Chapter 22 Bastian
BASTIAN
flash point /flaSH point/: noun
The rooftop gravel bites into my knees through my jeans as I crouch behind an HVAC unit, watching the safe house across the street. My phone screen glows with the time.
Should. Should is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this plan. More than I’d like.
I taste metal on my tongue, that familiar tang of adrenaline that I’ve come to know intimately over the past two months.
My fingers tighten around the climbing harness strapped across my chest. It cost me four hundred bucks cash at the REI in Schaumburg this morning.
The cashier gave me a quizzical look when I asked which model could support two hundred pounds of deadweight on a rapid descent, but in the end, she rang me up without questions.
Thank fuck, because my backup option was slinging a bath towel over the wires and praying like hell that it’d hold me.
The power lines stretch between buildings, sagging in the humid air. They look thinner from up here than they did from street level.
Six stories below, the pavement waits with infinite patience and infinite appetite for blood.
Zeke’s voice crackles through the headphone in my ear that’s connected to the cheap burner phones we bought. “In position at the south entrance. Ready when you are, Captain.”
My idiot best friend showed up tonight wearing all black, like we’re auditioning for roles in Ocean’s Eighteen.
But to his credit, he didn’t ask questions when I handed him the jerry can of gasoline and explained his job was to torch the nearest parallel-parked car, chuck in a handful of fireworks, and then get the hell out of Dodge before the guards could put a bullet in him.
“You sure about this?” is all he’d asked. I’d said, “No,” and he’d nodded like that was good enough for him.
That’s Zeke. That’s always been Zeke.
“Copy,” I murmur into the phone. “Eleven twenty-three. Seven minutes out.”
“Seven minutes,” he repeats. “Then I light this bitch up and we see if your crazy plan actually works.”
“It’ll work.”
“You sound real confident for a guy about to tightrope-walk across live electrical wires.”
“Dumb confidence is all I’ve got left, Z.”
“That’s all you’ve ever had, emphasis on the ‘dumb,’” he snorts. “That and your winning personality. So I guess this really is goodbye.”
Somehow, I find it in me to laugh. “Stay safe.”
“You, too, asshole. Don’t die for real this time. I don’t have any good lines left over for a second eulogy.”
The last few minutes crawl by like hours.
11:24.
11:25.
11:26.
My muscles are coiled tight enough to throb. The harness digs into my hips where I’ve cinched it too tight, but there’s no adjusting it now.
11:28.
I move into position at the roof’s edge. The power lines veer off before me. The safe house squats on the other side, waiting.
Sage’s window is dark now. He must have gone to sleep, not knowing his brother is about to do something unbelievably fucking stupid to get him back.
11:29.
I clip the harness to the wire. The metal carabiner clicks into place.
11:29:57… :58… :59…
At the stroke of 11:30, the night explodes.
Firecrackers rip through the air—crack-crack-crack-crack—sounding exactly like gunfire, just as we planned.
Shouts erupt from below. I hear boots pounding on pavement and see the black smudged shadows of guards scrambling toward the south entrance where Zeke’s motor vehicle victim of choice is presumably going up in flames.
I don’t hesitate.
I launch myself off the roof, and the wire catches my weight with a wary groan that vibrates through my entire skeleton. My shoulders scream as I start shimmying, hand over hand. The wire sways above beneath me, undulating from side to side in lazy arcs that make my stomach turn.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t fucking look down.
I keep moving.
The far rooftop rushes toward me faster than expected. I release the harness at the last possible second and drop, tucking into a roll that my knees immediately despise. The gravel tears through my jeans and into skin, but I’m across.
I’m fucking across.
No time to celebrate, though.
I find the rooftop access door and wrench it open with a screech that makes me wince. My footsteps echo down the interior stairwell no matter how carefully I place them. I pause between each one to listen for signs of guards.
But I hear nothing. I reach the second floor landing without incident. I ease the door open one inch. Then two.
The hallway stretches before me, lit by a single flickering bulb that casts everything in sickly yellow.
I see one guard, just one, slouched against the wall about fifteen feet from Sage’s door, his face illuminated by the glow of his phone screen.
His rifle leans against the wall beside him, close but not in his hands.
I move in.
The carpet muffles my footsteps as I close the distance. The guard doesn’t look up from his phone. I hope the TikTok reel was worth it, you miserable bastard, I think to myself.
My arm hooks around his throat from behind, locking into the chokehold Aleksei taught me when I was twelve years old, back when our biggest concern was which corner boys were trying to muscle in on our territory.
