Chapter 20 Bastian
BASTIAN
window pane test /?windō pān test/: noun
Zeke’s apartment hasn’t changed much since my untimely demise. It still smells like stale gym sweat and Thai basil, his unfolded laundry covers every flat surface, and canisters of protein powder stand sentry over the kitchen.
But I see the things that have changed. That baseball bat propped against the shoe rack in the entryway, for instance… That definitely wasn’t there before. It speaks to nights of anxious fear, of gripping and re-gripping that bat with slippery hands while every sound at the door makes you jump…
As with the bags under Eliana’s eyes, I look at Zeke’s drawn, exhausted grimace and I think to myself, I did that. This is all my fault. Every fucking bit of it.
Zeke finally releases Yasmin long enough to usher us all inside, though his hand stays firmly looped around her hip like he’s afraid she’ll evaporate if he stops touching her.
I get it. God, do I get it.
“Someone want to explain,” Zeke asks, “why my dead best friend just showed up at my door with two women I thought were missing persons?”
“It’s complicated,” I say.
“No goddamn motherfucking shit it’s complicated, you idiot.” He gestures at the couch. “Ladies, please sit. As for you, you undead piece of shit… start talking. And if you leave out a single fucking detail, Bastian, I swear to God, I’ll send you right back to the underworld with my own two hands.”
Eliana finds her way to the couch with Yasmin’s help. They sit together, thigh pressed against thigh, and look up at us reproachfully. I remain standing because sitting feels too much like this is a normal conversation between normal friends catching up normally.
Nothing about this is normal, though.
Zeke doesn’t offer me a beer like he usually would. He just stands in the kitchen with his arms crossed and glares.
“You gave a eulogy, huh?” I finally say. Someone has to break the standoff.
Zeke’s jaw flexes. “Yeah, I did. Cried like a bitch in front of three hundred people. I told them you were the best man I knew, if you can believe that.” He shakes his head in disgust. “And all that time, you weren’t even dead. Dick move, bro.”
“I know.”
“No,” he laughs scornfully. “You don’t. You really fucking don’t.”
I spread my arms wide. “What do you want me to say, Z? That I’m sorry? I am. That I had reasons? I did. That those reasons make any of this okay?” I shake my head. “They don’t. Nothing makes it okay.”
Zeke’s nostrils flare. “You know what we have to do before the healing can begin.”
I knew this was coming. I nod slowly. “Yeah. I do.”
Eliana’s brow furrows. “What? What do you have to do?”
Yasmin looks back and forth between us, equally confused. “Am I missing something?”
“It’s tradition,” says Zeke.
“No way out of it,” I agree somberly.
“Written in stone.”
“Might as well be.”
“Will one of you two morons,” Yasmin interrupts, “stop bantering like fricking talk show hosts and explain what on earth is happening?”
“He gets to punch me in the face,” I explain. “Once. It’s only fair.”
“What?! That’s barbaric!” Eliana protests.
“Actually, I’d say he deserves it,” Yasmin counters.
Zeke rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck from side to side. “It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t go through with it. House rules. You fake your death and let your best friend ugly-cry at your funeral, you take the hit.”
I plant my feet and drop my hands to my sides. “Make it count, brother.”
With absolutely zero hesitation, that’s exactly what he does.
Zeke’s fist connects with my jaw like a fucking freight train.
It’s as if he’s been waiting his whole life to get to swing on me like this, and he makes the most of his opportunity.
My head snaps to the side and I taste copper as hot blood explodes in my mouth.
Stars burst across my vision. I stagger but stay upright, albeit barely.
When the ringing in my ears subsides, Zeke is shaking out his hand with a grimace.
“That’s that,” he announces. “We can all move on now.”
He plucks a bag of frozen peas from his freezer and passes it to me. I accept and stumble over to the armchair, dropping down gratefully. It’s strange—in nearly two months of working for Aleksei, I’ve been stabbed and shot and hit and kicked.
But nothing hurt even one percent as bad as a punch in the jaw from my noodle-armed best friend.
Zeke joins us in the living room and, mumbling because my mouth is on fire, I run him through everything that’s happened as quickly as I can. By the time I’m done, he’s shaking his head in amazement.
“What a mess,” he says. “Sage doesn’t deserve this shit. He’s a good kid.”
“He is,” I agree, pressing the frozen peas harder against my throbbing cheek. “Which is why I need to get him out before Aleksei moves him again.”
“And you’ve got, what, forty-eight hours?”
“Less now.”
Zeke scrubs a hand over his face. “So what’s your play? You can’t exactly waltz up to a Bratva safe house and knock politely.”
“I need to do recon tonight. See the building for myself and figure out when and how we’ll have a chance to make our move.” I switch the peas to a fresher spot. “Frank gave us the address, but I don’t trust his intel enough to go in blind.”
Zeke nods once, an unspoken decision made. “I’m coming with you,” he announces.
“Not a chance. This is a solo—”
“I really fucking wasn’t asking permission.” He crosses his arms. “You’re not doing this alone, Bash. Not after everything.”
He stands and crosses the room to open a drawer beneath the TV console and retrieve a pair of premium binoculars.
Yasmin guffaws as soon as she sees them. It’s the first smile she’s shown since we picked her up from the diner. “Oh, you absolute clown,” she cackles. “Are those your birdwatching binoculars?”
