Chapter 28 Eliana
ELIANA
the pass /T?H? pas/: noun
I leave Bastian to bro-handle whatever personal crisis Zeke is going through and I keep heading down the hallway toward Yasmin’s room. If Zeke’s as upset as he sounded, then Yas is probably in hysterics, about to commit several felonies, or both.
I tend to handle my traumas inwardly. Yasmin, on the other hand, is the polar freaking opposite.
Everything that’s ever happened to her, good or bad, is processed through a series of sometimes entertaining and more often terrifying episodes.
We’re talking dramatic soliloquies, floors scrubbed with violent intensity, the occasional soft (or not-so-soft) object hurled at a wall.
For the good of all the breakable items in this house, I need to calm her down.
I knock on her door. “Yazzy, babe? It’s me.”
I’m greeted with silence at first, then a muffled, “Go away.”
“You and I both know that’s not happening.” As I slip inside, I detect the aroma of lavender incense, which increases my concern by several levels. Lavender, in Yasmin’s world, is the smell of impending meltdowns. “Wanna tell me what’s going on, or should I just start guessing?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar is what you are.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a terrible friend.”
I tap my pointer finger to my lips. “Gotta say, that feels a little harsh.”
“A better friend would let me wallow in misery all by myself.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure a better friend would not let you do that.
It’s kind of the definition of the term.
” I feel my way to the bed and sit down on the edge.
My hand finds a lumpy pile of tissues, which I promptly relocate to the nightstand.
I sincerely hope they’re wet from tears and not…
other substances. “Seems like it might’ve been bad.
Zeke sounded like someone ran over his dog.
Multiple times. Forward and backward. With a semi-truck. ”
Yasmin sniffles. “Good. He deserves to feel like shit.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I insist. “C’mon. Talk. I’m a good listener.”
She hesitates still, sniffling and blowing her nose repeatedly. Her voice is all teary at the edges when she finally speaks. “He just makes me feel so many things at once. I think I might explode.”
I chuckle. “Not all of them are good things, I take it?”
“No! Not at all!” she cries. “But even if they were, does it have to be so many at the same time? A girl likes to have time to sort through stuff, you know. It’s not fair to just pile it on me.”
“Well, why don’t we take it one by one?” I suggest. “Like a grocery list. Except instead of zucchinis and eggplants, it’s emotions. Much more fun.”
She sounds like a dying goose as she honks into another tissue. “Fine. Emotion number one: I’m furious.”
“At Zeke?”
“At everyone! At Zeke for suggesting we turn tail and run. At Bastian for dragging us into this mess in the first place. At Brandon for… just existing, I guess. And most of all, I’m furious at myself for being stupid enough to fall for a guy who thinks the solution to every problem is either punching it or feeding it. ”
“To be fair, those are solid problem-solving strategies in many contexts.”
“Not helpful, El.”
“Sorry. Continue.”
“Emotion number two: I’m terrified.” She swallows hard.
“Every time I close my eyes, I still feel Brandon’s hands around my throat.
And now, there’s this whole other layer of danger on top of it, this shadowy mob nonsense I know nothing about, and Zeke wants to talk about running?
” She laughs bitterly. “Where exactly does he think we can run to? The moon? Mars? Aleksei probably has people on Mars!”
“I don’t think the Bratva has interplanetary reach just yet. But we can’t rule it out, I suppose.” I lace my hands together in my lap. “Okay, what’s emotion number three?”
The lavender incense curls through the air between us, thick and cloying. When Yasmin speaks, that booming, take-no-shit voice of hers has gone as meek as a little mouse. It hurts me to hear her like this.
“Emotion number three is that I’m in love with him.”
I wait. There’s more to come.
“I’m so in love with him,” she says, “and I hate it. I hate so many things about it! Like, there’s so much guilt that we left him the way we did.
I know we had to, and if we went back, I’d do it all over again because I love you, too—but I fall asleep every night seeing him lying on the floor of my apartment, so still and pale and bloody, and it breaks my fucking heart, Elly.
I think part of the reason I’m mad is that I’m lashing out to pretend I didn’t play a role in turning all this into such a mess. ”
I reach out and touch her knee, just to establish some kind of physical reassurance between us. “You can’t beat yourself up like that, hon. For what it’s worth, I feel guilty, too.”
