Chapter 11 Eliana
ELIANA
rescue /?res?kyo?o/: verb
There’s a moment when everything feels whole again.
I press my palms flat against his chest, just like I did that first night in his office when I stumbled into him in the dark. My fingers spread across the crisp cotton of his shirt, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
Back then, I’d been practicing blindness. Now, I am blind, and touch is all I have to confirm he’s not another hallucination conjured by grief and exhaustion.
His heart beats beneath my hands. Strong and steady, just like the ultrasound said about our baby’s. One hundred and sixty beats per minute for the little one. Maybe forty for Bastian, if that. Two hearts, both still going.
Both.
Still.
Going.
“You’re really here,” I whisper.
“I’m here.”
My hands move up to his shoulders, his neck, his jaw, all that familiar terrain. The slight stubble. The razor’s edge of his cheekbone. The warmth of his skin.
He’s not dead. Bastian is not dead.
Which means everything I thought I knew about the last few hours is wrong.
Which means…
… the wholeness shatters.
“You let me think you were dead,” I grit out. “I went to your funeral, Bastian.”
“I can explain—”
“I stood in that cathedral!” My hands shove against his chest. He doesn’t budge an inch, which only makes me angrier.
“I listened to strangers talk about you like they knew you, as if they had any fucking clue who you really were, and the whole time, I thought—” I shove him again, harder this time. “I thought you were fucking dead.”
The heartbreak hits me all over again, but this time, it’s tangled up with a temper so hot I can feel it burning through my veins. I mourned him. I cried myself sick thinking about how I’d never get to tell him about our—
No. I can’t think about that now. If I do, I’ll truly lose it.
More importantly, he doesn’t deserve to know.
“Do you have any idea what you put me through?” My hands are shaking so violently I have to press them against my thighs to quell the tremors. “I heard it on the news. And I just—I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. And then I had to sit there and pretend everything was fine while—”
I cut myself off before I spill too much.
“—while I tried to process that you were gone,” I say instead. “The last time I saw you, you were covered in blood in an alley, and I ran, and I never got to—to—” The sob catches in my throat. I won’t cry. I won’t give him that. “So how dare you? How dare you let me believe that?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Bullshit! You always have a choice, Bastian. That’s what you taught me, remember? You’re the one who’s always in charge of fucking everything, and you expect me to believe that your hands were just tied? I’ll ask again: How fucking dare you?”
I can hear him breathing, slow and measured, like he’s trying to stay calm. It makes me want to scream again.
“I mourned you,” I repeat after another trembling exhale. “I stood in that church and I mourned you, and it was all a lie. Just another lie in a long list of them. I don’t know why I ever expected anything different from you.”
“Eliana, please—”
“Get out.”
“El—”
“Get out of my apartment. Get out of my life. I can’t—” I press my hand against my mouth, trying to hold back another sob. “I can’t do this again. I won’t.”
But I don’t hear him make any move toward the door.
“Did I fucking stutter?” I hiss. “I told you to get out.”
“No.”
“‘No’? It wasn’t a question, Bastian! Get out! Get! The! Fuck! Out!”
I start battering him with my fists. I connect with his chest, his shoulders, anywhere I can reach. I don’t think I could do serious damage if I tried, though God knows I am trying. I’m trying like hell to hurt him so he knows just one percent of how much he’s hurt me.
He doesn’t try to stop me. Doesn’t grab my wrists or step back or defend himself at all. He just stands there and takes it, absorbing every hit like he’s been waiting for this.
“I hate you,” I sob between strikes. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you…”
But soon, my fists slow. My arms grow heavy. The rage burns itself out, leaving only exhaustion in its wake. I sag against him when I’m finally spent, forehead to his chest.
“I deserve that,” he murmurs. “Penance for my sins. But I still can’t leave.”
“Watch me make you,” I spit back.
I reach for where I think the door is, intending to wrench it open and shove him through it if I have to. My hand finds only air, then the wall, then, finally, the doorknob. I yank it open so hard the hinges protest.
“I’m not leaving, Eliana.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because Aleksei has Sage.”
My hand freezes on the doorknob. “… What?”
“My brother. Aleksei, the one I told you about.” Bastian’s voice is still flat, but with every new syllable, it starts to fray at the edges and expose something raw and bleeding underneath. “He has Sage.”
I don’t move. My hand stays where it is, wrapped around the doorknob, more for balance than anything else now.
“He implied that if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he’d hurt him,” Bastian continues. “So I did. I did everything. The killing, the hits, the whole fucking show.”
My hand slips off the doorknob.
“The funeral was staged,” he says. “It was my only option to get away from him and buy some time. As far as the world knows, Bastian Hale is dead. Which means I can’t go to the police. I can’t go to anyone. Because if Aleksei finds out I’m still alive and not under his control, Sage is…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to.
“So you’re a ghost,” I say. “A dead man walking around my apartment.”
“For three more days, yes.”
I frown. “What happens in three days?”
“Aleksei’s on the West Coast,” Bastian explains. “Business trip. But when he gets back and realizes what I’ve done—that I faked my death to get out—he’ll know I betrayed him. And Sage…”
His voice fractures on his brother’s name.
I lean back against the door, suddenly grateful for its solidity. My legs feel like they might give out. “So you came here.”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
The laugh that escapes me is sharp enough to draw blood. “You’re unbelievable. You know that? You let me mourn you, put me through hell, and now, you show up because you need something. Typical fucking man. Nowhere to be found when I need you, but as soon as you need me, boom, here you are.”
“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice.” He hesitates, then adds, “I wanted to look for you, you know. After you ran. But I didn’t. For your sake, I didn’t.”
“For my sake?” I repeat, incredulous. “You disappeared into the criminal underworld and committed murder for ‘my’ sake? I think you need to go back to the School of Grand Romantic Gestures, buddy, because this ain’t it.”
“You saw what I became that night,” he growls. “In that alley. You looked at me like I was a monster, and you were right to. So I stayed away because that’s what you deserved: to be free of me.”
“Don’t you dare make yourself the martyr in this story.”
“I’m not. I know what I am, Eliana. I’ve always known.
” He takes a step closer, his scent and heat invading my space.
“And I know better than to ask for forgiveness. Even if you’d give it to me, I don’t deserve it.
So don’t mistake why I’m here. I didn’t come for that; I know it’s a lost cause.
I came for Sage. Nothing more. Nothing less. ”
“So what do you want from me?” I ask.
“I need your help.”
“That’s fucking rich,” I scoff. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m blind, broke, and on the run from a murderous asshole.”
I can practically hear him running his hands through his hair.
“I’m desperate, Eliana. I can’t involve Zeke—Aleksei knows him.
He’d be in danger the second I made contact.
I can’t go to the police without Aleksei finding out, because he owns every fucking cop in Chicago.
I need someone he doesn’t know about. Someone outside the Bratva’s awareness.
Someone who’s already a ghost like me, who is smart enough to help me figure out how to get Sage back without getting him killed in the process. ”
He pauses. Waits.
“I need you, Eliana.”
A deathless silence follows. God, I wish it could swallow me whole.
“You have a lot of fucking nerve,” I whisper at last.
“I know.”
“After everything—”
“I know.”
“—you show up here and ask me to—”
“I know,” he says. “But I have nowhere else to go. So that’s the question: Will you help me?”