Chapter 58 Bastian
BASTIAN
yield /yēld/: verb
I exist in a haze of pain. Everything else has ceased to have meaning.
Somewhere between the third session with the pliers and the cattle prod’s crackling kiss against my ribs, the buzzing tubes overhead transmuted into a burning ball of light and gas, a sun in this subterranean hell.
Blood and sweat becomes pancake and syrup.
My screams are my daughter’s laughs and my daughter’s laughs are my screams.
I hang from the hook in the darkness as my little girl’s voice echoes in my head.
Daddy, watch me jump!
Watch me jump!
Watch me…
Then, suddenly, on some silent cue, the men set down their tools, their bloodied scalpels and pliers and blowtorches, and leave.
I sag against my restraints. Every inch of my body throbs with its own distinct flavor of agony. I try to inventory the damage—broken fingers, cracked ribs, oozing burns and sawtoothed cuts I don’t want to think about—but the list grows too long and my brain keeps sliding away from it.
There’s no point in hoping, anyway. They’ll be back. They always come back.
But when the door opens again, it’s not the masked men who enter.
It’s Aleksei.
He doesn’t say anything as he steps inside and closes the door behind him. There is only the soft clomp of his footsteps as he does slow circuits around me, surveying the wreckage his men have inflicted on my body.
Plink, says my blood as it meets the floor.
Watch me, Daddy!
Plink. Plink.
He’s baiting me with his silence, hoping I break and beg for mercy. But I refuse to speak first.
If he wants something from me, he can fucking ask for it.
Finally, Aleksei sighs. “You know,” he says, “I never wanted it to come to this.” He stops circling and stands somewhere in front of me.
“All I ever wanted was my family together. I keep saying that again and again, but nobody will fucking listen. It could’ve been so simple!
The three of us, united. The way it should have been from the beginning.
” He pauses, letting the words hang in the fetid air, then starts meandering again.
“Do you remember when we were boys? The promises we made to each other? Before you abandoned me for your so-called ‘legitimate’ life?”
I work my jaw, gathering what little moisture remains in my mouth, and spit a glob of blood onto the concrete between us.
“You stopped being my brother,” I rasp, “the night you locked me in that freezer and chose murder over me.”
He stops again, stunned, as if I cold-cocked him in the face.
“You think that’s what it was? That I just had such an insatiable taste for killing?
” He shakes his head slowly. “For God’s sake, Semyon, I locked you in that freezer to protect you.
I got my hands dirty to keep yours clean.
I wanted you to have a life that was never, ever possible for me. ”
“It does sound nice when you put it like that,” I admit with a hoarse laugh. “Almost makes me wish it was true.”
“I’m your brother,” he rasps. “Everything I built, I built for us. For family.”
I look down at the blood dribbling from dozens of wounds on my shirtless body and laugh. “This is one hell of a way to treat family, bratishka.”
He straightens up tall and scowls at me. “You forced my hand. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Let us live our fucking lives, Al,” I say. “That’s all you had to do. But no—you needed something and so you did what you always do: spilled blood until you got it. You had choices. You’ve always had choices. You just chose wrong.”
“‘Chose wrong,’” Aleksei echoes. “We grew up eating scraps from restaurant dumpsters, Semyon. Don’t you remember?
We slept in shifts so the other street kids wouldn’t steal our shoes.
Our mother sold her body to feed her addictions and died birthing a child she couldn’t afford to raise. What ‘choices’ did we ever have?”
“We had the choice not to become like the people who hurt us.”
His lip curls. “Easy to say from your billion-dollar ivory tower. But someone had to climb through the shit so you could stand on clean ground.”
I meet his eyes, the same blue as mine, and see nothing but a stranger wearing my brother’s face. “You spent so long climbing through shit that the smell is embedded in your nose, Al.”
His face degrades into a hideous, enraged mask.
Then he passes a hand over his eyes and, like some perverted magic trick, suddenly, he’s calm and collected again.
“Choices, yes. Choices, choices, choices. Well, let me talk to you about choices.” He turns away from me, laces his fingers together behind his back, and wanders over to the table of torture tools.
“While you’ve been hanging here, I took a little trip out to Skokie. Lovely neighborhood. Very quiet.”
My heart stops.
“I found a charming house out there,” he continues.
“Red front door. White picket fence. Cracked step on the front porch—you really should fix that, by the way. It’s a nasty hazard to those amongst us with disabilities.
And inside?” He smiles. “Quite the little family you’ve assembled, Semyon.
The best friend, the mother-in-law, our dear baby brother.
” He pauses before he concludes, “And of course, your pregnant girlfriend.”
The blood drains from my face so fast I nearly black out.
“Congratulations, by the way.” His smile is a wound. “A baby. How wonderful! Such a shame you’ll never get to meet them.”
“What did you do?” I whisper.
“I left them in Brandon’s capable hands. He worked so hard to find them; it seemed like the least I could do.” Aleksei turns to face me again. “He seemed very eager to reconnect with his ex. I’m sure he’ll take good care of everyone else there, too.”
The sound that tears from my throat is utterly fucking depraved.
It’s primal, feral, savage, raw, ripped from the deepest part of me where I’ve buried every fear I’ve ever had.
