Chapter 3 - Bastian
BASTIAN
SIX WEEKS LATER
binchotan /bin?CHōt?n/: noun
I am a zombie. I am a ghost. I am the living dead.
The only benefit is that the dead don’t dream.
Not that I have time anymore to sleep. I don’t. I do what my brother orders. I am his blade, his gun, the weapon in his right hand. He points me at his enemies and his enemies die.
I wear a black suit every day now. It’s good enough to get me through what the daylight hours require of me: glad-handing investors who pour in one after the next to congratulate me on the outstanding success of Project Olympus.
And it’s also good enough for what the nighttime hours require of me: meeting with friends of Aleksei who need “convincing.”
The people who need convincing are usually dead by morning.
I’ve killed a dozen men. Or is it more? I can’t remember.
I lost track a long time ago. Aleksei calls it “proving myself.” I call it Tuesday.
Thursday. Saturday night when the clubs are loud enough that no one hears the screaming and the strobe lights make the blood look like spilled drinks on the dance floor.
My hands don’t shake anymore. That’s how I know I’m irretrievably gone.
The day after everything changed, when the sun rose red and bloody over a skyscraper with all the lights on, Harold Fitzgerald sent an email—subject line: “Well Done.” I deleted it without reading.
It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing does.
The restaurants are packed? Doesn’t matter.
Reservations booked six months out? Doesn’t matter.
Michelin inspectors fawning at our feet? Doesn’t matter.
I don’t fucking care about any of it.
I’m standing in the back room of The Caged Bird, waiting for Aleksei to finish his phone call. The bass from the club downstairs thrums through the floor, a ceaseless, churning rhythm to match a heartbeat I no longer possess. I pass the time by counting the cigarette burns in the leather couch.
Aleksei hangs up and turns to me with a smile.
“Bratishka!” he croons as he starts pouring vodka into two glasses. “Sit, sit. You deserve a celebratory drink. You’ve exceeded every expectation.”
I take the glass he offers and throw it down. The vodka tastes like nothing. Everything tastes like nothing now.
“The Southside Irish are finished,” Aleksei continues as he sips his own drink. “The docks are ours. The distribution networks are ours. Even the city council is finally seeing things our way.” He lights a menthol and the smoke curls between us. “You’ve been very productive.”
Productive. That’s one word for it. Aleksei points; I eliminate. It’s simple. Clean. No thinking required.
But the only thing I’m “producing” is a volume of blood and bodies that Chicago has never seen before.
“I have something new for you.” He hands me a folder and I open it without interest. Inside are photos of a warehouse on the North Side. I skim the details, but they don’t really land. Like everything else in my life, the specifics no longer matter to me.
“This one’s a bit different,” Aleksei adds. “Touch more delicate, yeah? The Koreans have been moving product through O’Hare. We need to send a message, but quietly. No bodies this time—just enough fear to make them reconsider their loyalties.”
I nod. Fear without bodies. I can do that. I’ve done worse.
“You look tired,” Aleksei observes, studying me through the smoke.
“I’m fine.”
“When’s the last time you slept?”
I don’t remember. Sleep means dreams, and dreams mean seeing Eliana’s face. The horror in her eyes when she looked at me in that alley. How she ran, ran, ran.
So I don’t sleep. I work. It’s better that way.
“You should take a night off,” Aleksei suggests. “You’re no good to me burned out.”
“I said I’m fine.”
He looks at me for one more long moment, then shrugs. “Suit yourself. The Korean situation needs handling as soon as possible. After that, we’ll talk about next steps.”
I close the folder and stand. “Anything else?”
“Nyet.” I pick up the folder and make toward the door, but Aleksei’s voice stops me. “Oh, wait—there is one more thing, Semyon.”
I pause, but I don’t turn around yet.
“I’ve arranged new accommodations for Sage.”
At that, I turn. “What?”
“Your penthouse is too exposed.” Aleksei taps ash from his cigarette, not meeting my eyes. “I’m moving him to a place on the West Side. He’ll like it—very nice, very private. My men will look after him.”
My men. Not our men. His men.
“He’s fine where he is,” I growl.
“He’ll be better where I’m putting him.” Aleksei finally looks at me, his face half-obscured by the tendrils of smoke. “Unless you’d prefer I leave him vulnerable…? After everything that’s happened, I’d think you’d welcome the extra protection.”
I understand immediately what this is. He makes it sound like a nice offer, a brotherly favor, but it’s not that, not at all.
Sage isn’t being moved for safety.
He’s being taken hostage.
Fucking hell. I can still see my little brother the way he was when I came home that night.
Lying on the floor beside his overturned wheelchair, tears streaming down his face.
How long had he been there? An hour? Two?
I’d locked him in before going to kill a man, and when I finally came back—blood still under my fingernails, Eliana’s horror still fresh in my mind—I found my brother crumpled on the carpet like discarded laundry.
I’d dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out, but he’d flinched away. Flinched. From me. The person who’d spent eight years making sure he never had to be afraid of anything again.
“Don’t touch me,” he’d whispered. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”
I’d never felt so low. Not in the freezer at Tolstoy’s, not in any alley with blood on my hands. Nothing compared to seeing Sage look at me like I was the monster he’d always been protected from.
He hasn’t spoken to me since. We’ve coexisted in the way that a tenant coexists with a ghost in their house. He looks right through me as if I’m not there. Won’t answer when I speak, won’t move when I walk by.