She exhales shakily. “The point is, I don’t know how to be this person. Caring? Psshh—that’s never been me. I’ve always been the one who walks away first. Who keeps things light. Who doesn’t let anyone get close enough to—”
“To hurt you?”
“To see me.”
“And Zeke sees you,” I say softly. “That’s the biggest problem of all, right?”
She sobs in laughing frustration. “He sees everything. It’s infuriating.
I can’t hide from him. He just looks at me with those stupid, earnest, soulful puppy dog eyes of his and asks if I’m okay.
I want to scream at him that of course I’m not okay, nothing is okay, nothing has ever been less okay, but also I want to crawl into his arms and never leave. ”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“Tell me about it.” She blows her nose again, loudly, another dying goose snort.
“And the worst part is that he’s not even doing anything wrong.
He’s just being himself. Being kind. Being patient.
Being annoyingly, relentlessly there. And I’m over here acting like a feral cat who got cornered in an alley. ”
“I’ve always thought feral cats are very misunderstood creatures,” I offer.
“Bad PR. Not their fault.” I scoot closer to her, thigh to thigh, and she rests her head on my shoulder.
“Yasmin, we are the way we are because we’ve been hurt before.
And we swore we’d never let the world close enough to hurt us again.
But the world has a way of worming past your defenses when you’re not paying attention, whether we like it or not.
We can fight and build new walls, or we can… ”
“Murder the trespassers?” she suggests hopefully.
“I was gonna say, ‘Let love in again,’ but your suggestion does have some merit to it.”
We both laugh, and I realize that I’m crying now, too. Yasmin’s problems are mine, and my problems are hers, and both of us—and both Zeke and Bastian, and now Sage, too—are all caught up in this nasty, lightless mess with no end in sight. We’re stumbling in the dark. All of us, not just me.
But in times like these, I default to Ye Old Reliables: a.k.a.
, the motivational posters hung up on the walls of my sixth grade classroom.
The one that springs to mind right now was a chain of silhouettes holding hands, with a slogan on the bottom that read, If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together.
I do want to go far. Far away from here and this nightmare and this tear-soaked, snotty-tissue-filled bed. There are better days ahead for all five of us, I know it.
We just have to trust each other enough to make it there.
“Hey,” I say, giving Yasmin’s shoulder a squeeze. “Why don’t you go take a shower? Hot water, some of that fancy eucalyptus body wash you like. It’ll help.”
She sniffles. “You think a shower is going to fix this?”
“At the very least, it’ll make you feel like a human being again instead of a swamp creature who’s been marinating in her own tears for the last God knows how long.” I nudge her gently. “Go. Wash the feelings off. Or at least dilute them a little.”
She laughs wetly and stands. “Fine. I’m gonna hog all the hot water so Zeke doesn’t get any.”
“That’s the vengeful spirit I know and love.”
I hear her shuffle toward the bathroom, then the click of the door and the groan of pipes as the water comes on. The lavender incense is still burning on the nightstand, but it’s fading now, mixing with the steam that’s already starting to creep under the bathroom door.
I lean back against the headboard and let out a long breath. The house settles around me—the hum of the air conditioning, the distant murmur of… voices?
I tilt my head, straining to hear. There’s an open window somewhere nearby. Through it, I can just make out Bastian and Zeke talking in the backyard. Their words drift in, fragmented but audible.
“… need leverage,” Zeke is saying. “Real leverage. And to get leverage, we need a threat.”
Bastian hums skeptically. “How exactly do you propose we get that?”
“We feed him to the feds.”
I listen for a while as they brainstorm all the various ways they could try to coerce a Bratva underboss into turning snitch, or install some kind of camera in Aleksei’s hideout, or lure him into a trip, or, or, or…
It’s all far-fetched, to say the least, and I know by Bastian’s increasingly doubtful hums—especially when Zeke starts saying he knows a guy who makes great prosthetic noses and mustaches—that none of it has a snowball’s chance in hell of working.
But as I lie there, half-listening to their increasingly desperate schemes, something starts to form in my mind. A thought, fragile as a soap bubble, floating just out of reach.
Leverage, Zeke said. A threat.
Where do we find something like that? Who is accessible enough for us to get to them, pliable enough to be manipulated, and self-serving enough to see the righteousness and/or payoff associated with our cause?
