55. Sasha
55
SASHA
I explode from the shadows.
Rainwater drips from my hair as I charge into the firelight’s jagged halo. Dragan’s blade glints against Jasmine’s throat—a silver smile biting into innocent flesh. My pulse thrums in the scar at my neck.
Dragan tilts his head, serpent-slow. “Still playing white knight, Sasha?”
I spread my hands wide to show I’m holding no weapon. “Just making you a deal you’d be stupid to turn down.”
He laughs. “These Makris girls don’t know how good they have it with you. Always coming to the rescue.” His knife carves deeper into Jasmine’s throat. A bead of blood pearls and runs down the edge. “What deal could you possibly offer me, Ozerov?”
I stand tall, unmoving. “You want vengeance against me, yes? Then take me. Let them both go.”
His tongue flicks out, tasting Jasmine’s fear. “Why? You think a quick death makes up for everything?”
“No. I know better than that. But you’ve studied me. You know which death would hurt worse. The one that doesn’t end,” I say, stepping into his orbit. “Watching everything I’ve built burn. How would that taste, Dragan? Sweeter than this?”
He arches a brow as he considers it. Beside him, Kosti stirs, crawling through his own blood.
Jasmine hiccups. “Sasha, don’t?—”
I cut her off with a dark laugh. “Don’t pretend you give a shit whether I live or die, Jasmine. You can hate me for what I’ve done. I would hate me. And even if you were noble enough to forgive me, you shouldn’t. Don’t offer me redemption. I’m not worth it. I am my father’s son.” I face Dragan again. “Let her go. Take me instead.”
Dragan looks at me. At Jasmine. Then he shrugs. “So be it. Kneel.”
I don’t even hesitate. Maybe I would have, once upon a time. But what do I have left now to protect—my honor? My dignity? No, fuck that. Those things are beyond worthless.
I have my wife, my children, and the sister-in-law whom I have used again and again like a chisel to mold the world to my liking. I won’t use her anymore. It’s my time to be used.
If my death protects them, so be it.
If it must happen in the dirt, so be it.
I sink to my knees.
“You,” Dragan barks at one of his men. “Give me your gun.”
He turns and smashes the butt of the weapon into my jaw. I see stars as something cracks within my mouth. Bone, tooth, I can’t be sure—but the hot taste of blood follows soon after.
Then he presses the gun… to Jasmine’s forehead.
I freeze. He grins wide. “So hard to choose,” he murmurs, “which one should go first. Do I flip a coin? Eenie, meenie, minie…”
He dances the gun back and forth, from my head to hers, from hers to mine.
“… moe.”
It stays on Jasmine.
Dragan shrugs again. “This will work.” He flicks off the safety.
But before he can pull the trigger, there is movement at his feet. We all look in unison as Kosti wraps his hand around Dragan’s ankle.
“Don’t—! Dragan, we had a deal?—”
Dragan kicks him away. “Your deals mean less than dog shit now, old man.”
“You said—you said if I brought you Sasha, you’d spare them!” Blood sprays from his busted lips with every gasped syllable. Kosti drags himself upright and claws at Dragan’s pants. “Jasmine—Jasmine is?—”
The disgust I feel for him overpowers anything else foul I can sense. This is the game he was playing? Feed me to Dragan to save his nieces? For fuck’s sake, we could have done this together! If he’d only asked…
Kosti glances to me and sees the repulsion written on my face. “Sasha…” His voice is wet with blood and shame. He struggles to his feet, swaying. “I had to. You have to understand?—
“Understand what?” I spit. “That you sold us out to this ublyudok ? That you let him burn my city?”
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t watch it happen again.”
My jaw tightens. “Watch what happen?”
“Another sacrifice. Another girl fed to you wolves.” He wipes blood from his chin. “I went looking, you know. It all seemed so neat and convenient. One Makris daughter dead; one left. And who should get the survivor but you? So I went looking. I dug deep—and I found how you manipulated everything. You needed the Serbian-Greek alliance to fail so that you could take Dragan’s place. So you arranged it all—the marriage. The abuse. You counted on him breaking her. You used her pain to expand your empire.”
Jasmine makes a small, wounded sound. Her eyes find mine through the rain streaming through the broken roof.
“And now?” Kosti’s laugh is weak. “Now, you are doing it again. Another Makris daughter. Another arranged marriage. Another piece moved across your board.” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t let Ariel become another Jasmine.”
