7. Bastien
7
BASTIEN
Thirteen Years Ago
I sat at the table in my apartment, rain hitting the windows as the droplets caught on the wind. It was a warm winter day, and we were getting rain instead of several more feet of white snow. I sat there with my laptop, my apartment a mess because I’d had a party over the weekend, and I still hadn’t cleaned. Some of the guys were shooting up and snorting cocaine. I joined them, but I wasn’t addicted like they were.
Night started to creep into the city, but I had a cup of coffee beside me because I’d just started my day. My nights were mornings and my mornings were nights. I’d wanted a life different from my father, but I’d ended up there anyway.
Because I’d basically flunked out of school and was rejected from every university I applied to. My father could have bribed or threatened my way into a program, but I didn’t have a father anymore, not as far as I was concerned.
A knock sounded on the door.
I turned away from the laptop and stared across the room to the door but didn’t move to answer it. I chose to stay quiet so whoever the fuck it was could just go away.
But they knocked again. “I know you’re in there, Bastien.”
My heart plummeted into my stomach because I recognized that voice.
It belonged to my father.
I stared at the door again, visualizing him on the other side, standing there in all black, his boots wet from the rain. I hadn’t seen him in two years. Didn’t know what he looked like these days, if he’d gained weight or lost it, if he continued to wear that cross around his neck like some kind of martyr. Whenever Mother called me, she didn’t talk about him and she rarely mentioned Godric. She tried to act like everything was normal by talking about the new restaurants she had tried and what she’d seen on TV, but it just irritated me more.
Because she was a spineless coward.
She let my father cheat on her. Let him treat his sons like hired help rather than family. Let him destroy the family she so desperately wanted to have. Like it was the eighteen hundreds and he only had children to help run the farm.
I hated her more than him sometimes.
I finally walked to the door and opened it.
He was exactly as I remembered, his face just a little more sunken from the cigars and the booze and the stress of running an immoral drug empire. Our features were similar, and I hated to admit I looked more like him as I became a man. The sight of him should instill a sense of fear, but it was hard to fear someone you didn’t respect.
He stared me down with the same ruthless expression, probably full of disappointment because of how useless I was. Godric rose to his expectations, became the right-hand man who would inherit the business when my father was killed or retired.
I stepped away and left the door open, turned my back to him even though it was possible he might shoot me in the back. He’d made me, so he could put me back in the ground where I belonged.
I heard his boots against the hardwood floor as he stepped farther inside. The door clicked shut behind him.
I turned back to face him.
He surveyed my shitty apartment, his eyes trailing over the old needles that didn’t belong to me, the open bag of coke on the table that also didn’t belong to me. It was dirty, and I still had boxes against the wall because I’d never really unpacked, even though I’d lived there for years now. The girls I brought home didn’t seem to care because it was just for the night.
He stopped several feet away, his hard expression impossible to read.
I didn’t know what to say. After years of estrangement, I hadn’t expected a conversation to ever take place between us. When he spoke about family to his people, I just assumed he pretended I’d never been born and no one was stupid enough to ever say my name. I was certain my mother hadn’t mentioned me either, called me only when he was out of the house and deleted the call from the log when she was finished. She remained connected to me because she loved me, but she didn’t love me enough to actually stand up to him.
He stared me down for a long time, his eyes slowly rising in anger. “You walked away from the business just to be a shit imitation? I sell lobster and you sell garbage.”
Hostility was exactly what I expected. “Would have gone to university if I didn’t essentially flunk out of school.”
“And it’s my fault you were too stupid to count to ten?”
After two years of silence, he’d come all the way here for this? To be a fucking asshole. “It’s your fault that you were a piece-of-shit father—and still are.”
His eyes narrowed at the insult, and he gave a slight nod. “You haven’t changed either, Bastien. Still blaming everyone else for your shortcomings. Sitting in this shitty apartment, shooting and snorting. You think you’re better than me?” he yelled, his voice probably carrying to the other apartments in the building. “You’re nothing without me. Useless and pathetic. A boy alone in an apartment that smells like piss and pussy. Wish you’d been a girl so I could have married you off to an ally. But no, you have a dick that you don’t even know how to use and a brain too stupid?—”
“Why are you here?” His words bounced off me like bullets against a steel plate. I felt no love for this man, none whatsoever, so he was just a crazy stranger hurling insults like a clown tossing pies.
His face flushed red like I’d pissed him off. “No respect?—”
“What do you want?” Now, I was the one to yell, wanting him out of my apartment as quickly as possible. “You haven’t seen or spoken to your son in two years, and then you decide to come by and start shit? I’m fully aware of what a grand disappointment I am to you, Dad . But you’re a far bigger disappointment to me.”
I’d clearly hit one of his buttons because he stepped toward me like some cheap trick to intimidate me.
I’d lived a hard life these last two years, so I couldn’t be intimidated. I stood my ground and faced off against the man I hated more than any other.
He snapped first and slapped me, slapped me like we were girls.
His palm struck me first before I twisted his arm around then shoved him hard into the boxes near the wall, needles and garbage flying everywhere, his heavy body thudding against the wall. He released a grimace when he landed hard on his shoulder then got back to his feet, looking at me like I was responsible for all of this. But this was how he’d always been, treating every reaction like it was the action that set everything in motion.
“I wanted one son, and your mother just had to have another. A worthless son I wish I’d never had?—”
I punched him hard in the face, using all the muscles in my arm to send him to the floor. “And I wish you were dead. I wish you were rotting in the ground so I could piss on your fucking grave.” I slammed my foot right down on his face.
His nose broke and he screamed. He reached for my ankle and tugged, sending me to the floor so he could crawl on top of me. He was much older than me but could still pack a punch. He hit me in the face with a closed fist. He grabbed me by the neck and slammed the back of my head into the floor. “Pompous. Arrogant. Son of a bitch.” He punched me again.
My head turned, and I saw stars for a second, the lights turning off in my eyes.
He pulled his gun but didn’t have the chance to point it at me.
I twisted his arm and pointed it into his chest, and then I squeezed the trigger, all of it happening in a split second.
He could have tried to get rid of the gun so I couldn’t use it against him. Or he could have been prepared to shoot me right there, in the fucking head, and that was the reason he’d come in the first place.
But now I would never know—because he was dead.
He went limp against me, his eyes shifting away before they went still.
I rolled him off me, the gun dropping to the floor because his grip had died with him.
I lay there, seeing the blood pool on the floor and inch closer to me until it absorbed into my clothes and coated my flesh. I lay there in my father’s blood, my eyes full of tears, not from what I’d done, but because of how this had ended.
He hadn’t come here to reconcile.
He’d come to kill me.