10 Days to Surrender (Ozerov Bratva #2)

42. Sasha

42

SASHA

The Hudson smells like diesel and dead fish when we slip off the cargo ship. New York’s breath hasn’t changed. But her face…

Feliks whistles through his teeth as we cruise down Brighton Beach Avenue. “Looks like Dragan redecorated.”

Eight months gone, and already, New York feels both achingly familiar and jarringly wrong, like coming home to find all your furniture rearranged by a stranger’s hands.

I lean forward between the seats as Feliks drives, drinking in every detail. The streets are still mine in my head—every corner, every alley mapped out in perfect clarity. But what fills those spaces has shifted.

“Serbian flag,” I mutter as we pass Dmitri’s old bar. The red-blue-and-white stripes mock me from where they hang, limp and damp in the autumn air. “Dmitri would rather die than fly that.”

“He did,” Feliks says quietly. “Two months ago. Dragan’s men made an example.”

My fingers curl into fists. Dmitri was no saint, but he poured me my first shot of vodka when I was sixteen. He deserved better than dying for a fucking flag.

We turn onto Coney Island Avenue, and the wrongness only deepens. Where Nikolai’s bakery used to fill the street with the smell of fresh bread, there’s now a Serbian butcher shop. The neon sign is garish, bloody red reflecting off puddles in the street. Three young thugs lounge outside. They track our car with predatory eyes.

“Keep driving,” I tell Feliks when his foot twitches toward the brake. “Not yet.”

He obliges, but I can feel the tension radiating off him. Pavel shifts in the backseat, his hand never far from his weapon.

Block after block reveals more changes. More Serbian businesses. More of my people’s livelihoods destroyed or corrupted. The boarded-up storefronts tell their own stories—Misha’s pawn shop sealed behind corrugated metal, Oleg’s garage stripped down to its concrete bones. Even the fucking bodega on the corner of Ocean View and 7th sports new Serbian ownership, if the crates of Jelen Pivo stacked outside are any indication.

“Like cockroaches,” I growl. “Everywhere I fucking look.” My knuckles ache around the Glock in my lap.

“Boss?” Feliks glances at me in the rearview. “Where to?”

I consider our options. The warehouses will be watched. The docks are no doubt compromised. But there’s one place Dragan won’t expect me to go.

“Take us to Babushka’s Lap.”

As we drive, the anger builds, slow and cold, familiar as breathing. This is my city. My streets. My people. And this fucking Serbian dog thinks he can just waltz in and take it all?

I think of Ariel back in Italy, crying in our ruined garden. Of the twins growing in her belly. All the things I left behind to come fight this war.

She’s wrong about what she said: I didn’t come here to die. I came here to take back what’s mine—not just for me anymore, but for them. For the family I never thought I’d have.

And Dragan? He’s about to learn exactly what happens when you wake a sleeping bear.

The kitchen at Zoya’s restaurant is full of my men. Bratva captains crowd around the scarred steel prep table, their faces drawn tight with eight months of barely-contained rage. They all look worse for the wear. Ilya’s tailored suit hangs loose from too many skipped meals. Roza’s lacquered nails click against a tablet, the only sign she’ll ever show of the anxiety bubbling beneath her surface. Viktor’s knuckles gleam raw pink and ooze blood.

Roza spreads out a map of New York, and as a group, we run again through what Feliks told me the night he arrived in Italy. Brighton Beach. Coney Island. The docks. Little Odessa—everything that used to be mine, it’s all Dragan’s now.

Ilya fills in the legal side of the thorns in our side: unannounced IRS audits hampering our businesses, union disputes hamstringing our workforces, permitting issues suddenly cropping up everywhere we’ve tried to build or expand. It’s all Dragan, pulling strings, fucking with us in every way he knows how.

As they talk, I trace the familiar streets with my fingertip. My territory has been reduced to a few scattered blocks. But what catches my attention isn’t the map—it’s my own hand.

Rock steady. Not a tremor in sight.

I toy with my Glock, checking the action. The weight settles into my palm like it never left. My shoulder doesn’t scream when I sight down the barrel. My fingers don’t shake on the trigger. The rest and rehabilitation have done their work. The weakness Dragan carved into my body is gone.

“That’s enough,” I say, cutting off their litany of losses. “We’re not here to count wounds. We’re here to inflict them.”

My captains straighten, hunger gleaming in their eyes. They’ve been waiting for this—for me to come back, to give them purpose again.

I’m ready to deliver.

The map is already bleeding red push pins, but I stab a fresh one into Red Hook. “Dragan’s Achilles’ heel isn’t his army—it’s his reflection.” Case in point: I flick a photo of Dragan’s new Midtown penthouse across the table—floor-to-ceiling mirrors in every room. “He’s Narcissus. Pure fucking ego. He’ll chase every threat personally. So, to tempt a narcissist out of his cave… we give him threats everywhere.”

Viktor leans in. “Hit the gambling dens and diamond district same night?”

“Same hour .” My finger traces circles around key points on the map. “Here. Here. Here. And here. We hit them all at once. Make him dance.” I tap the central Brighton Beach warehouse. “Roza, clone his burner phones. I want his men getting conflicting orders from a dozen different numbers.”

She grins, shark-like. “I’ll make his comms scream.”

“Viktor, check our old protection network. See who’s still breathing, who might be willing to flip back if properly motivated. Then give them that motivation, however you deem necessary.”

