10 Days to Surrender (Ozerov Bratva #2)

50. Ariel

50

ARIEL

Koukla ,

You’re reading this because I’m already gone. Don’t look for me. By the time your tears dry on this page, I’ll be halfway to a place where men like me don’t get to die old.

I’ve told you this before, but I was there the day you were born. I held you, pink and squalling, in my arms. As I did, I promised I would keep you safe. I swore it on the saints, even though we both know I stopped believing in anything but the weight of a gun years ago.

So you must believe me on this point: I tried.

Koukla , I swear to you I tried.

When Leander betrothed Jasmine to that Serbian dog, I thought, This is how it starts. The rot. The slow bleed. But I was a coward. Told myself it wasn’t my place to interfere. That the Makris girls were born to be bargaining chips, and who was I to question the currency of our world?

But it didn’t take long to show me how wrong the rules of our world truly are.

Your sister came to me once, in those ugly first weeks. Eyes bruised like overripe plums. I cleaned the blood from her split lip and thought, This is where loyalty gets us. This is the cost of silence . I tried to stop it. I told Leander that Dragan had a taste for cutting up girls who talked back.

Your father merely shrugged. “Jasmine knows her duty.”

Then he sent her back to the beast.

It was Sasha who came to tell us that Jasmine was dead. He said the Serbian brute had done what brutes like him do—gone too far. Put her in a grave she did not deserve. I beat myself senseless and I swore that, next time, if there was a next time, I would not sit by idly. I would act.

But, as you know, your sister wasn’t dead. For fifteen years, we thought she was. We were wrong.

Everything changed the night of your engagement party.

I’d been digging, Ariel—digging and hunting and searching, because something in my heart said the story did not add up. I was right! You cannot imagine how good it felt to learn that I was right. When I heard Jasmine’s voice… It was like she was born again. That she, like you, was once again a pink and happy baby in my arms.

She told me what Sasha had done. How he learned of her suffering and offered her a way out. How he snatched her from Dragan in the dead of the night, framed him for a “murder,” and gave her a new lease on life.

You might still think that’s what happened. You might still believe he saved her. My God, what a story it is! The noble Bratva prince, smuggling Jasmine to Marseille like some fairytale knight!

But then I learned otherwise.

You see, koukla, some knights raise the dragons they slay. Sasha didn’t merely discover Dragan’s cruelty—he cultivated it. He fed the man’s worst impulses during long nights playing chess and sipping rakija. Laughed when Dragan bragged about breaking his last woman’s ribs. “A man who can’t control his woman is no man at all,” Dragan would say, and Sasha would raise his glass. “To control.”

He needed the alliance to fracture. Needed your father desperate enough to hand you over next—because he knew that, when the time came, Sasha would be the one who received the Greek’s alliance. So he made sure Dragan’s hands were around Jasmine’s throat before he ever laid eyes on her.

Sasha did not save Jasmine from her marriage.

He condemned her to it.

At first, I wanted to kill him. To toy with the lives of innocents like that… it is beyond the pale. But as I sat with the thought, it occurred to me that killing Sasha would not be enough. As long as men like him exist—men like Dragan, men like your father—they will keep using the people around them as pawns. The only way to truly protect you both was to bring down the whole game. To set the kingpins at each other’s throats.

That is what I’ve done.

I know the price of what I’ve done is measured in blood. Perhaps I’m no better than them now. But I couldn’t watch another generation of Makris women be sacrificed on the altar of men’s ambitions.

The only thing that gave me pause was you, my darling. I know you think you love him. I’ve watched you twist yourself into knots trying to reconcile the monster with the man. But some stains don’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub. When I saw you glowing at that altar tonight, I knew I had to make my choice.

Either I burn this whole fucking world down, or I let him poison you, too.

I couldn’t do that. I made a promise the day you were born. This is what that promise looks like.

So forgive me. Or don’t. But above all, I beg of you this: don’t let him spin this into another pretty lie. The man you married didn’t change. He simply learned to hide his knife better.

Your uncle,

Kosti

I look up. Sasha stands a dozen yards away from me, looking back.

He took off his jacket while we were dancing. Now, the first raindrops of a storm that snuck over the horizon splatter against his shoulders. Every single one leaves its mark.

“Not again,” I whisper. “Not again.”

The letter slips from my fingers. It touches the dirt at my feet. As it does, something rips through me. Lightning, but not lightning in the sky. This is lightning from within .

With it comes a fear. I wish I had a word, but it’s unlike any fear I’ve ever felt before. Even if I did know how to describe it, the pain it brings muzzles me. All I can do is let out an inhuman wail as the lightning forks and branches and burns parts of me that only my babies’ dancing feet have ever touched.

I crash to my hands and knees. It’s as if decades pass as I crouch there, on all fours like an animal, screaming wordlessly. I’m being burned alive, squeezed by a cruel god’s giant fist.

Finally, slowly, it relents. I can feel it preparing to strike again, though. Like it’s merely inhaling between efforts.

I look up again at Sasha. He’s blurred and refracted by my tears. Torn between coming to my rescue and knowing that he’s the last person alive I ever want to touch me again.

Not again.

Not again.

“You… you knew,” I choke out. “You let him hurt her. You orchestrated it.”

His eyes frost over. “It wasn’t like that.”

Thunder rumbles over the horizon. As I watch, distant lightning—the real kind—breaks on top of the hills. They look like teeth chewing the sky. Jagged, broken, rotting teeth.

I hate this place. I hate this place so fucking much. I want out of here and away from him.

But as the next bolt of lightning in my womb cracks, I’m pinned on hands and knees to the earth.