“So you went to Dragan.”
“At least he’s honest about what he is.” Kosti’s shoulders slump. “You… you pretend to be better. He does not.” Finally, he drags his gaze back to Dragan. “But you struck a deal, Dragan. I gave you what you want. Give me what I am due.”
Again, Dragan shrugs.
Again, Dragan looks at me.
Again, Dragan says, “So be it.”
Then he puts a bullet between Kosti’s eyes.
Jasmine screams, knife completely forgotten. I can only watch, too stunned to so much as blink, as the man who saved me just to damn me again goes slumping to the ground, bleeding from the hole in his forehead.
Kosti’s hand flops lifelessly in between us. Reaching for Jasmine, I think. He’ll never quite get there.
Dragan blows smoke from his pistol’s barrel. “Annoying to the last, that old bastard.” He pivots to press the still-hot gun to my nose again.
I open my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself. I might die on my knees, unloved and unredeemed.
But I will die with a curse on my lips for a man who doesn’t even deserve the breath. As I inhale to speak it, though, something else speaks instead.
The roar of an engine that has seen better days.
We all turn as one just in time to see two blinding white headlights pour into the church. Stone screams as the Peugeot plows through the rotting wall, blasting the last remaining stones to smithereens. The car’s grille catches Dragan cleanly, inches away from smiting me along with him, slamming him into a pillar with a wet crunch of bone. Dust and debris explode outward, choking the air.
Then—chaos.
Feliks comes keening out of the corner. He hurls a knife that sinks deep in one Serbian’s throat, followed by a stone that crushes the skull of another.
Jasmine drops, scrambling toward Kosti’s body as his killers reel. I’m already moving—snatching Dragan’s fallen pistol from the rubble, putting two rounds in the nearest Serb’s skull before he gathers his bearings.
When the goons are all dead, I turn once more to see the one who remains.
Pinned between the car and the altar is Dragan. His legs are pulp beneath the bumper and blood leaks from his lips. He’s still breathing somehow. Wet, gurgling sobs that speak of punctured lungs and crushed ribs.
I advance on him with the gun in my hand. “Look at you. Roadkill.”
He spits blood on my boots. “F-finish it, then.”
This is for Jasmine, I think as I level the gun at his head. For Ariel. For every woman you’ve ever hurt.
But before I can pull the trigger, the car door creaks open. A figure stumbles out into the rain-slick mayhem.
The storm howls through the shattered nave, whipping Ariel’s hair into a Medusa’s crown of wet snakes. Her wedding dress clings to her like a second skin, ivory linen now the color of old bruises. One hand grips the car door frame—knuckles white as bone shards—the other splayed low over the swell of her womb. Blood streaks her inner thighs.
She shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be standing . Shouldn’t be anything but curled in that cellar with our children, safe.
Our eyes lock across the carnage. Her gaze isn’t the shattered glass I expected—it’s flint sparking against steel. I see the girl who sent back a dozen courses just to watch me sweat. The woman who fucked me senseless on a printing press. The mother who clawed her way through hell just to spit in death’s face.
Dragan whimpers beneath the Peugeot’s crumpled hood. I should finish him. Put a bullet through that smirk he’ll wear into the grave.
But my arm won’t lift. My finger won’t bend.
Ariel takes a step. Stumbles. Catches herself on a pew gnawed to splinters by termites and time. The movement parts her dress’s torn slit—I glimpse the bandages Zoya applied hours ago, already blooming fresh crimson.
“You,” she rasps at me, voice raw from screams, “don’t get to die today. Not when you have children to live for.”
Thunder cracks. The church groans. Behind me, Feliks drags Jasmine toward the blown-out wall.
But all I smell is peaches.
Ariel limps closer. Rain pools in the part in her hair. She stops a breath away. Her palm finds my chest—over the wound Kosti’s betrayal left.
“Look at me,” she demands.
I do.
Her thumb brushes my jaw. “You don’t get to quit,” she whispers. “Not on them. Not on me.”
“Ari—”
Then she kisses me.
It’s not forgiveness—that will take time. It’s not absolution—that will take penance. It’s a collision of teeth and truth and every unspoken thing that matters between then and now. When she pulls back, her lips are painted in our shared violence.
“We’re not done,” she says. She glances at Dragan. “He is, though. Leave him here to die.”
The church doors burst open. Wind screams through the hole where our future waits—broken, bleeding, but alive.
I follow my wife into the storm.