Chapter 6 Bastian
BASTIAN
sachet d'épices /sa?SHā dā?pēs/: noun
Harold Fitzgerald’s bow tie is crooked.
I notice this as he leans across the conference table, one meaty hand extended for a congratulatory shake.
“Remarkable, Bastian. Simply remarkable.” His grip is damp.
I resist the urge to wipe my palm on my slacks when he finally releases me.
“The Michelin announcement alone has generated more buzz than we could have bought with ten times the marketing budget.”
Around the table, the other investors murmur agreement. Charts and projections litter the polished surface, all those neat little graphs climbing upward like staircases to heaven.
Project Olympus is a smash fucking hit.
I should feel something about that. Pride, maybe. Satisfaction. Relief that the thing I nearly destroyed myself building is actually working.
But I don’t feel a fucking thing.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” I say instead.
“Er, right.” He withdraws uncomfortably. “Well, we’ll let you get back to it. Dinner next week? The club?”
“I’m busy,” I say, already standing. The universal signal for get the fuck out of my office.
They take the hint. Handshakes all around—more damp palms, more congratulations I don’t give a flying fuck about. I walk them to the elevator with a face of stone.
The doors slide open with a pleasant chime that grates against my nerves. We file in, Harold still talking about market penetration and brand recognition and other terms that used to mean something to me. The elevator descends in smooth, climate-controlled silence.
Ground floor. The doors open again onto the lobby’s marble expanse.
“Bastian?” Harold pauses in the doorway. “You coming?”
“No.” My thumb finds the basement button. “I’ve got something else to take care of.”
“Ah. Of course.” He adjusts that goddamn bow tie again. “Don’t work too hard.”
The doors close on his teasing smirk. He thinks I’m heading down to inspect kitchen equipment or review inventory. It’s the hapless grin of someone who has no fucking idea what I’ve become.
The elevator continues its descent into the dark.
When it reaches the lowest circle of hell, I step out of the elevator and into the concrete corridor that runs beneath Olympus’s gleaming kitchens.
It’s not pretty down here. It’s ugly, intentionally so.
Raw-edged concrete and metal pipes. The flickering fluorescent lights are daggers to the eyeball, but they’re better than the darkness.
It could be anything hiding in the darkness.
My footsteps echo as I walk toward the storage room at the far end. The door is steel and windowless. I unlock it with a key that lives on a separate ring from all my others.
Inside, Aleksei’s latest problem is zip-tied to a folding chair.
He’s already been worked over—ribs mottled purple and black, lip split so deep I can see the pink of inner tissue, head lolling forward like his neck has already given up the fight. One of Aleksei’s men did the preliminary work. Softened the meat for me.
I’m here to carve it up and serve it on a silver platter.
The man’s eyes track me as I cross the room. He whimpers before I’ve even said a word. He knows why I’m here. What I am. What I represent.
The last thing he’ll ever see.
“Please.” His voice comes out wet, garbled. He’s missing teeth. I can see the raw, bleeding sockets when he talks. “I got kids. I got—”
“Shut up.”
I don’t reach for the gun right away. Instead, I shrug off my jacket and fold it over the back of an empty chair. Roll my sleeves to the elbow.
Aleksei prefers I do these things quickly and neatly, but I’m past giving a shit about his preferences. This isn’t about sending messages anymore.
It’s just about getting through the day.
“The gun would be mercy,” I tell him. My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere far away. “I don’t know the meaning of the word.”
I pick up a scalpel from the selection of implements resting on a nearby table. I heft it, switch it from one hand to the other, then turn on him.
His eyes bulge. “No, no, no—”
Grabbing his jaw, I split his cheek in two. Right side, then left. His jaw hangs loose and wrong from his face now. Blood pours in red curtains down his throat. The scream that comes out is damn near unholy.
I grab a fistful of his hair and wrench his head back, forcing him to look at me. His face is a ruin. Unrecognizable. One eye already swelling shut, the other wide and white-rimmed with terror.
Blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
His bladder releases. The acrid smell of urine joins the metal-and-mold cocktail already saturating the air. He’s crying now. Tears cut tracks through the dried blood on his face.