I bite down my cheek so I don’t scream this time. But the skin doesn’t last long—when it gives way, I taste and feel the hot trickle of blood.

I spit the blood on the soil between my hands and look up again. The rain is thickening now, coming down harder. Soon, Sasha’s white shirt is drenched and ruined.

“You told me you saved her. Saved her, Sasha? Do you even know what that means? Are you even capable of doing something selfless?”

In the corner of my eye, I see Jasmine bend down next to me and pick up the letter. Her hand flies to her mouth as she reads. A horrified gasp stills on her lips, halfway between swallowed and screamed.

“I was wrong,” Sasha whispers. “I am not the man I was then.”

I bark out a laugh at that. “How can you not be? No, better question: how the fuck am I supposed to believe that? You’re just such a pretty liar, Sasha Ozerov. You make the world look however you want it to look. And I’m stupid enough to fall for it, every single time.”

I plant a hand on the chair I was in moments ago and use it to leverage myself up. Mama comes rushing to help me, but I wave her off. I want to do this alone.

Next to me, Jasmine is slowly sinking into a chair of her own. She’s eggshell white, that hand still covering her mouth like it’ll stop the screams from coming just as long as she keeps it there.

“You married me,” he rasps. “Some part of you at least has to believe I’m telling you the truth. I am not what I was then, Ariel. You looked into my eyes an hour ago and I know you saw that I’m changed.”

The rain turns his shirt translucent. I want to claw it off him. I want to claw him off the earth.

“You think a vow fixes it?” My voice fragments into a thousand shards. “You think marrying me erases what you did to my sister?”

Lightning again, overhead and within at the same time. I grit my teeth against the agony as the rain pours, pours, pours.

“It wasn’t like that.” His hands flex like he wants to reach for me. Like he still has the right.

“Bullshit.” I press a palm to the molten, churning ache in my belly. “You fed her to him. You sat there while he?—”

“I kept her alive !” The roar bursts out of him, raw and ragged. “One way or another, Leander was going to do what he wanted. He would’ve killed her for refusing the match. Dragan would’ve skinned her alive if she’d fled without my help. So yes—I let him think cruelty was our common language. I let Dragan carve his initials into the world so I could carve mine into his throat when it mattered.”

Another contraction. White-hot supernova, pressure like the earth crushing me in its jaws.

Sasha takes a step forward. “Ariel?—”

“Don’t.” I spit blood and rainwater at his feet. “Don’t you dare make this sound noble. You didn’t save her. You used her. Used me. You needed Leander’s empire. Jas and me… we’re nothing more than the shiny keys.”

Thunder drowns out his curse. When it passes, he’s closer—close enough that I smell the storm on his skin. “You really believe that? After everything?”

“I believe this .” I fumble the letter from Jasmine’s slack grip and shove it against his chest. “You let him hurt her. You laughed.”

He doesn’t look at the paper. His eyes stay locked on mine, blue going black at the edges. “You want the truth? Fine. The first time Dragan cracked her rib, I drank with him until dawn. When he bragged about making her beg, I refilled his glass. And every second—” His voice breaks. “Every fucking second, I told myself it was the price of keeping her breathing.”

I’m distantly aware that the rain has become torrential. Damn near biblical. We’ll have to go in soon, or we’ll be swept away.

But no one moves. My mother, Zoya, Marco, Gina, Lora, Pavel, Feliks—all of them watch in mute, dumbfounded shock as Sasha, Jasmine, and I stand still in this fucked-up triangle that none of us can escape.

“But the real truth,” Sasha snarls, “the only one I know you’ll believe, is this: I would do it all again.”

Mama gasps.

Feliks’s jaw drops.

My eyes stay fixated on Sasha. Only on Sasha.

“I would do it all again,” he repeats as he advances toward me where I stand, clinging to the iron chair like a crutch. “I would mold Dragan to be violent. I would arrange his marriage to Jasmine. I would help her fake her death. I would send her across the ocean. I would tell you and your father and your mother that she’d died. I would plan with Leander to make you my bride. I’d let you keep mourning your sister, thinking she was dead. I would redo every lie, every betrayal, every cruel, calculating deception… because it brought me to you.”

It hurts. What he’s saying hurts and what’s happening inside me hurts. All around us, the storm moans as if the world itself is hurting, too.

I close my eyes as tears become rain, and both of them soak through my wedding dress. “I thought I knew you,” I whisper. “I thought I saw the real man beneath the monster. But there is no beneath, is there? The monster is all there is.”

Lightning flashes. In the strobe, I see it: the exact moment his heart fractures.

I don’t have long to linger on him, though. Because the next contraction that comes is the most undeniable yet. Then pain blots out everything: his face, the storm, the lies. Just fire and pressure and the terrible, tearing sense of split .

Mama rushes to my side, her hands cool on my face. “The babies,” she gasps. “Something’s wrong.”

“We need to get her to a hospital,” Gina says, already pulling out her phone. But after a moment, she curses. “No signal.”

Zoya starts barking orders; Lora quivers; Feliks and Pavel stand with fists clench, caught between love and loyalty. Marco, poor bastard, doesn’t know what the hell he’s wandered into.

But I barely have eyes for any of them. My world is shrinking down to a one-inch wide pinpoint, focused on Sasha’s face. It’s all I can see.

Feliks appears at Sasha’s shoulder. “The storm’s knocked out the power lines. The roads will be flooding soon.”

Sasha says nothing.

Feliks again, rain plastering his hair to his forehead: “Boss. Kosti’s trail is still fresh. If we move now, we might catch him before he vanishes completely.”

Sasha says nothing.

“Sasha, goddammit, you have to decide! Do something, for fuck’s sake! Choose!”