Chapter 41 Bastian #2
For a long moment, I don’t say anything at all. The envelope sits heavy on my lap like a tumor. Inside it is a way out. A coward’s mercy dressed up in the clothes of sacrifice.
Disappear, Aleksei says. Let them go. Move on.
And the sick thing is—the truly fucking sick thing—part of me wants to take it.
I could be on a plane tonight, and tomorrow would find me sipping caipirinhas on Copacabana Beach, watching the sun set over an ocean that’s never heard the name Bastian Hale.
I could let Eliana believe I’m dead, actually dead this time.
And she’d grieve, yes, but grief fades. Grief scabs over.
Eventually, she’d meet someone else. Someone without blood crusted under his fingernails.
A kinder man who could hold her in the dark without wondering if his hands remember how to do anything besides kill.
She’d be safe.
Our baby would be safe.
And isn’t that what love is supposed to be? Putting others’ happiness above your own selfish need to be near them?
My throat closes around something jagged. I think of Eliana’s face in the darkness last night. I could love a face that looked at me the way she did then.
I think of Sage. My baby brother already believes I abandoned him once.
Eight years I’ve spent trying to earn back his trust. Eight years of physical therapy appointments and video games and arguments about homework.
All the small, tedious, sacred work of being someone’s caretaker.
If I vanish now, he’ll never know why. He’ll spend the rest of his life believing I chose to leave. Again.
Which is crueler to them? The quick amputation of my absence? Or the slow rot of my presence poisoning everything it touches?
“You’re quiet,” Aleksei observes. “That’s unlike you.”
I keep staring at the envelope. My hands are shaking. I can’t make them stop.
Take the deal, whispers the part of me that has always believed I was born broken. You know what you are. The kindest thing you can do for the people you love is remove yourself from the equation entirely.
Let her go.
You were never going to deserve her anyway.
I could say it. It’s only a few simple words, even if they hurt like hell. Yes. Fine. I’ll go. Just leave them be.
But then I remember Eliana’s hand finding mine on that suburban sidewalk and the delight in her eyes as I guided her fingers to the petals of a yellow rose.
I remember her laugh when I took that knife to the pullout couch, that startled, incredulous sound, like she couldn’t believe I was real.
I remember the way she said, You’re the father, with her chin lifted and her shoulders squared. Like she expected me to run.
I didn’t run then.
I’m not fucking running now.
“No.”
It’s not even a whisper, but it detonates in the warehouse like I just dropped a fucking nuke.
Aleksei’s eyebrow arches. “Excuse me?”
“I said no.”
A vein throbs on his forehead. “You understand what you’re refusing, yes? What you’ll suffer if you turn this down? Prison, Semyon. Disgrace. Your child growing up with a father—”
“—who fought for them.” I meet his gaze without flinching. “That’s more than you and I ever had.”
Aleksei’s face curdles.
I watch my brother as he processes. It’s like an optical illusion—for a split second, the tailored suit and cigarette smoke disappear, and behind them, I see the scrawny seventeen-year-old boy who used to steal bread for us when our mother was too strung out to remember she had children.
The brother who taught me how to throw a punch. How to survive.
We came from the same hell.
We just chose different doors out of it.
And I won’t be going back.
Bit by bit, Aleksei’s mask cracks. It doesn’t shatter all at once—he’d never do anything so abrupt or dramatic. But I watch the fissures spread across his composure like ice breaking over a frozen lake. Beneath it, a dark fire blooms.
His jaw works. His hands, those surgeon-steady hands that have orchestrated a hundred deaths without trembling, curl into fists at his sides.
He turns away from me, facing the grimy window again, but this time, his shoulders are tense.
The cigarette between his fingers has burned down to the filter, forgotten.
As I watch, he drops it to the floor and grinds it out beneath his heel.
“I tried,” he says, and his voice—
Christ.
His voice shakes.
“I tried to bring us together. I tried to give you everything—power, money, family. A legacy worth having. Something to pass down to that kid of yours someday. What the fuck else could you want?” He laughs, but I’ve never heard such a horrible sound before.
“But you keep choosing them over your own blood.”
What I’m hearing stuns me. He’s pissed, righteously pissed, of course.
That’s what I expected. But he’s also wounded.
He’s got a rotten, gaping wound in some deep, festering place that goes back much further than the Bratva.
The roots of that black blood reach all the way to a mother who died with a needle in her arm, a father who for all intents and purposes never existed, and two boys huddled together in a roach-infested apartment, promising each other they’d survive…
… until I walked away.
“Al—”
He wheels around, and the look on his face stops the words dead in my throat.
He crosses the distance between us in long, frenzied strides.
His hand shoots out and grabs my jaw, wrenching my face up toward his.
This close, I can see the bloodshot threads in his eyes, the gray stubble he missed while shaving.
He looks old suddenly. Worn down in ways that have nothing to do with age.
“You were supposed to be my partner,” he hisses. “My brother. We were going to— Oh, fuck it. Fuck all of it.”
He releases my jaw and steps back. His hand flies to his hip. He draws, aims, fires.
I don’t even have time to flinch.
The bullet punches into my abdomen, and everything, everything, everything goes white. Pure, screaming white. Pain explodes through my core, radiating outward in waves that make my vision swim and my lungs seize. I double over as an awful sound tears from my throat.
Aleksei holsters his weapon. “Goodbye, little brother,” he spits without looking at me. “I hope she was worth it.”
Footsteps recede the same way they came in. The warehouse door clangs shut. An engine growls to life outside, then fades into the distance until there’s nothing left but silence and the ongoing drip-drip-drip from somewhere behind me.
I’m alone.
Blood-orange morning light creeps across the concrete floor, inching toward me like a slow tide. It touches my toes. My shins. My waist. Up my blown-open stomach, my chest, my throat, my chin. It washes over my face.
That’s the last thing I see before the world whites out.
I get one more taste of the light.