Chapter 35 Eliana
ELIANA
fond /f?nd/: noun
I’m shivering in the passenger seat. Bastian’s blood-soaked jacket is wrapped around my shoulders.
Beneath it, the tattered paper gown clings to my damp, sweaty skin.
Every time I try to breathe, I feel like my nostrils are being assaulted.
The metallic spice of blood mixes with Bastian’s wintergreen scent, horror melting into comfort with no clear line between the two.
My hands won’t stop quivering. I press them against my thighs, then dig my fingernails into the meat of my legs, then sit on them, but the tremors keep coming no matter what I do.
Bastian’s breathing is harsh beside me, tightly controlled in that way that means he’s not controlling anything at all. The air between us is a living thing. Swollen. Festering. Pregnant with everything we’re not saying.
I open my mouth three separate times, but each time, I close it right back up. I have no clue about where to start with this.
Should I say I’m sorry? Should he? Should I be grateful that he showed up, or angry that he broke his word?
The last time I saw Bastian kill someone, I ran. This time, I couldn’t. I was pinned to the floor, half-naked, watching through sightless eyes as the sounds told me everything I needed to know.
The wet thud of fist meeting flesh.
The crack of bone giving way.
The choking noises that got quieter and quieter until they stopped altogether.
I didn’t see it, but I heard it. Every single second of it.
And the worst part—the part that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin—is that as all that happened, I felt only relief. A man was dying at Bastian’s hands once again, but at least it meant that man would never touch me.
Does that make me a bad person? What kind of mother-to-be listens to a man being beaten to death and thinks, Thank God, thank God, thank God?
The car feels like it’s shrinking. The walls are closing in, the air thickening, the smell of blood and wintergreen and terror is choking, choking, choking me.
“Stop the car,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer.
“Bastian,” I try again, “stop the fucking car. Now.”
The brakes engage so sharply that I collapse forward. I barely manage to catch myself against the dashboard with one hand while the other clamps protectively over my belly.
Tires squeal against asphalt. The car comes to a halt.
I don’t wait for him to say anything. My fingers scramble blindly for the door handle—where the fuck is it—and finally connect with cool metal. I yank, shove, and go tumbling out onto concrete that scrapes my bare knees.
Fresh air greets me. It’s hot and sticky, but I gulp it down in desperate, heaving breaths, like drinking from a garden hose. As I do, I crawl forward on the sidewalk until my palm finds the rough edge of a chainlink fence. I drag myself to a seat with my back against the steel post.
Bastian’s door opens. His footsteps crunch across gravel until he’s standing over me, his shadow blotting out the sun.
“You killed him, right?” I ask.
He doesn’t bother sugar-coating it. “Yes. I did.” He kneels in front of me and adds, “And I’d do it again, if I had to.”
My head drops between my knees. The nausea surges up my throat, and I have to breathe through my mouth to keep from puking in my lap.
What’s making me sick to my stomach is a realization that’s been a long time coming.
I’ve tried to ignore it, to keep my head stuck in the sand, but there comes a point when you can’t do that anymore, and it turns out that that point is when the father of your child beats a man to death two feet away from you.
The realization is this: Bastian isn’t a good man who’s done bad things.
He’s a bad man trying his hardest to be good—but when push comes to shove, he’s willing to be bad again.
Bad for me, yes—but can I live with that? Are my hands dirty just because his are? Or does he dirty his so I don’t have to?
I don’t know. I no longer fucking know anything.
Bastian lowers himself onto the curb beside me. “He was going to hurt you,” he continues. “I saw the belt in his hand, Eliana.”
I flinch at the memory. The cold tile against my bare skin. The hiss of leather sliding through loops.
“When I broke through that door, you were exposed, terrified, and he was standing over you with his pants undone. I didn’t think; I just reacted. I won’t apologize for that. Because if I’d been even thirty seconds later...”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. I know exactly what would have happened if Bastian hadn’t followed me.
He lied—for me.
He killed—for me.
And he’d do it all again—for me.
“Thank you,” I whisper. There’s more to say, but I don’t have the breath, the courage, or the vocabulary to say it right now.
