Chapter 13 Bastian
BASTIAN
car·ry·o·ver: /?kerē?ōv?r/: noun
The freezer door shuts behind me, but I can still feel the warm imprint of her body against mine.
When’s the last time someone surprised you, Bastian?
You have, Eliana, I almost said. Every fucking day since you stumbled into my office.
“… Mr. Hale? Did you hear me?”
Patricia’s voice crackles in the phone as I stride through the test kitchen. The staff scatter like roaches under a suddenly flipped light and I carve through them without a second look.
“Say that again.”
She clears her throat. “You have a visitor who insisted on waiting in your office. He… He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and security seemed reluctant to intervene.”
My jaw locks, tendons rigid beneath skin that suddenly feels too tight. Only one person makes my security team “reluctant.”
“I’ll be right up.”
I don’t run. Running would signal panic to the staff, and I learned long ago that panic spreads faster than flames in a grease fire.
But I don’t take my time, either. As soon as I’m out of sight, I lunge into the service elevator instead of the main one. As floors climb—too slow, too fucking slow, what in the fuck is taking so goddamn long?—I wrack my brain.
What the hell is he doing here? It’s been sixteen years since we last spoke, and I would’ve been pretty damn thrilled to hit seventeen. It’s better when I can pretend that that part of my life got cremated along with our mother’s body.
Aleksei has other ideas, apparently.
Finally, the doors whoosh open and release me onto the main floor.
It’s quiet in this corner. Patricia’s desk sits empty.
She’s made herself scarce, smart woman. My office door is closed, but I can see light bleeding out from underneath it, and I catch a whiff of menthol cigarettes.
The confirmation I didn’t want and didn’t need.
He always did like those stupid things. Pretentious, preening bastard.
I push open the door.
Aleksei Izotov sits in my chair, his feet up on my desk, the menthol cigarette smoldering between his tattooed fingertips.
He’s got one of my Michelin plaques in his free hand, examining it.
As I walk in, he stubs out his cigarette precisely in the middle of the flower, then flicks the butt halfway across the room. It lands on the carpet at my feet.
I step on it and grind it to nothing beneath my heel, then sigh and look up.
He hasn’t changed much—same sharp cheekbones we both inherited from our mother, same cold blue eyes, though his are darker than mine. Meaner, too. His suit looks like sharkskin, gleaming and gaudy. A tattoo creeps up his neck from beneath his collar. That wasn’t there sixteen years ago.
Two stars at the tip of an eagle’s wings. I know what that means. He wears the crown now.
“Little brother.” He checks his nails, chews at the end of one. As if he’s bored. “Nice trophy.”
“Thanks. I earned it.”
His brow arches. “You must be proud.”
I shrug. “It’s a plaque, it’s an ashtray, it’s meaningless. I don’t give a shit one way or the other.”
“And yet it must feel so good to be baptized in the fine waters of legitimacy, does it not?” He grins. One of his teeth is gold-capped. That’s new, too.
I stay where I am, one foot inside the door. Christ, it’s gonna take me ages to get the smell of menthol out of here. I’ll have to rip up the carpet and start over. “You’re in my chair, Al.”
He ignores me. “Our mother would be proud.” He drags his eyes up to mine, slowly, lazily, as if gravity weighs more on him than it does on the rest of us. “Her precious little Semyon, feeding the rich instead of robbing them.”
I cringe at the name I haven’t heard in a long time. Moy Semyon, my little prince, my baby, my boy—her voice croons in my ear like she’s right behind me. It takes every ounce of willpower I have in me not to turn around and check.
“Quit the fucking bullshit, Al. And don’t talk about her.”
“Why not? She was my mother, too.” He swings his feet down but doesn’t get up.
“Though you’d hardly know it, the way you’ve erased us all.
Tell me, does anyone here even know you speak Russian?
Or do they actually believe Bastian Hale sprouted fully formed from American soil?
” The overexaggerated Midwestern twang he puts on my adopted name makes me cringe almost as much as Semyon did.
I step into the office and close the door behind me. No need for Patricia to hear this, assuming she’s even still on this floor. “What do you want?”
“Can’t a man visit his brother? It’s been sixteen years, Semyon. That’s a long time.”
“Bastian. My name is Bastian.”
“Of course it is,” he says with a sardonic chuckle. “Bastian Hale, icon, legend, restaurant mogul. An upstanding citizen who receives fucking flower plaques. No relation to the Izotov boy who used to cook in the back kitchen while I collected debts in the dining room.”
That’s another memory whispering from just behind my shoulder: me at eleven, before the tattoos, before the grease scars pockmarking up and down my forearms, working the line at Tolstoy’s while Aleksei, all of seventeen, made grown men twice his size piss themselves over protection money.
Even then, we were on different paths. I was learning to break down chickens; he was learning to break fingers.
We both spilled our fair share of blood.
“You always were too good for the family business,” Aleksei continues. “Even Mama knew it. ‘Semyon will be something special,’ she used to say. ‘Something clean. Keep him out of the mess, da, Alyosha?’”
My fist balls up at my side, nails digging into my palm hard enough to leave marks. Our family has always been fucked up. Aleksei and I—well, we went through shit. I prefer to leave it at that.
