Chapter 45 Eliana
ELIANA
THREE DAYS LATER
second seating /?sek?nd ?sēdiNG/: noun
The pullout couch is ruined. I can’t stop touching it.
My fingers trace the jagged edges where Bastian’s knife tore through the fabric. I touch the exposed springs that jut up like broken ribs, the foam stuffing he gutted and scattered across the floor like entrails.
Nobody’s cleaned it up. Nobody’s dared to touch anything in this room since Zeke came back alone.
Since Zeke came back alone.
“El.” Yasmin’s voice floats somewhere above me. “You need to eat something.”
I don’t answer. My thumb finds a vicious tear in the upholstery and presses into it. It’s like thumbing my own gaping wound; that’s how bad it hurts.
“Please.” Her hand settles on my shoulder. “Just some toast. Anything.”
The baby wobbles inside me, a flutter of protest or hunger or both. That started happening the night Bastian left. I should care about it, I know I should care, and I do, I do, I do. But…
“What were my last words to him?” I hear myself ask. “I can’t remember, Yas. I can’t remember if I was cruel.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t think like that. You’re going down a bad path.”
I shove her hand off of me. “I pushed him away every chance I got, and now, he’s—he’s—he’s—”
I can’t say it.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Yasmin insists half-heartedly. “Zeke said they took him. Took, not killed. That’s different.”
I laugh like a deranged woman. “Aleksei doesn’t take prisoners, Yas. That’s the whole fucking point of being a mob boss.”
I press my palm flat against my stomach and try not to cry. This child will never know their father’s voice. Never hear him sing that Russian lullaby: Spi, mladenets moy prekrasny.
Then a car pulls into the driveway and my heart stops.
I’ve learned to dread the sound of tires on gravel. I’m conditioned now, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, except instead of drooling, I spiral into terror. As I listen, two car doors slam.
Not one.
Two.
“Did Zeke go out?” I ask.
“No, I don’t think so.” Yasmin sounds as confused as I feel. “He’s been in the bedroom since he came home.”
I grip Excalibur and rise on unsteady legs. I position myself between the door and the rest of the house, planting my feet wide, ready to fight.
If this is Aleksei, I’m going down swinging.
Yasmin braces herself beside me. The door opens and swings inward on rusty hinges. As air wafts in, I smell…
… wintergreen?
Impossible, hallucinatory wintergreen, burning through my senses like a fever dream. It can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any damn—
“Eliana.”
That’s my name, whispered in a voice I know better than my own heartbeat. The voice sounds like it’s been through hell and back, but no amount of hellfire could keep me from it now.
Then his hands are on my face. Calloused and warm and real.
I scream.
I don’t mean to—it tears out of me like something feral, and then my fists are flying, battering his chest, his shoulders, anywhere I can reach. “You’re supposed to be dead!” I screech. “Zeke said—said you were gone—I’ve been mourning you for days while you were—where? Where were you?”
My knuckles connect with solid flesh. He doesn’t stop me.
“How dare you keep doing this to me?”
He absorbs it all, every strike and scream, without lifting a hand to defend himself. His body is a stone wall I throw myself against again and again, my fists connecting with muscle and bone while tears streak down my face and my lungs burn from the effort.
“I thought you were dead,” I choke out between strikes. “Again. I thought—I thought—”
Still, he doesn’t stop me.
I don’t know how long it lasts. Minutes, maybe.
An eternity of sorrow compressed into the space between heartbeats.
Eventually, the fury drains out of me, leaving behind something hollow and trembling.
My forehead drops against his chest and my fists uncurl into open palms that press flat against his torso.
That’s when I feel the bandages. They’re thick and stiff beneath the thin cotton of his shirt, wrapped around his midsection in endless layers.
His breathing is wrong, too. Shallow and labored. Each inhale catches on something painful.
“Bastian… What—what is this? What happened to you?”
