Chapter 47 Bastian
BASTIAN
fin·ish·ing salt: /?finiSHiNG s?lt/: noun
Tolstoy’s is gone, but the building that housed it remains.
These days, it’s a nightclub called The Caged Bird.
The facade has been updated—sleek black paint, purple lighting, a maze of velvet ropes stretching outside the entrance.
But I can still see the bones of the old restaurant underneath.
The bloodstained bricks are exactly how I remember them.
I remember how they got the stains, too.
I stand across the street, hands shoved in my pockets, and stare at it.
This is a monumentally stupid idea. Aleksei might not even be here. And if he is, walking in there voluntarily is like sticking my head in a lion’s mouth and hoping it’s feeling merciful.
But I’m tired of looking over my shoulder and wondering when the next shoe will drop.
It was fine as long as Eliana and I were pretending that this would end once our contract did.
I can’t fucking do that anymore, though.
It’s becoming increasingly and painfully clear that there is no expiration date that I’ll let take Eliana away from me.
She’s mine now.
For better or for worse, in the light and in the dark, now and in the future, she’s mine.
So if Aleksei thinks he can do something to either of us, he can fucking think again. I’m here to make sure he understands that.
Just as I start to step down from the curb, my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pause, one foot dangling over the asphalt, and pull it out to see a text from her.
ELIANA
Home safe. Are you okay?
I start to type back: Debating whether to do something very fucking dumb.
Then I delete the message and write a different one: I’m sorry.
I delete that one, too.
Finally, I just send:
All’s okay. Get some sleep.
I tuck away my phone and cross the street toward the club.
The building pulses with bass like it’s got a heartbeat of its own. I bypass the front entrance, where partiers in various states of undress and inebriation are queued up waiting to enter, and go down the side alley.
At the far end, a trio of young men in leather jackets stand clustered around a red door flaking with rust. When they hear me approach, they drop their cigarettes one by one and crush them underfoot. Each of them tucks a hand into his jacket, no doubt to grab a weapon.
I hold my own hands up to show they’re empty. “At ease, gentlemen. I’m not here to cause trouble.”
“Then what are you here for?” one of them sneers.
“I’d like to talk to Aleksei.”
They all chuckle in unison, a deep, grating, unpleasant sound. “Aleksei don’t take visitors,” the sneering one says.
“He will.” I nod and clear my throat. “Tell him Semyon is here.”
The name has the intended effect. All three of them go rigid.
“Wait here,” the one in the middle finally says. He disappears through the red door, leaving me alone with the other two.
Neither one speaks. They just stare at me with the kind of slit-eyed hostility you can only learn by growing up in the unlit back alleys of this world.
I know that look intimately. I used to see it in the mirror.
The minutes stretch as we wait. My heart thuds against my ribs, but I keep my breathing steady. Show no weakness—that’s rule number one.
The door opens again. The man who left reappears and summons me forward. “He’ll see you,” he says. “But you leave your phone out here.”
I hand it over without argument.
Then I step through the red door into the belly of the beast.
The hallway stinks. It’s pitch-black and sticky underfoot. My footsteps echo on the worn linoleum as I follow the lieutenant up a narrow staircase. The bass from the club keeps thumping in time with my own heartbeat. Like we’re one and the same. As if I left this place, but it never, ever left me.
At the top of the stairs, there’s another door. The lieutenant knocks twice, pauses, then knocks once more.
The door swings open.
The room beyond is almost as dark as the hallway. Ribbons of cigarette smoke float through the air, wreathing around the heads of the men who sit at the table.
Six or seven pairs of dark eyes flit to me as the door at my back closes and locks.
One pair of blue eyes does, too.
Aleksei is sitting in a high-backed chair at the far end of the room, flanked by men I don’t recognize.
But I know those scowls and those scars.
I could probably guess everything about them without asking—where they’re from, what kinds of parents they had, what things they saw and did before they were old enough to know right from wrong.
“Semyon!” my brother crows as he spreads his arms wide in welcome. “What a pleasant surprise.”
I stand in the doorway. “Can we speak in private?”
Aleksei’s smile widens. He waves one hand at the men. “Out.”
The men exchange glances, but they don’t argue. One by one, they file past me, their shoulders brushing mine as they go. The last one out pulls the door shut behind him with a soft click.
Then it’s just us.
Aleksei leans back in his chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin. “I’m glad you came by, bratishka. Truly. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me entirely.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything.”
“Good. Good.” He gestures to the chair across from him. “Sit. Please.”
I don’t move.
He sighs. “You know, Semyon, family is everything to me. Blood is the only thing in this world you can trust. Those men who just left?” He points his chin toward the door.
“Loyal, yes. Useful, absolutely. But they’re not us.
They don’t understand what we’ve been through. What we’ve survived together.”
“We haven’t survived anything together in sixteen years,” I remind him.
“And whose fault is that?” he chides. “I’ve tried, you know. I want us to be together. Three brothers working side by side in the family business. That’s how it ought to be.”
I shake my head. “Sage and I want nothing to do with you.”
He puts a hand on his chest like I’ve wounded him. “I wish I could tell you how much I hate hearing that, Semyon. It hurts.”