But I can’t stand when he brings up our mother. He was the one who brought the news to me: that our mother had died giving birth to Sage while I was twenty years old, halfway through my second year at culinary school—the education that Aleksei’s blood money had made possible.
The irony wasn’t lost on me even then that the dirty cash from his protection rackets and loan sharking was funding my attempt at a clean life.
I found out about her death three days after it happened, when Aleksei showed up at my cramped studio apartment near campus with a bottle of vodka clutched in one hand, a little baby bundle tucked in another, and eyes so red and swollen I barely recognized him.
He’d been crying—something I hadn’t seen since we were children huddled together in whatever shithole apartment Mama could afford that month.
The great Aleksei Izotov, already making a name for himself in the underworld, reduced to a broken boy mourning the woman who’d brought us into this world and then spent most of her waking hours trying to escape it through the bottom of a bottle.
“Is that why you’re here?” I ask. “To reminisce?”
“Partly.” He stands finally and saunters around my desk, dragging one of those nails along the wood.
The scraping sound makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“You’ve built something impressive here, little brother.
Hale Hospitality. So pure. A blond and blue American boy, living the dream.
Nothing dirty to see here, folks, nothing dirty at all. ”
“It’s not a lie. I legally changed it.”
“You can change your name, but you can’t change your blood.” He drops the plaque on the floor. It lands with an ungainly thump, but it doesn’t break. “How is our youngest brother, by the way? Still in that cripple chair?”
The rage that floods me is instant, white-hot, and absolute. I don’t even have to tell Aleksei to shut the fuck up, because he takes one look at my face and raises his hands in self-defense.
“What? I’m not allowed to ask about Sage? He’s my brother, too, Semyon. Just because you decided to play Superman—”
I cross the room in three strides, but no matter how badly I want to cave his face in, I don’t touch him. I learned long ago that violence is his language, not mine. “I decided to keep him away from you. Away from that life.”
“‘That life’ paid for everything you have now, brat. Do you forget where we came from? Or how we got here? I kept you fed when Mama was too drunk to remember she had children. Everything I did, I did for family. For us.”
“You did it for yourself.”
“Partly,” he agrees. “Partly. But it benefited you all the same.” He tucks his hands into his pockets and looks up at me.
I’m half an inch taller than him, which he always despised.
You’d never know it unless you saw us eye to eye, and it’s been a long time since I was close enough for that to happen. “Which brings me to why I’m here.”
Of course. There’s always an angle with Aleksei.
“I need to move some money through legitimate businesses,” he says, casual as could be. “Nothing dangerous, nothing nasty. Just some real estate investments that need clean paperwork. Your restaurants would be perfect—”
“No.”
“You haven’t heard the terms.”
“I don’t need to. The answer is no.”
“Semyon—”
“Bastian,” I correct again. “And Sage and I don’t need you, Aleksei. We haven’t for sixteen years.”
“Family debts don’t expire,” he purrs. “You can pretend all you want, Mr. Hale, but you’re still an Izotov. That crippled boy in the wheelchair is still an Izotov. And one day, that might matter more than your Michelin stars.”
“Is that a threat?” I snarl.
“No, no, no. Merely a reminder.” He reaches into his coat. I tense up, but he just pulls out a carved wooden box and sets it on my desk with care. “These are from the old country. A gift.”
I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside. I can smell them through the wood: white truffles, earthy and intense.
One more memory, just because bad things come in threes, I suppose: Aleksei and I cowering in the walk-in freezer at Tolstoy’s, wide-eyed in wonder as we stared down at the walnut-sized lump of truffle resting in my brother’s open palm.
I wasn’t sure where he’d gotten it and I knew better than to ask.
But when he cracked it open and held it to my nose, we smelled things that gutter boys like us were never meant to smell.
And as I sat in that dark, frigid room, I felt like I wasn’t alone in the world. I had an older brother who would do terrible things to keep me safe.
I just didn’t know quite how terrible those things would become.
Back in the present, Al is watching my eyes carefully. He knows where my head went, and I know that his is in the exact same place. It’s been sixteen years since I’ve met those eyes, but I know them every bit as well as I always did.
“Enjoy them while they’re fresh,” Aleksei says, heading for the door. “Everything decays eventually, little brother. Even the things we think we’ve preserved.”
He pauses at the door. He doesn’t look back and he doesn’t say anything else and neither do I. But for as long as he stands there, it’s just the two of us again: the Izotov boys huddled in a dark room.
That one smelled like truffles. This one smells like menthol cigarettes, smoke, and the rot of things that would’ve been better off staying buried.
Then he leaves. When he’s gone, I sink into my chair—still warm from him sitting in it—and stare at the wooden box.
My hands are shaking, I notice, and I loathe that he still has this effect on me.
Sixteen years of distance, and one visit is all it takes to make me feel like that scared kid again, caught between two worlds.
I crack the lid, just enough for a whiff of the truffle aroma to emerge. Then I slam it shut and hurl it across the room.
I press my forehead to my desk and let the coolness calm me down. Counting backwards from ten, one for each breath, I urge my heartbeat to slow, my shaking to still, my incandescent rage to give up its heat, degree by degree, until finally, I’m myself again.
I am Bastian Hale.
Semyon Izotov is dead.