Who else stands to gain if Aleksei Izotov spends the rest of his days rotting in a jail cell?
Almost as soon as I frame the question, the bubble pops. The thought crystallizes.
I know the answer.
I scramble off the bed so fast I nearly trip over my own two feet. I hear Yasmin calling out from the shower to see if I’m okay, but I ignore her and barrel down the hallway. I burst through the back door just as Bastian and Zeke round the corner of the house.
And I plow directly into Bastian.
His arms come up instinctively, catching me before I can bounce off him and land flat on my ass. My palms lie flat against his chest, his hands gripping my upper arms, our bodies aligned in a way that feels far too familiar.
Just like it was the night I first touched him.
Bastian goes completely still. I feel the sharp suck of his breath. His warmth. His smell. Again and again, we keep finding ourselves in this exact orientation, and again and again, we’re forced to confront how right it feels.
I ought to pull away, because there are entire schools’ worth of bigger fish to fry. But I let myself have this one stolen second: wintergreen warmth, heat and ice, solid and male, close enough to touch and so far from being mine that I might as well be a princess-astronaut in space after all.
Then I step back, his hands fall away, and the moment shatters into a thousand irretrievable pieces.
“I have an idea,” I announce.
Bastian clears his throat. “About…?”
“Harold Fitzgerald,” I say.
Zeke leans in. “As in the investor?”
“The sleazy investor,” I correct. “The amoral, narcissistic leech with the wandering hands and the bow tie and the moral compass that points wherever the money is.” I’m talking fast now, the pieces clicking into place as I speak.
“Think about it. He pulled out of Olympus right before the gala, then magically came back in after everything got fixed. He’s in bed with Aleksei somehow, or at least he knows enough to be dangerous. We can use all that.”
Bastian emits another one of those skeptical, wordless rumbles.
“Harold’s entire M.O. is looking after his own interests. Right now, those interests are tied to Aleksei’s success. But if we can show him that Aleksei’s ship is sinking? He’ll flip faster than you can say ‘bloodsucker.’”
Bastian is quiet for a long moment. I’m bracing myself for his rejection. It’ll be something along the lines of Stay out of this, little girl; you don’t know what kind of games are being played here.
Then his hands are cupping my face, and his mouth is on mine, and the kiss is brief and fierce and tastes like morning beer.
I gasp in surprise, but my body gets with the program way before my mind does.
My lips part to let his tongue flicker in and my hands find their home in the curls at the back of his head.
He pulls me flush to him and I revel in how good it feels to be there again, swaddled in Bastian, my wintergreen wonderland.
The aperture of my world condenses to the press of his lips and the scrape of his beard stubble against my chin. Harold who? Aleksei what? All of those things seem meaningless as long as we’re kissing.
My back hits something solid—the siding of the house, I think—and Bastian’s body follows, pinning me there with his hips. He growls into my mouth and I moan right back like the wanton woman of the night I turn into whenever he puts his hands on me.
Eventually, it stops. He pulls back just far enough to rest his forehead against mine. His breathing is ragged. So is mine.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Shut up,” I whisper back. “Just… give me one more second.”
But the words ruin it. We separate reluctantly, though my hand lingers on his waist and his does the same on mine.
“I take it you like the idea?” I ask.
“I fucking love it,” he breathes. “You’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“You’re pretty damn smart,” agrees Zeke, “though it seems modesty is not your forte. Not for either of you, really. Could’ve at least told me to turn around before you started swallowing each other’s faces.”
I laugh and blush shockingly red. Bastian, standing next to me, makes an unusually awkward sound, too, a mix between a squeak of embarrassment and a grunt of Mind your own business, bro. It’s kind of endearing, honestly. I like seeing him out of his element sometimes.
“So,” Zeke says, clapping his hands together, “Harold Fitzgerald. Walk me through how we’re supposed to turn him into our secret weapon.”
I clear my throat and try to organize my racing thoughts into something resembling coherence. It’s kinda hard to do when my lips are still tingling and Bastian’s hand is still on my waist, thumb tracing absent-minded little circles against my hip bone.
Focus, Eliana. Get your head in the game and out of the gutter.
“The same way every chef solves a tough problem,” I say. “With a little bit of handy knife work.”