Chapter 14 Eliana #2
Behind me: the motel parking lot, the highway, the apartment, the life I’ve been trying to build from scraps and stubbornness.
Ahead: wintergreen and blood and Bastian fucking Hale.
“It’s alright,” Bastian says. “You don’t have to—”
“Shut up.” I step inside before I can change my mind. What else am I going to do? Stand in the parking lot next to whatever’s leaking into the pavement cracks?
The door clicks shut behind me. I hear the deadbolt thump into place.
The sound feels final, like I’ve just locked myself into something I won’t be able to walk away from.
I stand there clutching Excalibur, listening to Bastian breathe somewhere to my left, waiting for him to explain why I shouldn’t turn around and leave right now.
“Thank you,” he says finally, “for coming.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”
I don’t let him speak first. That was one of many decisions I made when I was tossing and turning in my bed last night. I have to get all this out before he gets a word in edgewise. If I let him start talking, there’s no telling what kind of voodoo he’ll enact on my poor, addled brain.
“Here’s how this works,” I begin. “I’ll help you get Sage back. But there are conditions.”
“Eliana—”
“No.” I hold up a hand. “You don’t get to negotiate. You came to me, remember? You slipped that address under my door because you need something from me. So you’re going to shut up and listen.”
I can hear the cheap carpet crunching like Styrofoam under his feet. Finally: “I’m listening.”
“First condition: complete honesty. You tell me everything—about Aleksei and the Bratva, and more importantly, about whatever insane plan you’re cooking up to get Sage back. Everything.”
“That’s—”
“Non-negotiable,” I interrupt. “You want my help? Then I need to know exactly what I’m walking into.”
My hand touches the wall, needing something solid to ground myself. The fake wood paneling buckles under my palm, but I don’t pull away.
“Second,” I continue, “no more decisions made ‘for my own good’ or whatever B.S. justification you want to use this time. We make choices together, or we don’t make them at all. You don’t get to play God with my life anymore.”
I have to swallow hard against the sudden wave of nausea that follows.
“And third…” This is the hardest part, the one that kept me up long past midnight. “When this is over, when Sage is safe and Aleksei is dealt with… you disappear. Permanently.”
He sucks in a breath. “What?”
“You heard me. You get your brother back, and then you’re gone. I don’t want to see hide nor hair of you ever again. You become the ghost you were supposed to be when you faked your death.”
The silence that follows is suffocating. I can hear traffic passing on Route 41, my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
“Those are my terms,” I say when I can’t stand the quiet anymore. “Take them or leave them, but decide now. I’m not standing in this disease factory of a motel room any longer than necessary.”
Bastian clears his throat. “You’re asking me to—”
“I’m not asking you for anything,” I correct. “I’m telling you what it’ll cost to get my help. You can afford it or you can’t. But I’m done being collateral damage in your life, Bastian. So what’s it going to be?”
The intake of breath that follows tells me that he’s about to disregard everything I just said and try to finagle his way out of this. But I have zero interest in that conversation.
“What’s. It. Going. To. Be?”
He lets the breath back out. Then, resigned, he says, “Okay. You should take a seat. There’s a lot for me to explain.”
“I’ll stay standing, thanks.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Now, start talking.”
Bastian launches into the whole story, from the very beginning. It’s like watching him grow up before my eyes. His brother seals him in that freezer and by the time he comes out, he’s a different man.
Years follow and I see little Bastian grow up. Slaving away in kitchens, bandaging his brother. The growing rift between them, then the separation, then Sage appearing like an olive branch—and Bastian slamming the door of reconciliation in Aleksei’s face.
He tells me about Aleksei reappearing at the office after sixteen years of silence and his demand to launder money through Hale Hospitality.
How he refused and Aleksei seemed to go away, but as it turned out, that was never the case.
The debacle the night of the gala, all the missing pieces of Project Olympus. Frank. Harold.
“And so,” he concludes, “now, we have three days.”
I blink. “Three days for what, precisely?”
“Before Aleksei gets back from the West Coast.” He’s all business now. Good. Business is something I can handle. “In that time, I have to figure out where he’s keeping Sage, how to extract him, and how to ensure Aleksei can never use him as leverage again.”
“That’s one hell of a wish list for a dead man,” I mumble.
Bastian laughs miserably. “I know where Aleksei’s men operate, all his little hidey-holes. But I don’t know which one has Sage. Al has been moving him every few days to keep me from tracking him down.”
“So we’re starting from nothing.”
“No, not quite nothing. I have a lead. But meeting him risks tipping off Aleksei that I’m not actually dead.”
“Three days for a wild goose chase,” I repeat as I think. Seventy-two hours to pull off what sounds increasingly like an impossible rescue mission.