“Cut off the blood, not the air,” he’d instructed, demonstrating on a practice dummy we stole from the back of a sporting goods store.
“If you do it right, they go out quiet in ten seconds flat. That’s what you want. Not a fucking peep.”
All these years later, I still do it right. The guard’s phone falls to the floor. His hands fly to my forearm, clawing uselessly. I count in my head—one, two, three, four—and feel the exact moment his body goes slack.
He never even saw my face.
I drag him to a supply closet halfway down the hallway, stuff a rag into his mouth, and use his own belt to secure his wrists behind his back. By the time he manages to get loose, we’ll be long gone.
I hope.
I approach Sage’s door and test the handle. It’s locked, of course. But it’s a cheap interior bolt, so all it takes is one sharp kick and the door splinters inward.
Sage jerks upright in bed. His face churns through every possible emotion in the span of a single heartbeat.
Shock first, eyes going wide, mouth falling open.
Then relief pours in, softening the hard lines of his jaw, making him look younger than sixteen, making him look like the little boy I used to carry on my shoulders through Grant Park.
Hope flickers next. Brief. Frail. A candle flame in a hurricane.
“… Bastian?”
And then it dies, snuffed out by a darkness I know well from every time I’ve looked in the mirror over the last two months.
Rage.
Pure, undiluted rage.
“You left me,” he hisses. He hurls it like an accusation, like I’ve committed the worst crime imaginable.
Maybe I have.
“Sage—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No. You don’t get to say my name. You don’t get to be here.”
I cross the room and drop to my knees at his bedside. The mattress springs creak as he flinches back from me, pressing himself against the headboard like I’m the threat here.
“I’m getting you out of here, Sage. Right now,” I tell him. “There’s a car downstairs. Zeke and Yasmin and Eliana are waiting.”
But even as Eliana’s name leaves my mouth, I feel the awful burden of what I’m asking. Trust me. Trust me again, after I chose blood over you. After I locked you in your room and walked out to commit murder. After I let you fall from your wheelchair while I was busy sawing off a dead man’s finger.
Trust me again, even though I’ve given you every reason not to.
Sage’s jaw works from side to side. His hands grip the thin blanket pooled around his waist, knuckles bone-white against the fabric.
“You left me,” he says again. “You fucking left me, Basti. On the floor. I couldn’t even get back into my chair.
I just laid there for hours, waiting for you to come home, and you never—”
“I know.” I swallow down a bitter, venomous taste on my tongue. “I know what I did.”
“Do you?” he laughs. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looked a lot like you chose to go after all the shit you swore you’d never touch again.”
“I did.” There’s no point in lying to him. Nor is there any point in hiding the tears surging down my cheeks, same as the ones surging down his. “I chose wrong, Sage. I wish like fuck that I didn’t, but I did, and I can’t take it back.”
His breath shudders out of him. In the dim light filtering through the barred window, his tear tracks glow.
“I’m sorry,” I add. “I’m so goddamn sorry, Sage.”
“What’s that supposed to fix?” he sneers.
“Right now? Nothing. But I’ll fix it all. I swear to God I will.” I shove myself to my feet. “Until then, though, we need to get the fuck out of here.”
I’m calculating how the hell I’ll go about getting a wheelchair down the fire escape in when I hear the footsteps. Heavy boots on hardwood, moving fast in our direction.
“Bast—”
“Quiet. Let me think.”
I have maybe fifteen seconds before they round that corner.
Therefore, fuck the wheelchair.
I lunge into action.
The window slides open without a sound. Frank’s reno work was good on this one detail at least.
I turn back and scoop Sage out of bed in one fluid motion. His arms instinctively wrap around my neck even as his face contorts with fury. He’s lighter than I remember, or maybe I’m just running on so much adrenaline that I could bench press a fucking Buick right now.
“Basti, what the—”
“Hold onto me,” I snarl. “Don’t let go.”
But I didn’t move fast enough. The guard rounds the corner at the end of the hall.
I see the man’s face make sense of what he’s looking at—a dead man holding a hostage boy, framed by an open window like some fucked-up Renaissance painting, chiaroscuro lighting and all.
He lifts his gun.
Levels it at us.
And I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.
My hands are full of my brother. My weapons are in my waistband, unreachable. We’re frozen here, caught between escape and execution, and all I can do is watch as the guard thumbs off the safety and aims it directly at my chest.