Chapter 51 Eliana
ELIANA
window /?windō/: noun
This rose bush is basically turning me into a pincushion.
Thorns dig into my skin everywhere, a million little pricks of pain, but I don’t dare move.
I’m too busy listening. Every nerve in my body is tuned to the frequency of Bastian, straining to hear something, anything, that will tell me he’s okay.
But all I hear is the soundtrack of Suburbia. Problem is, every sound has taken on the most menacing quality possible.
A car door slams somewhere down the block and I flinch so hard my teeth clack together, because what if that’s Aleksei throwing Bastian into a trunk?
A dog barks in a neighboring yard, and my heart seizes, because that could be Aleksei bringing bloodthirsty hounds to rip Bastian limb from limb.
The crackle of leaves above me could be wind or could be footsteps or Aleksei hissing vicious promises of torture, and I can’t tell the difference, I can’t see the difference, and God, I’ve never hated my blindness more than I do in this moment.
My lips still buzz with the kiss Bastian gave me before he left.
It tasted far too much like goodbye for my liking.
He knows something. He saw something. And now, he’s out there, alone, with a bullet wound in his gut, facing whatever made the fear run cold in his veins like it’s doing right now in mine.
I sit, and sit, and sit, and do my best not to freak out. It goes… medium-well.
Until footsteps approach through the grass, and all my fears get jacked up to eleven out of ten.
I freeze, every muscle locking up, sweat prickling cold on my skin. The thorns jab deeper into my shoulders as I huddle back against the fence, trying to make myself smaller, invisible, please God let me be invisible—
Then a pair of hands grabs me.
I start to scream before he kisses the fear away. It’s a rush of wintergreen in my mouth, like aloe for my soul. I hug onto Bastian so hard that it’s not until he winces that I remember I really should not be doing that, given his current condition.
Even still, I can’t quite let go fully. I’m running my fingertips all over him, head to toe, checking for wetness, for the hot slick of fresh blood, for any sign that something went wrong out there.
I find nothing. He’s intact. He’s whole.
“What happened?” My fingers are still twisted in the fabric of his hoodie. “Bastian, what the hell happened?”
Bastian sighs wearily. “The man following us wasn’t Bratva. He was FBI.”
I blink. “FBI? As in the Federal Bureau of Investigation…?”
“I didn’t believe it at first, either. But he had his badge on him and it looked legit, as far as I could tell.
Special Agent Jordan Solis. He said he’s been working Aleksei’s case for years.
” Bastian’s fingers lace through mine. “He told me that Harold Fitzgerald is dead. Aleksei got to him before he could testify. Two bullets in the back of his skull, tongue cut out and stuffed in his jacket pocket. The full Bratva Special.”
My stomach lurches. I remember Harold’s sweaty handshake the first time I met him. He was a worm, but nobody deserves to die like that.
“So that’s it then,” I summarize. “Harold’s dead and Aleksei wins.”
“Not quite,” he says. “Solis said the FBI recovered Harold’s documents from a bank vault.
Eliana… they have evidence. Lots of it, all of it painting Aleksei as a bad motherfucker.
All they’re missing is a witness. Someone who can connect the dots, fill in the gaps, put a face and a voice to all that paperwork so a grand jury understands what it all means. ”
Something is building in my chest. Something I’m almost afraid to name. “Bastian…” My voice comes out reedy and thin. “What are you saying?”
His hands cup my face. “They’re offering me full immunity. In exchange for my testimony.”
Immunity. Testimony. These aren’t words I’m familiar with. Just like Yasmin telling me about her pregnancy, I have to roll them around in my mouth a hundred times before they even start to make sense.
But as they do, it’s like flavor after flavor explodes on my tongue. It’s a ten-course tasting menu of freedom.
“And not just me,” Bastian adds as I chew through everything. “For everyone. You, Sage, Zeke, Yasmin, your mom. All of us. New identities, new lives, somewhere Aleksei can never reach.”
Hope is the dessert. It floors me—literally. Bastian has to catch me and then sink down at my side, both of us landing ass-first on the dew-soaked morning grass.
A way out.
After everything—the running, the hiding, the blood, the terror, the grief, so much fucking grief—after mourning Bastian twice and watching him kill a man in front of me and feeling our baby kick while men with guns hunted us through the streets of Chicago—
There’s a way out.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “Bastian. Bastian. This is—we could actually—”
I’m laughing and crying at the same time, tears streaming down my cheeks while joy springs up through my throat. I grab fistfuls of his hoodie and shake him, as if I can physically jar the reality into being.
“We could be free!” I exclaim. “We could raise our baby without looking over our shoulders. Sage could go to college. Yasmin could— Oh, God, Yas is going to lose her mind!”
I’m babbling, I know I’m babbling like I’m absolutely Looney Tunes, but I can’t stop.
The future is unfurling in front of me like a red carpet, glittering with possibilities I’d stopped letting myself imagine.
Weekend mornings without fear. Doctor’s appointments without looking over my shoulder for black sedans.
Watching our child take their first steps in a home that’s actually ours, with a door that locks against nothing more sinister than nosy neighbors.
There’s a way out.
But Bastian’s hands are hard claws on my shoulders, and the joy blooming out of me gets nipped in the bud.
“Slow down, Eliana,” he warns.
“‘Slow down’?! Bastian, this is—”
“This is a trap waiting to happen.” He pulls back. “You think I haven’t heard this song before, Eliana? Every time I let myself believe things might actually work out, the universe finds some creative new way to fuck me sideways. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Aleksei has judges in his pocket. Cops. Politicians. Solis even said so himself. What makes you think the FBI is any different? What if Solis is compromised? This whole thing could be just Aleksei dangling bait to smoke us out.”