His hand comes up to cup the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. “Aleksei shot me,” he says simply. “But I’m here. I came back to you. And I brought someone with me.”
Then another presence makes itself known.
A familiar perfume—floral and sickly-sweet, badly overdone, the kind you find in drugstore clearance bins—cuts through the wintergreen. I hear a tentative footstep on the threshold and a voice I haven’t heard in almost two months, saying my name like a question and an apology all at the same time.
“Eliana?”
Mom.
I go still in Bastian’s arms. My emotions are whiplashing so violently that nausea rises in my throat. Mom is here. Mom, who I’ve been avoiding. Mom, whose calls I’ve let ring out to voicemail again and again. Mom, who I left behind without explanation when I fled Chicago in the dead of the night.
Bastian steps back, giving us space, and I hear my mother’s shaky breath across the room. There’s a swoosh of fabric and a clack of her bangles as she wrings her hands.
“Baby girl,” she whispers. “I didn’t know if you were okay, or hurt, or anything at all.”
She stops. Swallows. Tries again.
“Bastian showed up at my door three days ago, bleeding everywhere. He told me everything. And I just wanted to be the mama who was there for you, sweetness. For once in my miserable life, I wanted to be the mother who shows up.”
“Mom,” I whisper.
I hold out my arms, and she’s on me, squeezing me tight, crying softly, shaking with the effort of it all. So am I.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes into my hair. “I’m so sorry, baby. For all of it. Every single time I wasn’t there when you needed me.”
I want to pull away and remind her of every broken promise and missed birthday, every Derek who mattered more than I did. But the time for that is behind us, and in a world that always wants to take from me, how can I be angry when, for once, it decides to give?
“You came,” I manage to squeak out.
“I came,” she agrees. “Finally. Finally, I came.”
I reach out and find her hands so I can hug her again.
Her skin is more papery and dry than I remember, and she feels like she has bird bones, but she’s still my mom, dammit, so I hug her and try not to let the feelings overwhelm me.
It’s a losing battle, but I fight it anyway. Stubborn pride and all that.
The commotion draws the others like moths to flame. Zeke barrels in from the bedroom, gasps, and half-tackles Bastian before his eyes catch on the way Bastian is holding himself.
“Holy shit,” Zeke breathes, pulling up short. “You’re—you’re actually—”
“Alive,” Bastian confirms. “Barely, but yes.”
The wheelchair’s familiar squeak announces Sage.
He wheels himself into the hallway and stops short, the rubber tires going silent on the hardwood.
Nobody speaks. The safe house fills with the static of too many emotions trying to exist in the same space.
I stay close to my mother, our hands still intertwined.
I squeeze back.
Sage breaks the silence first. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he says flatly.
Bastian laughs. “The cat should’ve probably left me out to die.”
Still, nobody moves. The air between them is boiling. Then Sage wheels forward. He stops right in front of Bastian, close enough to touch.
“You came back,” Sage says. “Again.”
“I’ll always come back,” Bastian growls. “Even when you don’t want me to. Maybe even especially then.”
I hear a strange, uncharacteristic hesitation in Bastian’s voice. A moment later, when he speaks again, I understand why.
“Can I—” He stops. Starts again. “Would it be okay if I hugged you, Sage?”
I hold my breath, my mother’s hand still clasped in mine.
“Yeah,” Sage says finally, in a surly teen boy kind of way. “Yeah, okay.”
I hear the twin thud of Bastian sinking to his knees. Then there’s the creak of the wheelchair as Sage scoots forward, and the soft collision of two bodies finding each other after too long apart.
Neither of them speaks. They don’t need to.
The sound of Bastian’s ragged breathing and Sage’s quiet, hitching exhale says everything words couldn’t.
I imagine Bastian folding himself around his little brother despite the bullet wound in his gut, Sage’s arms wrapping around Bastian’s neck the way they must have when he was small, before the accident, before everything went wrong.
And tears pour unchecked down my face.