“My kids,” he whispers. “Please. They need—”
“You stole from the Bratva. Did you think there wouldn’t be consequences?”
I release his hair and drive my fist into his chest. Something gives beneath the impact—ribs, probably, the ones Aleksei’s men have already cracked. He screams, or tries to. It’s a repulsive, gagging sound.
“My kids,” he says again. “Please…”
For one second—one fraction of a heartbeat—something opens in my own chest. It’s the memory of a different man. A path not taken. A pinky not cut.
Then it’s gone.
I grip his left hand, still zip-tied to the chair arm, and position the scalpel above his index finger. He’s shaking so hard the whole chair quivers against the concrete.
“This is for the money you stole.”
I push down.
His scream bounces off the cinderblock walls, high and animal. The finger comes away with a wet, tearing sound. Blood wells up, dark and immediate.
“This is for making me come down here on a Tuesday.”
The second finger is harder to grip because his hand is slick with blood now. But I manage. I always manage.
By the time I reach his third finger, he’s stopped screaming. Shock, probably. His head sags forward as his consciousness fades like a dying bulb.
That’s good enough. I pull the gun from my waistband. A Glock 19, clean and simple.
“Look at me.”
He doesn’t respond. I grab his hair again, force his head up. His one good eye finds mine, glassy and unfocused. I open my mouth to tell him to rot in hell with all the rest of the thieves and traitors.
What comes out instead is, “I’ll tell your kids I’m sorry.”
Then I press the barrel against his forehead and pull the trigger.
The gunshot is deafening in the enclosed space. The man’s head snaps back. The chair tips, taking his body with it, and he hits the concrete with a gruesome thud that I feel through the soles of my shoes.
Silence rushes back in, broken only by the fluorescent lights’ persistent hum.
I stand there for a moment, gun still raised, watching blood pool beneath the overturned chair. My hand is steady. My breathing is even. My heart rate hasn’t changed.
I lower the gun and pull out my phone. One text to Aleksei’s cleanup crew: In the basement.
They’ll be here within the hour to make this disappear. They always are.
I step over the body on my way out, careful not to track blood into the hallway. There’s a small bathroom at the end of the corridor. I stop there to wash the red from my hands.
Blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
I’ll tell your kids I’m sorry.
Where the fuck did that come from?
I push through the service exit into the alley behind Olympus. The sun is bloody red. Feels like it’s been that color every dawn and every dusk for weeks now. It comes in hot streaks through the gaps between buildings. I blink against it as my eyes adjust slowly.
That’s when I see him.
Zeke leans against the brick wall about twenty feet away, hands shoved in his pockets, looking thinner and gaunter than ever. There’s a faded, yellow-green shadow of bruising along his jaw. He’s wearing a Cubs cap pulled low and sunglasses despite the overcast sky.
I consider turning around and walking back inside, because he’ll know at first glance what I’ve been doing, even though I made sure to leave no blood caked underneath my fingernails.
“You look like shit,” he says when I’m close enough.
“Right back at you.”
“Yeah, well. Blunt force trauma from a fuckin’ psycho will do that.” He touches his jaw gingerly, then drops his hand. “You got a minute?”
I glance back at the door. Inside, Aleksei’s cleanup crew is probably already at work, erasing evidence of what I just did. Making it like that man never existed. As if his children won’t spend the rest of their lives wondering why their father never came home.
I’ll tell your kids I’m sorry.
“Not here,” I say.
“Where, then?”
I think about our old spots—the dive bar in Pilsen where we used to shoot pool, the coffee shop near his apartment with the barista Zeke used to crush on. All those places feel like they belong to a different person. Not me. Couldn’t possibly be me.
“Millennium Park,” I say finally. “The Bean.”
Zeke’s eyebrows rise above his sunglasses. “Tourist central? That’s your idea of private?”
“That’s the point. No one pays attention to anyone else.”
He thinks about that, then nods. “Alright. Twenty minutes?”
“Yeah.”
He turns to leave, then pauses. “Bash?”
“What?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He doesn’t blink or look away. “Just so you know. I’m still your best friend. No matter what’s happened or what you’ve done.”
He leaves without waiting for me to reply. I watch him walk away, his gait still slightly uneven from the attack.
The bruises will fade.
