Chapter 43 Bastian
BASTIAN
forced march /f?rst m?rCH/: noun
The light fades.
Then it comes back.
I don’t know how much time passes between those two events. Might be seconds. Could be hours. The only thing I know for certain is that when life claws its way back into my skull, the blood-orange dawn has turned to dull gray morning, and I’m still fucking here.
The zip-ties have loosened. I realize it dimly at first, then with growing urgency.
My thrashing when the bullet tore through me must have worked the plastic enough to create slack.
My right wrist slides free with a wet, sucking sound, leaving skin behind.
Blood and sweat, nature’s finest lubricant.
I force myself upright.
The world wobbles violently. My stomach—or what’s left of it—screams in protest, and a fresh wave of agony pours outward from the wound, so intense that black spots dance across my vision.
I press my hand against the hole in my gut and feel the hot, rhythmic pulse of blood pouring out between my fingers.
Too much blood. Way too fucking much.
I have minutes. Maybe an hour, if I’m lucky.
My phone is gone. My wallet is gone. I have nothing but the clothes on my back and a ragged hole where my brother’s love used to be.
I totter toward the warehouse door. Every step is a fresh hell, but I’ve been through hell before, and this is neither better nor worse. The metal groans as I shove it open and stumble out into weak morning light that feels like needles in my eyes.
The docks stretch out before me. I don’t know where the fuck I am, and even if I did, I’m in no fit state to navigate intelligently. I just pick a direction and start walking. One bloody foot in front of the other.
I press harder against my stomach. More blood squelches between my fingers, warm and wrong.
My options are limited. I can’t go to a hospital. Aleksei owns half the doctors in this city, and the other half are too scared to ask questions. The moment I show up with a bullet wound, word gets back to him within the hour, and he comes to finish the job.
Can’t call Zeke, either. He’d come running, and then Aleksei’s men would either gut him on the spot or follow him straight back to Eliana and Sage and everyone else I’m trying to protect.
Definitely can’t risk her.
Then a building catches my eye and a memory surfaces through the fog of pain: a cramped apartment. An eviction notice crumpled on a kitchen table. A woman sobbing into Eliana’s shoulder while the smell of Glade PlugIns and cheap wine hung thick in the air.
Georgia’s place.
It’s eight blocks from here. Maybe ten. Might as well be a fucking marathon, but between that and death, I’ll run the damn race.
I make it three blocks before I collapse the first time.
My knees hit the pavement, and the impact sends a shockwave of heat through my torso that makes me retch.
Nothing comes up but bile and blood. I stay there for a moment, hunched over like a wounded animal, my forehead pressed against filthy concrete while the world spins in lazy, nauseating circles.
Get up.
Eliana’s face swims through my mind. Those lips, pink and pure.
Get up, Bastian. Get. The. Fuck. Up.
I get up.
Four more blocks. My vision tunnels to a narrow point of light surrounded by encroaching darkness.
I think of my unborn child. If I die here, in some piss-stained alley between a shuttered bodega and a dumpster overflowing with rotting garbage, that kid will never know their father existed or that he tried. That he fucking tried, goddammit.
I collapse again at block six.
This time, getting up takes longer. The pain has become something abstract now—a distant roaring, like a train passing through my body, obliterating everything in its path.
Back upright. Left foot. Right foot. Left. Right.
Don’t stop.
Don’t fucking stop.
Georgia’s building materializes through the murky, foggy haze like a mirage. For a terrible moment, I think I’ve hallucinated it. But no. The fire escape is real. The graffiti-tagged dumpster is real. The cracked concrete steps leading up to the entrance are real.
I don’t remember which apartment is hers, but I haul myself up the stairs anyway, leaving bloody handprints on the railing like breadcrumbs for the Grim Reaper to follow.
Second floor. Third. Is this it? I don’t know, and being wrong will kill me.
Each step is costing me something I can’t afford to lose.
My vision strobes between too-bright and pitch-black, and somewhere in the middle, I catch glimpses of doors.
Peeling paint. Brass numbers that swim and blur.
One of them looks familiar. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just dying and my brain is serving up comfort lies.
I pound on it with a fist that feels like it belongs to someone else. It’s as much strength as I can muster, but even still, the sound is weak, pathetic. More of a scrape than a knock. The flutters of a dying bird’s wings.
The door swings open.
Georgia stands there in a faded bathrobe, coffee cup halfway to her lips.
“H-hello,” I manage.
Then my legs give out, and everything flips upside down as I crumple across her threshold.