“You left feelings behind a long time ago, brother.”
“Wrong. So, so wrong.” He stands and circles closer to me, leaning up against the edge of the table.
“I’m just a patient man. I mean what I’m saying to you: Family is the most important thing in the world to me.
I understand why you’ve made the choices you’ve made.
But you can’t outrun blood, Semyon, and what I have matches what you have exactly.
Sage is one of us, too. We all belong together. ”
I shake my head again. It feels like I do a lot of that whenever Aleksei is around. “Not happening,” I say flatly. “And that’s not what I came here to discuss.”
Raising a brow, Aleksei grabs a nearby chair and spins it around to straddle it backwards, facing me. “Then by all means, tell me what’s on your mind. Floor is yours, brother.”
“I know you sent him.”
Aleksei’s face remains carefully neutral. “Sent who?”
“Don’t play dumb,” I growl. “You’re a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.”
“Flattered, as always,” he says with a grin. “But you’ll have to catch me up to speed. Sent who?”
Grimacing, I reach into my pocket and pull out a driver’s license. I slap it down on the table between us.
Petya Egorov’s face stares up at his employer, unsmiling. Aleksei looks at it, then away. “Is he dead?” he asks.
“No. One pinky short, though.”
He laughs. “I like your style, Semyon. Knife work was always your finest skill.”
I bite back the anger rising in my throat. “You don’t get it, do you? I didn’t want to be that person again. I spent sixteen years trying to wash the blood off my hands, and you forced me right back into it.”
Aleksei tilts his head to the side as he looks at me with genuine bewilderment crossing his face. “Semyon, you protected what’s yours. That’s not something to be ashamed of. That’s what men like us do.”
“I’m not like you.”
“Oh, but you are.” He taps the driver’s license. “This proves it. When it mattered, when someone threatened something you cared about, you did what needed to be done. You became exactly who you needed to be.”
“I became who I never wanted to be again.”
Aleksei shakes his head slowly. “There is no ‘again,’ brother. There’s only who we are. The rest is just pretending.”
He doesn’t get it because he can’t. I hate him for making me turn back the clock and become that kind of man again. Aleksei does not understand, he cannot understand, because he has been that kind of man for so long that he’s forgotten there is any other way to be.
It comes to me again, the image of the moment when our roads diverged and he followed his path into the darkness.
The bitter chill of the walk-in freezer. The man’s screams. The door swinging open and Aleksei standing there with the cleaver in his hand.
The blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
I force myself to snap back to the present. “I didn’t come here to debate fate with you, Al. I came to tell you to leave her the fuck alone. And to leave me alone, too, and Sage. We want nothing to do with you. We aren’t troubling you, so don’t trouble us.”
Aleksei doesn’t answer right away. He just sits there, straddling that chair backwards, watching me with those cold blue eyes that are so much like mine and yet nothing like mine at all.
“I can’t do that,” he says finally.
“Yes, you can,” I insist. “You just won’t.”
“No, Semyon. I genuinely cannot.” He stands and walks to the window, looking down at the street below. “You see, I’ve built something here. An empire. And empires require certain things to function properly. Infrastructure. Logistics. Legitimate businesses to move money through.”
My stomach drops. “You’re still trying to push that? You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am.” He turns back to me. “Your restaurants are perfect for what I need. It would be so easy, Semyon. A little money laundering here, a little creative accounting there. You’d barely notice.”
“The answer is no.”
“I haven’t asked the question yet.”
“The answer is still no.”
He sighs and shakes his head yet again, every bit the older brother who is bitterly disappointed that his younger sibling simply does not get it.
“You’re making this more difficult than it needs to be.
I’m offering you a partnership. A real one.
We work together. We protect each other.
We build something that lasts. That’s what brothers do. ”
“No, Aleksei. Don’t ask again. I won’t change my mind.”
I wonder for a moment how far he’s willing to go here.
There’s a trickle of something in his eyes, a black cloud.
He never lost his temper, not even as a child, but I remember from early on that he somehow always got his way in the end.
Obstacles simply disappeared, things shifted, until the road he wanted to walk was cleared.
But this road isn’t clearing. He won’t taint what I’ve built. He won’t touch my life’s work, or my woman, or my little brother. Either he’ll keep his fucking hands to himself, or a severed pinky will be the least of his issues.
In the end, though, he stays calm. The black cloud goes away and he raises his hands. “Alright then. You’ve said your piece and, as your brother, I will respect it. I will find another way, and I will leave you and your woman alone.” He pauses, then adds, “I hear she’s lovely, by the way.”
I grit my teeth so I don’t say the many things I’d like to say. “Glad to hear it,” I answer instead. “Take care of yourself, Al.”
Then I turn and stomp out. The door swings open as I approach. I pass all of his lieutenants lining the hallway and staircase. None of them make room for me. They stand slouched against the wall, smoking their cigarettes, staring me down as I pass.
But with every stair I descend, the feeling of unease dissipates. Aleksei swore he’d leave us alone. He’s many things, that brother of mine, but he’s not a liar.
So when the rusted red door clangs shut behind me and I’m alone in the alley, I let out a breath I’ve been holding for a long, long time now.
With any luck, I’ll never see him again.