SASHA
An hour after taking Ariel back to her apartment, I find myself standing in a warehouse that reeks of gasoline and Serbian arrogance.
The flames have been put out, but the damage remains. Charred shipping containers slump like rotten teeth. Puddles of chemical runoff shimmer rainbow-slick under emergency lights. Half my shipment of pharmaceutical materials—the legal shipment, the one meant to keep DEA auditors off my ass—is ash.
“Third strike this month,” Feliks mutters, kicking a melted pill bottle. “These svolochi aren’t even trying to be sneaky anymore.”
I crouch, dusting soot off a blackened ledger. The numbers swim—losses stacked on losses, alliances stretching thin. My father’s smug face floats behind my eyelids. This is what happens when you play house instead of war, boy. Pathetic.
He’s right.
I stand, crushing the ledger under my boot. “Get a cleanup crew. Dump anything salvageable at the Brooklyn docks. And find out who leaked the shipment route.”
Feliks hesitates. “You think it’s another rat?”
“I think stupidity is contagious.” I stride past him, toward the corpse lying limbs akimbo on the loading dock.
The Serbian foot soldier, the only one we managed to snare today, can’t be older than twenty. I toe the kid’s shoulder, rolling him onto his back. Bullet between the eyes—clean work. My men know better than to leave a mess.
His jacket falls open, revealing a crude tattoo on his sternum—two-headed eagle, wings spread. The Serbian crest. Just in case I needed further proof of who’s daring to fuck with what’s mine.
“They’re escalating,” Feliks remarks as he joins me again.
“They’re desperate.” I straighten, wiping my hands on my coat. “Tell Viktor to triple the patrols. Shoot anything that moves.”
“And if they hit the other warehouses?”
“Then you’ve failed.”
Feliks’s jaw twitches, but he nods and steps away to do as I commanded.
The drive back to Manhattan gives me too much time to think. Too much time to ponder the taste of honey cake still simmering on my tongue. Blood and honey, honey and blood—the two tastes mix and meld and mingle in my mouth, a perfect metaphor for the two irreconcilable halves of my life right now. They don’t go together. They can’t.
Only one can last.
Rain sheets down, blurring the skyline into a watercolor bruise. Memories flicker like a broken film reel—Ariel perched on my desk, cherry-red nails tapping my laptop. Distracting.
Pathetic.
I press the gas, swerving around a cab. Horns blare. Let them. These streets are mine. Mine.
My phone vibrates. Leander’s name lights up the dash.
“Malaka,” I mutter. The last person I want to talk to right now, but one of the few I cannot afford to avoid. I answer via Bluetooth. “What?”
“Heard about the fire,” he says by way of greeting. “Tsk-tsk. Hard to keep the lights on without friends, no?”
“I don’t need friends. I need Serbian corpses.”
“Ah, but corpses don’t marry your daughters.” A pause follows, thick with implication. “Speaking of which, how is my daughter? I worry still, Sasha. She is… troubled. Troubled by what happened. Troubled by Jasm—”
“I get it, Leander. She’s fine. Everything is under control.”
My grip tightens on the wheel. Troubled. Yes. The way she’d looked at me in that alley behind Zoya’s—not with fear, but with pity. As if she’d peeled back my ribs and seen the rot inside.
“Hm.”
“Ten days, Makris. That was the deal.”
“Ten days,” he agrees. “Very well. Keep me updated. We will put the Serbians where they belong—once the wedding date is set. Until then… well, take care.”
The line goes dead.
I slam my fist against the steering wheel. Take. Take. Take. Take care, take heed, take cover. Isn’t that what I’ve always done? I took my father’s empire. Took his enemies’ throats. Took and took until even the act of taking felt hollow.
But Ariel…
Am I doing the taking? Or is she?
I cut across three lanes, ignoring the symphony of middle fingers in my wake. She’s not the only one trying to take from me. The Serbians are testing borders. My pill processing plants upstate were raided last week. Two dealers vanished in Queens—they’re probably hogtied in some Balkan butcher shop while Serbian bastards carve them into ribbons.
Leander’s docks are the only way to move product without Serbian interference. His cops. His judges. His protection. Once I have all that, this war will come to a swift and brutal end. The price to bring that all under my banner seemed so simple when I struck the deal.
A ring. A vow. A pretty bird to keep in my bed.
Nothing seems quite so simple anymore.
The memory of Ariel underneath me, gasping, clawing—it should disgust me. Or bore me, at the very least. Instead, it surges in my gut, hot and relentless and un-fucking-forgettable.
It takes, too. And takes. And takes.
By the time I reach the office, the rain has iced over into sleet. I shrug off my coat, the scars on my back pulling tight. Yakov’s voice echoes. Softness is a cancer. Cut it out. Cut her out.
I need a drink to clear my head. But whiskey barely burns anymore. Even when I pour three fingers, drain it, pour three more—it doesn’t touch the chaos raging in my skull.
This shit cannot continue. I need to do what I’ve always done: draw a line in the sand and defend it with my fucking life. The plan must remain the same as it was from the start:
Seduce. Marry. Control.
So if Ariel has decided that she wants to fuck with fire? So be it. I’ll reduce her to cinders. Let her sob my name into Egyptian cotton. Let her claw my back raw. Let her trick her own body into mistaking lust for love.
But I won’t give her love.
I can’t.
Love is the first domino, and I turned my back on that the day I wrapped barbed wire around my father’s throat and pulled.
I take out my phone and text her. Then I put it away. As I do, I see something: a single thread of auburn hair peeking out from under the couch.
I pick it up.
Then I put it in the trash where it belongs.