I thrash against the hook, feeling stitches pop and scabs crack and fresh blood pouring down my arms, but I don’t care.
I don’t care about anything except getting free, getting to her, getting to them.
“Let me go!” I howl. “Take me instead—do whatever you want to me—just call him off! Call him off!”
Aleksei doesn’t move. He watches me flail and scream and tear myself apart without so much as blinking.
Eventually, my body begs me to quit. “Please,” I croak. “Aleksei, please. She’s pregnant. Sage is just a kid. They didn’t do anything. This is between us…”
My voice breaks. My body breaks. I hang there, spent, gasping, blood dripping steadily onto the concrete below.
“No, Semyon.” Aleksei steps closer. “This,” he says softly, almost tenderly, “is what happens when you try to leave family behind.”
The fight drains out of me. It leaves nothing behind. I hang there, empty, hollowed out, a shell of meat and broken bones suspended from a hook in a dank, death-filled basement. The fluorescent lights sing their indifferent hymn. Blood pools beneath my feet in a spreading lake of failure.
Eliana.
Her name echoes through the cavern where my heart used to be.
The baby.
I can’t even go there.
I failed them.
I failed her.
All those promises I made, they’re ash now. They’re smoke and ruin and the wet crunch of Brandon’s fists meeting flesh.
Daddy, watch me jump.
The kitchen of my happily-ever-after disappears. The sunlight fades.
There is only darkness left.
“I did this once before and it didn’t go well. But being the merciful man that I am, I’m going to one last chance to choose what happens next,” says my brother.
He begins to pace again.
“It’s the same as before. Insist on staying and I will kill you, then them.
Option two,” he continues, “is more generous. You disappear. Tonight. Leave the country and never come back. Never contact Eliana. Never meet your child. As far as anyone knows, Bastian Hale died in that warehouse, and this time, it stays true.”
He stops in front of me.
“In exchange for your vanishing act, I will call off Brandon. I’ll let Eliana and the others live their quiet little lives in peace, far away from me.” His eyes bore into mine. “But you must be gone by sunrise. And you can never come back.”
All my meager options circle through my skull like vultures waiting for something to die.
Fight back. But I’m chained to a fucking hook with broken fingers and pulverized ribs, and Brandon is already there, already with them, already—
No. Don’t think about what he’s doing right now. Focus.
Bargain. Offer Aleksei something else, some other piece of myself he hasn’t already carved away. But what’s left? He has Sage. He has Eliana. He has leverage in every direction and I have nothing but blood pooling beneath my feet.
Find an angle. Some loophole or weakness in his logic. Aleksei always has blind spots. But none of those blind spots help me when the clock is ticking and Brandon’s hands are—
The truth settles into my bones like concrete hardening.
If I stay and fight, everyone dies tonight while I hang here, useless. The only variable I can remove from this equation is me.
That sunlit kitchen flickers back into existence one last time, but it’s different now. Sepia-toned. Bittersweet. Like looking at a photograph you know you’ll never get to take.
Evening glow slants through windows that face west. The backyard stretches out, backlit in gold and amber, as fireflies begin their slow blink above the grass. Our daughter runs barefoot through the yard with a mason jar, trying to catch stars that won’t stay caught.
Eliana sits on the porch swing, bare feet tucked beneath her, watching with a smile that could light up the night. She’s laughing at our little girl.
Neither of them misses me.
I would have been an overbearing father. I know that. Overprotective to the point of suffocation. Irascible. Unapproachable. God forbid she ever bring a boyfriend home.
But I would have been present.
God, I would have been so fucking present.
“Okay. I accept your deal.” I gulp down the sour taste in my throat. “But you have to swear you’ll honor it.”
He laughs, amused. “You’re hardly in a position to negotiate, brother.”
“Swear it on her grave,” I insist. “On our mother’s grave. Eliana and the baby stay untouched. Brandon gets called off tonight. Tonight, Aleksei. Not tomorrow, not in an hour—and he never goes near any of them again.”
Aleksei considers me.
“And Sage,” I continue. “He lives his own life. No Bratva. No ‘family business.’ You let him go to college, get married, die old and boring in some suburb. You leave him alone.”
He waits. And waits. And waits. And then…
“Agreed,” Aleksei says finally. “On our mother’s grave. All of it.”
The last bit of hope inside me—a stupid, fragile hope that’s been holding on by its fingernails for too long now—goes quiet. Calcified. There is only cold, dead stone where my heart used to beat.
I’m choosing their happiness over mine.
And it’s destroying me.
Aleksei crosses to me and reaches up. His hands work the chain loose from the hook. Carefully, lovingly, he lowers me to the ground. My legs give out, useless, as I crumple to the concrete in a heap of blood and broken promises.
The floor is cold against my cheek. The drain sits inches from my face, dark and patient, like the blinking eye of the underworld. I don’t try to move. There’s no point anymore.
“A car is waiting outside,” Aleksei intones from somewhere above me. “It will take you to a private airfield. Documents are waiting for you there.”
His footsteps move toward the door.
Then they stop.
“You were always the best of us, Semyon.” His voice is almost kind, like the brother I remember from before that freezer door closed. “That’s exactly why I could never allow you to stay.”