Chapter 44 Eliana
ELIANA
heat lamp: /hēt lamp/: noun
By Monday morning, I have bruises on my ass and way more questions than answers.
I catalog them—the bruises, not the questions—while I’m getting dressed for work.
I twist in front of my bathroom mirror to examine the damage.
Purple splotches spread across both cheeks, unmistakably spatula-shaped.
They’ll fade in a week or so, but for now, they’re a constant reminder of what happened on my kitchen floor.
Of what he did to me.
Of what I let him do.
I pull on my loosest pair of trousers and wince when the fabric grazes the tender skin. Every step on my walk to the L station is a fresh reminder. Every time I sit down, I feel him.
Bastian never came back after he left Sunday morning. He didn’t text or call, either. Pure radio silence. I told myself he was giving me space. But the bigger the space got, the louder my doubts became. What if he regrets it? What if he hates me? What if he’s ghosting me worse than my retinas are?
By the time I swipe into the Hale Hospitality building, I’ve worked myself into a full spiral.
The office is buzzing with its usual morning chaos. Patricia waves at me from her desk outside Bastian’s office. I wave back and head straight for the conference room where our weekly Project Olympus status meeting is scheduled.
Bastian is already there. He stands at the head of the table, frowning at something on his tablet. He looks like he always does: perfect and remote, like a beautiful mountain range. He doesn’t look up when I enter.
“Morning,” I say. It sounds way too fawning for my liking.
“Good morning, Ms. Hunter.” He couldn’t say it any flatter. “Please have a seat. We’ll begin shortly.”
Ms. Hunter, he calls me. Like we didn’t spend Friday night tangled together in a movie theater. Like he didn’t bury his face between my thighs on my kitchen counter. Like he didn’t sing me Russian lullabies in the shower while I fell apart in his arms. Like, like, like…
I lower myself into a chair and immediately regret it when my bruised ass makes contact with the seat. I bite back a wince and force myself to smile as everyone else joins us.
Once we’re all assembled, Bastian launches into the agenda without preamble. His voice remains blunt and emotionless the whole time.
I try to catch his eye. Just once. Just long enough to confirm that I didn’t imagine everything. But he never looks at me.
I try to grab him before the meeting ends, but he slips out and vanishes before I’ve even lifted myself halfway out of my seat.
I stop by his office at lunch. Patricia tells me he’s in back-to-back calls.
I send him an email marked Urgent. It bounces like he’s blocked me.
By three o’clock, I’m standing outside his door when he emerges with his coat already on. “Bastian, we need to—”
“Not now, Ms. Hunter.” He doesn’t even slow down. “I have an off-site meeting.”
“When will you be back?”
“Late.”
He disappears into the elevator before I can follow.
I’m left standing there in the hallway, staring dumbly at the closed elevator doors. My ass still throbs with every movement. My palms still tingle where he bandaged them. I can still feel the ghost of his hands on my throat, his voice in my ear.
You’re mine.
Apparently not during business hours, though.
I return to my cubicle and try to focus on work, but the words on my screen blur together. Every time someone walks past, I look up, hoping it’s him.
It never is.
I stay late. Not because I have work to do—though I obviously have a reprehensible amount of work to do—but because I need to see him so he can explain what the hell happened.
Little by little, most of the office empties out around me. Six o’clock becomes seven. Seven becomes eight. The cleaning crew arrives and departs. Bastian never shows. Still, I wait.
Finally, at 9:42, the elevator dings.
Bastian emerges, his coat slung over one arm, his tie loosened. He looks exhausted. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there this morning.
He doesn’t see me at first. I’m standing in the hallway between his office and the elevator bank, directly in his path.
When he finally notices me, he stops.
For a moment, neither of us moves. We just stare at each other across ten feet of carpeted hallway.
Then I step forward, closing the distance until I’m standing directly in front of him. If I’m all he can see, he can’t pretend I don’t exist.
“Look at me,” I demand softly.
His eyes remain fixed somewhere over my left shoulder.
“Bastian,” I say again. “Look. At. Me.”
At long last, his gaze drops to mine. “What do you want, Eliana?”
“What do I—” I stop myself and take a long, soothing breath, because if I strangle him to death, it’ll be awfully hard for him to give me any answers.
“What I would like is for us to have a reasonable, adult conversation about several shall-we-call-them ‘interesting’ events that occurred around and between us this weekend. I think that is a reasonable, adult request and I would like you to respond in a reasonable, adult fashion.”
Shockingly, he does not. His brow arrows downward and he reaches out to snare my upper arm hard. “For fuck’s sake, what do you not under—”
But then he cuts himself off and looks up. I follow his gaze to see both Jovanni and Shithead Kyle looking at us curiously. Bastian growls until they drop their gazes.
Then, with one sweeping glance around the office to be sure no one else is watching, he drags me down the hall.
He stops in a shadowy corner behind a big plant and shoves me against the wall. His body cages me in, one hand braced beside my head, the other still gripping my arm. “You want answers?” he rasps. “Well, I can’t give them to you.”
“Why—”
“I can’t tell you why Aleksei wants you. I can’t tell you what he’s planning. I can’t tell you about the things I’ve done or the person I used to be.” His jaw clenches. “And I sure as hell can’t promise that getting close to me won’t get you killed.”
I swallow hard. “Then what can you give me?”
“Nothing you’re asking for.” His eyes search mine in the fluorescent light filtering through the plant’s leaves. But when he exhales, he softens, some of the tension leaving his face. “If you want to walk away right now, I’d understand. It would wreck me, but I’d understand.”
The sane thing to do is obvious. But it seems sanity left the building a long time ago, because what I say instead is, “What if I don’t want to walk away?”
Bastian’s hand slides from my arm to my waist. “Then for the next seventy-nine days, we pretend like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. No questions asked, no answers given. Just—” He sighs. “Just us.”
“That’s it? We just ignore everything?”
He shakes his head. “Not everything. We have the stuff that matters. The sex, the intimacy, the companionship. All those items on your list that you want to cross off before—” He can’t finish the sentence.
But I can.
Before I go blind. Before our contract ends. Before whatever this is between us implodes spectacularly and takes us both down with it.
“You’re asking me to live in a fantasy,” I accuse.
“I’m asking you to let me give you what I can.” His forehead drops to mine, and for the first time all day, the steel leaves his face completely. “Even if it’s not everything you deserve.”
I weigh my options. He’s asking me to pretend I didn’t just get assaulted in broad daylight and then get sexually ravaged by a caveman incarnation of my boss. It’s irrational, to say the least.
But I’m not rational anymore. Truthfully, I haven’t been rational since the day Dr. Haggerty told me what my future held.
And standing here, pressed against the wall with Bastian’s forehead touching mine, his breath warm on my lips, I realize something: I don’t want to be rational.
I want to be reckless. I want to take what I can get and worry about the consequences later.
I want a taste of the dark.
Because there’s no telling what “later” will bring.
“Alright,” I whisper. “For seventy-nine days, we lie to ourselves. I can do that.”
His eyes close and a soft sigh of relief passes through his lips. “Thank you, Eliana.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I warn. “You might regret this.”
“I already do,” he growls wistfully. Then he laughs. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop.”