Bastian’s hand encircles mine. His fingers are gluey with drying blood as they thread through my clean ones, but I no longer mind. I need the grounding.
We sit like that on the curb, two broken people clinging to each other while traffic hums past and the afternoon sun beats down on us without mercy.
The world keeps spinning, indifferent to our trauma, indifferent to the dead man cooling on an exam room floor, indifferent to the tiny heartbeat still thrumming steadily beneath my ribs.
We sit like that until the blood crusts and the shadows lengthen and my ass goes numb against the concrete.
Here’s the thing about trauma: it doesn’t ask permission. It just barges in, rearranges all your furniture, and leaves you sitting in the mess wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to live here now.
Bastian’s the mess. Bastian’s also the only thing holding the walls up.
And so, when I feel his attention turn to me, I know my answer before he even asks the question.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks.
The courtesy of that stupid, simple request, after everything that’s happened, makes me want to cry all over again.
I nod.
His lips find mine with a gentleness that seems impossible from a killer. The kiss is soft at first, unsure, both of us testing whether this is allowed, whether we can have this after the horror of the clinic.
But then my hands fist in his bloodstained shirt and I pull him closer.
Bastian pulls me into his lap right there on the curb. His arms band around my waist as I straddle him. My mouth opens to accept his tongue and give him mine. I moan softly into the kiss and he growls right back.
I don’t care that we’re on a public street, or that I’m wearing nothing but his jacket, or that dried blood is flaking off his knuckles onto my skin. I just need to be closer to him, nestled in his arms, because that’s the only place left in this world that feels safe to me anymore.
Bastian’s teeth catch my bottom lip and tug just hard enough to make me gasp. When I bite his lip back, giving as good as I get, I feel him shudder beneath me.
His hands slide inside the jacket, beneath the shredded paper gown, and find my bare skin. His palms drag up my spine, leaving trails of heat in their wake. When I arch up toward him, the friction of his shirt against my nipples tweaks nerves that haven’t been tweaked in a long time.
I rock my hips forward without thinking. The movement grinds me against the hard length straining beneath his jeans, and the guttural he makes ripples through me.
His mouth leaves mine to trail along my jaw, teeth scraping, tongue soothing. When he reaches the hollow beneath my ear, he nibbles down just hard enough to make me cry out.
My head falls back to expose my throat, and he takes full advantage, kissing, sucking, marking me in ways that will leave hickeys for days.
One of his hands tangles in my hair, gripping at the root and pulling until my scalp tingles. The other slides down to my hip. I place my palm over it in a silent plea for him to grip me harder.
Make my body remember you’re here. Bruise it to prove a point. I want to be your broken little plaything, Bastian Hale; that’s what I was born to be.
My thighs clench around his waist. My breath comes in ragged gasps whenever we separate long enough to allow it. Every nerve ending in my body is alight and begging for more.
His hand moves again. It ventures between my thighs. One fingertip slides through the slick heat there.
“Fuck,” he growls against my lips. “You’re soaked.”
We’re on a public sidewalk in broad daylight. Anyone could drive by. Anyone could see.
I don’t care.
“Just… please…” is the most I can say.
“Oh?” Bastian chuckles darkly. “Do you like that, little one? Do you like that these filthy fucking hands turn you on?”
I whimper and rock harder against his hand.
“Answer me.”
“Yes,” I gasp. “I like it.”
His finger circles my clit once, twice, a third time. Every pass over my most sensitive part makes me spasm from head to toe. I can feel my center clutching at nothing and moan at the absence. It wants so much more and it wants it so, so badly.
“Even after everything?” His breath is hot against my neck. “Even knowing what these hands just did?”
“Especially after everything,” I hear myself say.
Bastian growls, pleased, as one thick finger pushes inside me. I nearly come apart right there on the curb.
“Christ, Eliana.” His forehead drops to my shoulder. “You’re going to be the death of me.”
“Pretty sure that’s supposed to be my line,” I manage between gasps as he adds a second finger and curls them up.
I bury my face against his chest to muffle the heinous sounds escaping my throat. Whimpers and moans like I’ve never heard before.