Zeke immediately clutches the binoculars to his chest defensively. “So a guy likes to admire the beauty of winged nature every once in a blue moon. Sue me.”
“That’s gotta be the least sexy hobby a man can have,” she drawls. “Remind me again what I see in you?”
He winks at her. “My roguish good looks, the heart of a gentleman, and a humongous di—”
“Alright!” Eliana interrupts with a clap of her hands before Zeke can finish that particular sentence. “Don’t you two idiots have some spying to go do?”
“Yeah,” I sigh as the brief moment of levity ends as quickly as it started. I stand and look at Zeke. “The girls gonna be alright here?”
He reaches over, grabs the baseball bat, and hands it to Yasmin. “Swing for the nuts if anyone tries anything,” he instructs her.
She salutes as she takes it from him. “We’ll be alright. I promise.”
“Take care of my woman, yeah?” I murmur to her.
I guess I didn’t say it quietly enough, though, because Eliana hears. Her face does a strange thing—half of it twists in a scowl, but the other half, if I’m not mistaken, looks almost like it wants to smile.
I’ll take whatever small victories I can get.
With that, Zeke and I go downstairs to my beat-up car. “I’m glad you’re with me, man,” I tell him with a clap of the shoulder. “It means more than I could ever put into words.”
He shrugs me off, but he’s grinning subtly. “That’s what best friends are for, Bastian. We show up for each other—even when you don’t deserve it.”
The Karlov Avenue building squats at the end of the block like a rotting tooth. It’s exactly as Frank described: boarded windows, gang tags crawling up the brick, just a nasty piece of work. Under any other circumstances, it’s the kind of place you’d cross the street to avoid.
Too bad these circumstances require us to head straight for it.
I kill the headlights a half-block down and cut the engine. Zeke passes me the binoculars without a word.
Through the lenses, the building sharpens into focus.
I take stock of everything I can see that has relevance to our mission here.
It’s three stories of urban decay. The fire escape, rusted to shit, hangs at a precarious angle on the west side.
No lights are visible through the gaps in the plywood covering the windows.
No movement, either. If there are guards, they’re firmly stationed in place for the time being.
“Anything?” Zeke asks after ten minutes of silence.
“Jack shit.”
Twenty minutes go by like that. Thirty. My arms start to ache from holding the binoculars steady. A stray cat picks its way across the overgrown lot next door. A car passes on the cross street, music thumping, then fades into the distance.
Still, nothing stirs.
The familiar tang of betrayal rises in my throat.
Did Frank play me? What if he fed me bullshit coordinates to buy himself time—or worse, to set me up for whatever Aleksei has planned next?
I should’ve known better than to trust a man who’d already sold me out once.
Idiot. I’m an idiot, and Sage is going to suffer for my idiocy.
“This was a mistake,” I mutter, lowering the binoculars. “Just a dumb fucking— Wait.”
Right as I spoke, a light clicked on. Fourth window from the left, second floor.
I yank the binoculars back up so fast I nearly crack myself in the eye socket. My hands are shaking as I adjust the focus, but there’s no mistaking what I see.
It’s Sage’s silhouette against yellowed curtains.
I know the distinctive shape of his wheelchair and the tilt of his head as he reads something in his lap.
He’s sat like that, hair falling in his eyes no matter how many times I’ve tried to coax him into cutting it, since he was eight years old, back when he hunched over comic books in his hospital bed while I sat vigil and prayed to a God I didn’t believe in.
My throat seals up tight.
“Bash?” Zeke sounds like he’s miles away from me right now. “You good? What do you see?”
I can’t answer or explain or do anything except stare at that window, at my little brother’s shadow moving behind the glass.
He’s right there. Close enough that I could probably hit the building with a well-thrown rock. If I screamed his name, he might hear me.
But with the guards I still can’t see, the guns I know must be waiting, and all the imminent violence simmering between us, the distance is as good as infinite. Sage might as well be on fucking Jupiter.
“He’s there,” I finally manage to croak. “Z, he’s there.”
I remember all over again the moment I first laid eyes on him: Aleksei standing in my doorway nearly sixteen years ago, snowflakes melting in his dark hair, holding a bundle of blankets that couldn’t have weighed more than a loaf of bread.
“His name is Sage,” Aleksei had said, thrusting the baby toward me. “Mama died having him. He’s got nobody else.”
I was basically a fucking baby in my own right in those days.
I didn’t know shit about how to raise another human being.
Hell, I couldn’t even take care of myself.
I’d been working double shifts at a steakhouse, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, eating ramen seven nights a week as I tried to get Hale Hospitality off the ground.
But I took that bundle anyway, because what the fuck else was I supposed to do?
Sage was so small then. Impossibly, unbelievably, terrifyingly small. His fingers were the size of matchsticks. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he made these tiny mewling sounds that reminded me of a kitten we’d found once behind our apartment.
But in that moment, I held my baby brother against my chest and made a promise.
Nobody will hurt you. Not ever. Not as long as I’m still breathing.
Now, I’m staring at his shadow through binoculars, and I’ve never felt more like a liar in my life.
But I’m going to fix this. I’m going to fix everything. Zeke, Yasmin, Sage, Eliana—I have so many people who wish they didn’t have to rely on me, but they do, they are, they will. I won’t let them down again.
I’m going to take care of my people.
No matter what it costs me.