and doesn’t answer.

That’s okay. She’ll answer soon enough.