“What’s the alternative? We just keep running forever?
” I grab his face, forcing him to focus on me.
“Bastian, I’m tired. I’m tired of hiding.
Tired of being afraid every second of every day.
We survived the alley. We survived the clinic.
Your own brother shot you in the goddamn stomach and you’re still here.
” I take a deep breath and paint him a picture.
“Imagine waking up and your first thought isn’t, Who’s coming for us today?
It’s What do you want for breakfast? We’d have a little house somewhere with a yard.
All ours. Our baby would learn to walk on grass that belongs to us, Bastian.
They’d go to school and make friends and we’d have a refrigerator papered with crayon drawings of our little one holding Mommy and Daddy’s hands. ”
His breathing changes. I press on.
“Witness protection means new names, new everything, right? That means Aleksei would never find us. We’d be so boring, Bastian. Gloriously boring. Pancakes and PTA meetings. Don’t you want that? I do! I want that all so fucking bad, Bastian. And we can have it! It’s right here!”
He drops his forehead onto my shoulder and shudders. “Of course I want all of that, Eliana. I’m just afraid of what it feels like to want after putting it all off for so long.”
“Then let me be the hoper,” I tell him. “I’ll be the light. You can be the darkness that makes the light possible.”
I feel things changing in the rose-scented air between us. An unclenching in Bastian that mirrors the same process taking place inside me. We’re both daring to believe in the possibility that there is an end to all this, and against all odds, it’s not a bloody one. Not for us.
My skin is sizzling with electricity and every breath feels like a blessing unto itself. Bastian’s hands bear down on my hips as we drift closer and closer without quite knowing why. I’ve never felt so good before, I don’t think. Not in a long time, at least, and maybe not ever.
I can’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Bastian growls against my temple.
“Us.” I wave a royal hand at our surroundings, at the thorns poking into my back and the wet grass soaking through my leggings. “We’re hiding in a stranger’s garden like horny teenagers cutting class. And we might actually get a happy ending.”
It’s all just too absurd, from the breeze ruffling the rose petals to the wind chime strung up in front of the house we’ve chosen as our hiding spot, tolling out soft little notes into the summer morning.
So when Bastian leans in and kisses me, it doesn’t feel absurd to let him. It just feels right.
The kiss is a tentative thing at first, but with us, that shyness never lasts long.
Soon, chastely closed lips give way to clashing tongues and roaming hands.
I sink onto my back and Bastian follows to press me into the damp earth.
I smell soil and grass, roses and wintergreen, and that electricity on my skin keeps right on crackling.
It’s finding a center at my center, all those sparks coalescing into this big, bright, beautiful ball of energy that’s somehow turned-on and turned-alive at the same time.
When Bastian’s hand slips beneath the hem of my sweater to stroke the bare skin at my hip, that alone is almost enough to take me to the peak.
“This is a bad idea, right?” I whisper against his lips. “We shouldn’t do this?”
“Definitely not,” he agrees. “Out in the open like this? Anyone could see us, rutting in the mulch like animals.”
“So we should stop.”
“Oh, absolutely. We have to.”
I palm his cock at the same time that he shoves a rough hand down the front of my leggings.
“The thing is, though,” he pants as I start to stroke him, “I don’t think I give a fuck anymore.”
I laugh again, giddy and delirious, as I exhale into his mouth to say without words that I don’t give a fuck anymore, either.
Clothes get shed or shoved down or rearranged with hands getting more and more frantic by the second.
I’m a buzzing, pulsing beacon of sparks now, liquid and electric.
When he pushes inside me, we both freeze like that.
His cock nestled in me. Me groaning and tightening around him.
Then he starts to move, and I forget everything else.
The thorns drawing red, bloody lines in my skin no longer matter.
Neither does the wetness of the ground or the prospect of someone catching us like this.
There’s only Bastian above me, around me, in me.
It all happens so fast. When the pleasure crests, I bite down on his shoulder to muffle the cry that tears out of me. That’s it. Finished almost as soon as it began, but goodness gracious, I feel reborn.
When it’s over, we lie all ramshackle together in the mulch, breathing hard, grinning at each other like idiots. I have dirt in my hair and scratches on my arms, and I can already feel bruises forming on my hips where Bastian’s fingers dug in. His wound is probably furious with him.
Neither of us cares.
“We’re going to win,” I tell him sternly. “You know that, right?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Long enough that I start to wonder if he’s going to retreat back into that fortress of pessimism he’s been building his whole life.
But then his hand covers mine. “Yeah,” he says. “I think we are.”
“Say it again.”
“We’re going to win, Eliana.” His lips brush my forehead. “I believe you.”
Then a screen door bangs shut somewhere nearby. “Mr. Whiskers!” someone hollers from a few yards over. “Mr. Whiskers, you mangy little gremlin, get back here!”
Bastian and I exchange a laugh, and then we’re scrambling. Our clothes get yanked back into place, my leggings hauled up, his hoodie tugged down. I’m stifling giggles against my palm as Bastian helps me to my feet, and he’s making these little huffing sounds that tell me he’s doing the same.
“Hold still,” he murmurs, his fingers working through the mess in my hair. “You’ve got half the garden in here.”
“Leave it. I like a little wild in my life.”
We slip out of the yard like slutty little thieves, fingers laced together, both still chuckling. The morning is still quiet, still ordinary, still unbelievably boring, set to a tune made up of sprinklers and birdsong and Mr. Whiskers evading capture.
My God, it’s beautiful.