There’s a rasping sound as Bastian scratches at his beard. I bet he looks like hell. Red-rimmed eyes, overgrown hair, the works. He sounds like it, at least. “Alright. So step one is to find someone on the inside who will talk.”
“Like I said, I have an idea,” he says. “But you’re not gonna like it.”
“When have I ever liked any of your ideas?”
“Frank Moretti contacted me,” Bastian says.
I go still. “Frank? You can’t be serious.”
“The one and only. That backstabbing son of a bitch.”
My mind races backward through memories of a life I’ve tried to forget.
Frank’s nervous energy during those final site inspections.
The way he couldn’t meet my eyes when we walked through spaces that should’ve been complete but weren’t.
The cigarette butts outside his trailer. The voices I heard yelling inside.
“He fucked you over, and yet you trust him with your little brother’s life now?”
“Does it look like I have a lot of options here, Eliana?”
“No,” I admit. “It doesn’t.”
I lean against the wall. “What did Frank say exactly?”
“He called two days ago and left a voicemail saying he had information about ‘recent developments’ and wanted to meet.” Bastian sighs. “Could be a trap. Could be genuine. Hard to tell with Frank. The man’s always been a coward, but he’s not stupid.”
“Why would he reach out now?”
“Guilt, maybe? Or he finally figured out that working for Aleksei comes with a very short life expectancy.” There’s a bitter edge to Bastian’s voice. “The Bratva doesn’t exactly offer 401ks and a pension.”
“When are you meeting him?”
“Tonight. Back room of a shady strip club a couple miles off the highway.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” I mutter.
“Again,” he says with a humorless chuckle, “I’m not exactly rich with solutions here.”
Another strained pause ensues as both of us squirm in place and think to ourselves about what the hell we’re doing here. The creep in Room Twelve was right: a blind girl showing up at a nasty motel at the ass-crack of dawn is the setup to a bad joke that can only end with an even worse punchline.
“There’s something else,” I hear myself blurt suddenly.
I don’t know why I say it—or, on second thought, maybe I do. It’s because, if I’m demanding complete honesty, then it has to run both ways. Even if every cell in my body is screaming at me to keep this particular secret locked away forever.
I take a breath, then rip the Band-Aid off. “I’m pregnant.”
The air in the room goes still. Even the ice machine outside seems to hold its breath.
“Eight weeks along,” I continue, keeping my face and voice as neutral as I know how to do. “It’s yours.”
Nothing. No suck of breath, no shift of weight, no sound at all.
I wish I could see Bastian and read whatever emotions are playing across those brooding features.
But maybe it’s better this way. Maybe blindness is a mercy right now, letting me stand here with my spine straight and my chin up instead of crumbling under the weight of whatever horror or calculation is written in his eyes.
“Say something,” I finally whisper. “Please.”
I hear him move. The air displaces, and I know he’s reaching for me even before I feel the heat of his hand hovering near my arm.
Then he stops himself, and that almost-touch hangs between us like a question he doesn’t have the right to ask anymore.
“Are you…?” He stops, clears his throat, and tries again. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Had an ultrasound and everything.”
“Jesus. Is it— Are you… are you okay? Do you need—what do you need? Vitamins? A better doctor? Money for—”
“Stop,” I say. “I don’t need anything from you.”
“But the baby—”
“—is mine.” My hand palms my stomach automatically. “This baby is mine, Bastian. Not yours. You gave up any claim the night you chose to pick up that bone saw.”
I can hear him breathing, ragged and uneven, like he’s trying not to fall apart. I don’t allow myself to feel bad for him. Let him fall apart. Let him feel what it’s like to have something precious ripped away without warning or explanation or the chance to say goodbye.
I realize with an ugly, self-serving satisfaction that I’ve finally done it: I’ve shattered him completely. In the end, it didn’t take much. Just the simple truth of a gummy-bear-sized life growing inside me that he’ll never get to know.
“I never meant—” he starts.
“I know exactly what you meant and didn’t mean,” I say.
“But intentions don’t matter anymore. This baby will grow up without you.
They’ll never know your name, or hear your voice, or even get the chance to wonder why their father chose the things he did.
As far as they’ll be concerned, you died in that warehouse.
I’m going to do what I promised I’d do—for Sage’s sake, not yours—and then you’re going to hold up your end of the deal: You’re going to disappear forever. ”
Even as I’m saying it, all these things I rehearsed, part of me wants to take it all back.
But I don’t.
Because this is what we are now—two people who loved each other once, standing in a shitty motel room, negotiating the terms of our mutual destruction.
Anything else is a lie.