But at least he’s there, goddammit. At least he’s alive and I can see every day that my sacrifice to keep him safe was worthwhile.
Now, Aleksei is taking even that away.
I didn’t think I was capable of losing anything else.
But Aleksei knows better. He’s always known better.
He understands that the human capacity for loss is bottomless.
There’s always one more thing that can be stripped away, one more wound that can be inflicted.
And Sage, broken, furious, silent Sage, is the last tether keeping me from floating off into the void entirely.
If Aleksei disappears my brother into some concrete bunker on the West Side where I can't even confirm he's still breathing, he’ll control the final link between me and this world like a leash in his hands with the other end around my throat.
He sees all of this playing out across my face. His smile widens just slightly.
And all I can do is nod.
“Good. That’s settled, then. Also, I meant to ask you: What ever happened with the blind girl?” Aleksei asks. “What was her name again?”
I grind my teeth together. “Eliana.”
“Ah, yes. Eliana.” Her name is nails on a chalkboard. Every hair on the nape of my neck stands at attention. “Have you heard from her?”
“No.”
“Looked for her?”
“No.”
“Good.” Aleksei settles back in his seat and nods. “Because she was a distraction, wasn’t she? A liability. You’re better off without her.”
Say it. Just fucking say it.
“She was irrelevant,” I force out. “A distraction. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” Aleksei echoes. “Right. As it should be.” He nods again. “The Korean situation. Don’t disappoint me, bratishka.”
I leave without another word, the folder tucked under my arm, and the door closes behind me with a sound like a coffin lid sealing shut.
The Korean warehouse has a single guard stationed at the back entrance, smoking a cigarette and scrolling through his phone. He doesn’t see me coming until my hand is already on his throat. I squeeze, wrench once, and then he’s as dead as I am.
I stoop down to fish the keys out of his pockets. Then I drag him behind a nearby dumpster, go to the door, and let myself in.
The warehouse interior is exactly what I expected: rows of shipping containers, forklifts parked in neat lines, an office in the back with lights still on. I can hear voices—two, maybe three men. They’re all cackling about something.
I move through the shadows between containers, checking as I go to be sure that my knife is sharpened and my gun is loaded. The office door is unlocked. Sloppy work, this. I push it open and the laughter stops.
Three men sit around a folding table inside. When they see me, one reaches for a gun on the desk, but I’m faster. My pistol is aimed at his head before his fingers touch metal.
“Don’t,” I say in Russian, then repeat it in Korean.
One of them—the oldest, gray at the temples—raises his hands slowly. “We don’t want trouble,” he says carefully.
“Then you shouldn’t have been moving product through O’Hare.” I keep my gun steady, my voice deadened. “That’s Bratva territory now.”
“We had an agreement with—”
“You had an agreement with people who don’t run things anymore.” I gesture with the gun toward the warehouse floor. “You have two choices: Pack up and leave Chicago, or stay and find out what happens when you ignore a warning.”
The gray-haired man’s jaw tightens. “And if we refuse both?”
I don’t answer. Instead, I shoot the computer on the desk. The monitor explodes in a shower of glass and sparks. All three men flinch.
“That’s your inventory system,” I say. “Next, I burn your product. After that?” I shrug. “The Izotovs get creative.”
I watch the Koreans scramble to gather their things. Their faces are pale in the low light. One of them is already on his phone, probably calling someone higher up to report what just happened. I let them all live, unscathed. Fear spreads faster when there are witnesses to carry the message.
I holster my gun and walk out the way I came. It’s the dead heat of summer, a time of year when the sweat comes as soon as you step foot outside, but I’ve never felt colder. My skin is pure goosebump. As pale and cold as a corpse’s.
This is my life now.
Eliana is gone. She saw what I am and she ran, and she was right to run. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame anyone except myself for ever believing I could be anything other than this.
Sage is leverage now, insurance against my disobedience. Every night I don’t come home, every order I don’t follow, Aleksei will make my brother pay for it.
And resistance? Resistance would only make things worse. For Sage. For everyone.
So I don’t resist. I get in my car, check my phone for the next assignment, and drive toward whatever fresh horror Aleksei has planned. The dead don’t dream, and the dead don’t hope.
The dead just do what they’re told.
I drive to her apartment without meaning to.
It’s three in the morning when I pull up across the street, engine idling, watching the dark windows that used to house her. Her lights haven’t been on in seven weeks. I know because I’ve done this damn near every night since she left.
I tell myself I’m just checking. Making sure she’s safe. That she hasn’t come back to a place where someone might find her.
But that’s bullshit and I know it.
I’m here because I can’t stop myself. When the night gets late and the city gets quiet, I find myself craving proof that she exists out there, in the real world, not solely as a figment of my imagination. I have to confirm that I didn’t imagine the only good thing that ever happened to me.
But no matter how often I come, the windows stay dark.
An hour passes. Two. The dashboard clock reads 5:12 AM when I finally put the car in drive, and the sun is just beginning to rise over the lake.
She’s not coming back. She’s smart enough to stay gone, hidden from whatever monster I’ve become. And that’s good. That’s right.
She’s safer without me.
I repeat that like a prayer as I drive away, even as the emptiness in my chest threatens to crack my ribs open from the inside out.
Let me stay dead. Let her stay gone.
It’s safer this way.
For all of us.