I slide my gaze to Ilya. “And you—I want everything on his legitimate businesses. Tax records, health code violations, union complaints. Find me pressure points, then poke them.”

“What about the docks?” Feliks asks.

“That’s where you come in.” I trace the shoreline. “Watch his shipments. I want to know exactly what comes in, what goes out, and most importantly—what he handles personally.”

My captains lean forward, hungry for more.

“We have twenty-four hours to line it all up,” I tell them. “That’s a tight window, so it means the work must be clean. No mistakes. No assumptions. When we move, we move with perfect intel or not at all.”

I study the map again. Dragan’s empire looks vast on paper. But paper burns. And every empire has its weak points—you just have to know where to shove the knife.

Feliks’s phone buzzes against the steel prep table. He answers with a grunt, then his face darkens. “Boss. Serbian scouts, three blocks away. Moving this direction.”

Roza’s taser clicks on. Viktor’s chair screeches back. I catch Ilya’s eye across the table—he’s already reaching under the counter for the sawed-off shotgun that Zoya keeps taped there.

“How many?” My thumb strokes the Glock’s grip. Steady. Always, always steady now.

“Three, maybe four.” Feliks peers through the blinds. “Snapping pictures of the storefront.”

“Shit.” Ilya adjusts his tie with trembling fingers. “They found us.”

“No.” I rise, rolling tension from my shoulders. The old bullet wound beneath my ribs stays silent. “If Dragan knew I was here, he’d send forty. Not photographers.”

“So what do you wanna do?” asks Viktor.

A grin spreads across my face. “Educate him on his mistake.”

We pour out into the night. August wind razors between brick tenements, carrying the reek of Serbian cigarettes from the alley.

“There,” Feliks whispers, jerking his chin toward movement at the far end of the alley. “Three targets. On foot.”

I assess them through narrowed eyes. Young. Cocky. The kind of muscle Dragan sends when he wants roving eyes but doesn’t expect serious trouble.

Perfect.

“Circle around behind,” I murmur to Pavel. “Feliks, take the fire escape. I want them boxed in when they reach the middle of the alley.”

My men melt away into the shadows. I stay where I am, counting heartbeats. One. Two. Three…

The Serbians saunter closer, talking quietly among themselves. They haven’t spotted us yet. Good. Let them come to me. Right up to my fucking doorstep.

When the first Serbian draws even with the dumpster, I step out of the shadows. “ Dobro ve?e, gospodo ,” I say softly.

Good evening, gentlemen. Spoken in their own tongue.

Their eyes go wide with recognition. But before they can reach for their weapons, Feliks and Pavel materialize behind them. The trap snaps shut with beautiful precision.

What follows is quick, brutal, and deeply satisfying. My body moves like it was never broken, muscle memory taking over as I slam the first man’s head into the brick wall. It pops like a fucking watermelon. His friend tries to draw, but my elbow finds his throat before the gun clears leather. The third manages to get off a single, wild shot that goes harmlessly wide before Pavel takes him down with a bullet to the leg.

When it’s over, I’m barely breathing hard. No pain anywhere—nothing but the rush of victory singing in my blood.

I look down at the two remaining Serbians lying groaning at my feet. “I’d ask you to tell Dragan his time is coming,” I say in Serbian. “But you won’t be around to see it.”

Three shots echo in the alley. Three bodies cool in the late summer air.

I’m ready.

The penthouse feels wrong. Dust sheets shroud furniture like corpses in white body bags. I rip them off couches where Ariel once pinned me with her thighs, sending particulate ghosts dancing in dawn’s gray light.

I move through the space like a ghost, touching things that shouldn’t matter. A pink elastic band on the bathroom counter catches my eye. Ariel’s. I pick it up, hold it gingerly in the palm of my hand. I look at it for a long, long time.

If it weren’t for my phone buzzing, I might’ve stood there for even longer. But when I pull it out, I see her name lighting up the screen.

ARIEL: Just checking you made it back okay.

Five words. Careful. Distant.

Ice.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I hit Call .

She picks up on the first ring. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Silence stretches between us, rife with all the things we’re not saying. I want to tell her about the hair tie, about how seeing it made my chest ache. Want to ask if she’s sleeping okay without me there to rub her back.

Instead, I say, “You’re up late.”

“Braxton Hicks. Practice contractions.” A pause. “False alarm, though.”

“You’re okay?”

“Fine.”

More silence. I hear her breathing on the other end of the line, tense and measured. Like she’s choosing her words as carefully as I am.

“Well,” she says finally. “I’m glad you made it back safe.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re… okay?”

I think of the three bodies cooling in the alley behind Zoya’s. Of how steady my hands were when I pulled the trigger. “Getting there.”

“Good. That’s… good.”

The conversation dies again. We used to be able to talk for hours about nothing. Now, we can barely string together three sentences.

“I should let you sleep,” I say.

“Probably.”

Neither of us hangs up.

“Sasha?”

“Yeah?”

She takes a breath like she’s about to say something important. Then: “Never mind. Goodnight.”

The line goes dead before I can respond.

I stare at the phone for a long moment, then set it face-down on the nightstand. Dawn is starting to creep through the windows. I should sleep. Should focus on the war ahead.

Instead, I pick up her hair tie and twist it between my fingers until the sun comes up.