I have to bite down on his shoulder to keep from screaming. With nothing else for my eyes to focus on, I’m seeing whirls of color, jewel tones and deepest blacks, like I’m staring into a kaleidoscope. My whole body feels like what I see, sparkling, crackling, and percolating everywhere.
His thumb finds my clit again. His fingers keep hooking inside me. The pressure builds fast, too fast, coiling tight in my belly until I’m trembling against him, boiling under every inch of skin, on the verge of a titanic eruption.
“Be my good girl,” he murmurs against my hair. “Come for me.”
That’s exactly what I do. I melt in his arms, my thighs clamping around his hand, my teeth sinking deeper into his shoulder to hold back the cry that tears from my throat.
It kills me and rebirths me and kills me again, this orgasm. I feel like he’s shoving me through a meat grinder and pulling me out the other side and reshaping me in the way that he’s always wanted me to be.
His.
Shaping me as his.
When I finally go limp against his chest, Bastian’s fingers slip free. His hand doesn’t go far, though. It lays flat over my belly. I cover it with mine and we stay like that, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together.
“We should go,” Bastian says when I’m breathing somewhat normally again.
I nod. “Yeah. We should. I just don’t know if I can walk.”
“I’ve got you.”
Before I can protest, Bastian scoops me up like I weigh nothing—which, given the small human inside me, is objectively untrue. One arm hooks under my knees, the other bands around my back, and suddenly, I’m airborne.
“I can walk,” I mumble against his chest. “It was a figure of speech.”
But even I don’t believe what I’m saying. My legs feel like overcooked linguine.
“Sure you could.” He doesn’t break stride.
“And I could let you try. But then we’d be here all day, and I’d rather not explain to the cops why there’s a half-naked pregnant woman crawling across a sidewalk in suburban Illinois.
” He deposits me back in the passenger seat gently, then reaches across me to buckle my seatbelt. “Comfortable?”
“Physically? Yes. Emotionally? Not even a little bit.”
He snorts, closes the door, and rounds the hood to climb back behind the wheel.
The whole drive back, Bastian’s hand doesn’t leave my thigh. Neither of us speaks. There’s nothing left to say that our bodies haven’t already said for us.
When we pull up to the safe house, Bastian cuts the engine but doesn’t move. “I need you to know something,” he rasps. “What happened back there, what I did—I’d do it a thousand times over. A million.”
I lick my chapped lips. “I know.”
“Do you?” He turns to face me, and even though I can’t see his expression, I can feel the intensity radiating off him like heat from a bonfire.
“Because I need you to understand, Eliana, that there is no line I won’t cross for you.
No version of myself I won’t become. And I’m not sorry for that. I can’t be sorry for that.”
“I’m not asking you to be sorry,” I whisper.
“I know what you are, and I know what I’m becoming.
I just—” I let that sentence hang unfinished as my chin sags down to my chest. My eyelids are headed south, too, as my whole body has apparently decided to shut down for renovations in the wake of this morning’s mayhem.
“I just need time. That’s all. A lot is changing, and I need time to understand what it all means. ”
Bastian exhales a long, shuddering breath. Then he’s out of the car, around to my side, and scooping me up again. This time, I don’t bother protesting.
He carries me inside the back way, his body angled to shield me from the others’ view. I hear Yasmin’s voice rise in alarm from somewhere deeper in the house—“What the fuck happened? Is that blood?!”—but Bastian keeps taking me down the hall and into the bathroom before anyone can intercept us.
“Take a shower,” he says. “I’ll find you something to wear.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
I turn on the water as hot as it will go and step under the spray. I’m still wearing the shredded paper gown. It disintegrates and slides off in soggy pieces that pool around the drain like shed snakeskin.
I scrub myself three, four times with Yasmin’s body wash, but even still, I could swear there’s a pungent trace of blood stuck beneath the eucalyptus. “Who am I becoming?” I ask nobody as I sink down to the tile floor and let the spray beat against my shoulders.
I think about the man in that clinic. I don’t know his name and I never will. But I know what he intended to do, and I know what Bastian did to stop him, and I know that somewhere between those two facts lives a truth I’m going to have to make peace with.
I press my forehead to my knees and let the water wash away everything it can reach.
Whatever’s left, I’ll carry.