Chapter 53 Bastian
BASTIAN
bait and switch /bāt and swiCH/: noun
The address on Solis’s card leads me to a beige office park in the middle of nowhere.
Before the economy gutted it, it probably housed insurance adjusters, chiropractors, telemarketing firms, a million anonymous nobodies.
Now, it’s just blank windows and weeds pushing through the parking lot cracks.
I park and sit, scanning the perimeter out of old habit.
The training Aleksei drilled into me doesn’t switch off just because I’m trying to be one of the good guys now.
Everything looks right to my eye, though.
A few vehicles dot the lot, including a white Honda Civic with government plates that screams “FBI” so loud it might as well have a neon sign.
No black sedans, though. That’s a good thing.
My phone vibrates. I check it and find a text from Eliana.
ELIANA HUNTER
That’s it. Nothing more. I allow myself a small smile, pocket the phone, and step out of the car.
My footsteps crunch on gravel and broken glass as I cross the lot. The front door of the building is unlocked. I pull it open just wide enough to slip through.
Inside, the building is dim and dusty, the air thick with the smell of mold and old carpet. My eyes adjust slowly, picking out shapes—abandoned desks, overturned chairs, a water cooler lying on its side.
“Solis?” I call out.
No response.
My hand drifts toward the gun I tucked in my waistband before leaving the safe house. Every nerve is firing warnings I don’t want to hear.
It’s fine, you paranoid freak. Just get in, tell them what they want, and get back to your woman.
I round a corner…
… and stop in my tracks.
I found Solis.
The issue is, he’s dead.
Agent Jordan Solis is slumped against a concrete pillar, his throat cut so savagely that his head hangs at an impossible angle. His eyes are still open, staring at nothing, and his shirtfront is drenched in blood. The beagle from our first meeting is nowhere to be seen. Small mercy, that.
A few feet away, a woman in a gray pantsuit suit—the federal prosecutor he mentioned, I assume—lies facedown in a spreading lake of blood. Her back is riddled with stab wounds, so many that her jacket looks like wet confetti.
Whoever killed these people didn’t just want them dead.
He wanted them displayed.
My hand closes around the gun at my back, but I already know it won’t matter. If Aleksei wanted me dead on arrival, I’d be bleeding out next to Solis.
No. He wants something else. It doesn’t take long to figure out what that something might be.
Sirens.
Multiple sirens, distant but converging fast, growing louder by the second.
The wail cuts through the abandoned building like a knife through a federal agent’s jugular.
Through the filthy windows, I watch as police cruisers and SWAT trucks flood the parking lot.
One, two, five, eight—they keep coming, a swarm of flashing lights painting the beige walls red and blue.
Officers spill out with serious weapons already drawn, taking positions behind their doors, shouting commands I can’t decipher through the glass.
I don’t know whether Solis was in on the trap from the beginning or if Aleksei caught wind of this meeting after the fact and arranged it to ensnare me, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
My brother has choreographed a ballet, and I danced every goddamn step.
All of it was bait, and I swallowed it whole because I let myself believe in happy endings.
Because I let myself hope.
My hands go up before the first officer breaches the door.
I toss my gun across the room and fall to my knees.
It makes me sick to my stomach to surrender, but running is pointless.
I’d make it maybe ten feet before they turned me into Swiss cheese.
Resisting would only give them justification to put bullets in me, and I promised Eliana I’d come home.
Cross my heart and hope to die. That’s what I told her.
The door explodes inward. Cops swarm through like hornets from a kicked nest, screaming contradictory commands over one another.
“On the ground!”
“Hands where I can see them!”
“Don’t fucking move!”
Two of them in head-to-toe SWAT garb snatch me and wrench my arms behind my back. They kick me to the ground and my face hits the floor hard enough to split my lip. The taste of blood floods my mouth as someone plants a savage knee between my shoulder blades.
Cuffs bite into my wrists. Metal teeth grinding against bone. Someone starts reciting my Miranda rights, not that I give a damn about that. My thoughts are on a woman’s womb, on roses in my nose and grass stalks in her hair. On promises kept and promises broken.
They haul me upright and drag me toward the door. Outside, the night has turned into a carnival of red and blue, strobing lights that burn my eyes after the dimness of that death house.
A cop shoves me into the back of a cruiser and slams the door behind me. Through the smeared window, I watch more units arrive. Forensics units and detectives unspool crime scene tape around the building where Solis and the prosecutor lie cooling in their own blood.
I imagine Eliana at the safe house. Checking her phone. Frowning at the silence. Growing worried when I don’t respond.
I wonder what she’ll think when she learns I’ve been arrested for double homicide. A cop and a federal prosecutor, no less. These kind of charges don’t come with bail. More like lethal injection or, best case, life in lightless, concrete solitary with no chance of parole.
I picture our child growing up visiting their father through bulletproof glass. Or worse, growing up without a father at all. I’ll be just a name on a headstone, a cautionary tale their mother tells them when they’re old enough to understand.
The cruiser pulls away from the scene. I slump against the seat as the future I thought I had in my hands recedes into the blackness behind.
Aleksei has won.
And everyone I love is now utterly, catastrophically unprotected.