The memories won’t.
Half an hour later, I find him standing beneath the Bean’s curved chrome belly. He’s looking up at his reflection in the metal. It’s distorted, distended, ugly, wrong. I don’t dare look up to see mine.
“You remember when we brought Sage here?” he says without preamble. “Must’ve been, what, five years ago? He made us take like a hundred photos.”
I remember. Sage was eleven, still figuring out how to navigate the world from a wheelchair. Floppy-haired and braver than I could ever be.
“Why are you here, Zeke?”
He turns to face me, and even through the sunglasses, I can see the exhaustion in his eyes. “I’ve been looking for them. Eliana and Yasmin.”
I pretend like something cold isn’t dripping down my spine. “And?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “No credit card transactions. No social media activity. No sightings. It’s like they vanished into fucking thin air, man.”
I say nothing. I keep my face expressionless.
“The police are still looking for them, too,” Zeke continues. “Witnesses for Brandon’s trial and all that jazz. But Bash…” He pauses. “They’re gone.”
I close my eyes and exhale. That’s as close as I’ll get to falling to my knees in relief.
She’s gone—gone from me, specifically, which is the smartest fucking thing she could ever do. She saw what I truly am and ran for the hills. She’s always been a bright one, that Eliana.
And yet there’s still a part of me that wants to ask Zeke to keep looking. Hire a private investigator and turn over every stone in this godforsaken city until we find her.
But that would be the most selfish thing I could do.
She ran from me for a reason. She saw what she saw and made a choice. The only choice.
“Good,” I hear myself say. “Better that way.”
“Better?” Zeke sounds incredulous. “Bash, she’s blind. She’s out there somewhere, completely fucking blind, and you think it’s better that we can’t find her?”
“She’s got Yasmin.”
“Oh, yeah? Yasmin? Yasmin, who’s got a stalker ex who put me in the hospital? Yasmin’s got enough of her own shit to worry about, man! You really think that’s a stable support system?”
I clench my jaw. “What do you want me to say?”
“For starters, you could act like you give a shit!” Zeke steps close enough that I can see my own reflection in his sunglasses, the reflection I’ve fought like hell to avoid.
It’s even worse than I expected—grotesque, emotionless, wrong.
“I want you to be the guy I thought you were. The guy that she thought you were. Not this…” He gestures at me, disgust clear in every line of his body. “Whatever the fuck this is.”
“I do give a shit,” I murmur, almost to myself. “That’s the problem.”
Zeke’s jaw works. “Then why aren’t you looking for her?”
“She doesn’t want to be found. Not by me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” I turn away from him, from his reflection and mine in the Bean’s chrome surface. If I never saw my face again, it would still be too soon. “I know exactly what she saw that night. I know what I looked like. What I was doing. And I know that no sane person would ever want to see that again.”
“So what, you’re just giving up? That’s it? You’re done?”
I don’t answer right away. Tourists stream past, taking selfies and laughing. None of them notice the two men standing in the Bean’s shadow, one of them asking if the other is capable of letting go.
Am I done with Eliana? Have I accepted that she’s gone for good?
The correct answer is yes. Lie, motherfucker, lie.
Instead, I reach into my jacket pocket.
The paper I pull out is soft from being folded and unfolded too many times.
The creases are worn thin, threatening to tear.
I’ve carried it every single day since she left, transferring it from one jacket to another, one pair of pants to the next.
Sometimes, I take it out in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep and read through her handwriting by the light of my phone.
Things to see before I go blind
I unfold it now and hold it out to Zeke without a word.
He takes it carefully. His eyes scan the list—the skyline at sunrise, Casablanca, standing in the rain. Most of the items are crossed out.
Then he looks up at me. “Bastian…”
I don’t say anything. What is there to say? The fact that I still have it, that I’ve kept it close like a talisman or a penance, says everything about how little I’ve actually moved on.
Zeke gazes at me with something halfway between pity and understanding. I can’t decide which of those two I’d hate more. Then he hands the list back, and I fold it carefully along its worn creases. It goes back into my pocket, right over my heart, where it’s lived for seven long weeks.
Where it will stay until I figure out how to deserve her again.
Or until I finally accept that I never will.