Chapter 59 Eliana
ELIANA
bone stock /bōn st?k/: noun
The floor is cold against my cheek.
Glass digs into my palms, my hip, the soft underside of my forearm. I can feel the blood seeping out of me, warm and slick, mingling with whatever else has been spilled across these hardwood floors tonight. My ribs scream. My head pounds. The baby kicks weakly against my bruised abdomen.
Off to my left, Yasmin is making sounds no human being should make. A ruined, animal wail that rises and falls with each ragged breath. Wet. Wrong. Crying that comes from a body that’s been broken in ways it wasn’t designed to break.
And Brandon is laughing.
“Should’ve stayed with me when you had the chance, baby,” he croons to her. “Could’ve avoided all this unpleasantness.”
I press my palms harder into the glass. The shards sink deeper, grinding against bone. The pain should be unbearable. It should be the only thing I can think about.
But something strange is happening inside me.
The pain and the fear are burning away.
And what’s left in its wake is something older.
Something colder.
Something that has fangs.
Brandon’s boots crunch through the debris field that used to be my living room. “Now then,” he says, slightly winded from the exertion of destroying everything I love, “time to deal with the blind bitch who started all this.”
I keep still, eyes closed, waiting. Waiting.
“Aleksei said to keep you alive until the baby comes,” he remarks with a hideous little giggle.
“But he didn’t say anything about keeping you comfortable.
And there are so many ways to hurt someone without killing them.
” His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper, like he’s sharing a secret.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about this moment. To plan.”
I stay silent. Let him talk. Every word he speaks tells me exactly where his mouth is. Where his chest is. Where his throat is.
His footsteps stop beside me. “Look at you,” he sneers. “All that fire, just gone. Snuffed out.”
When his hand fists in my hair and yanks, I don’t resist. I let my body go boneless as he drags me up like a rag doll.
“Please,” I whimper. “Please, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything…”
“Oh, now, she begs?” He pulls me closer, until his breath fogs hot against my face. “How hypocritical. ‘Cry me a river,’ wasn’t that what you said?”
I let out a sob. “I was wrong. I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
“Hey, asshole!” comes an unexpected voice.
We both turn toward Sage’s shout. As we do, there’s a smack of impact and Brandon’s head snaps sideways. Something hard—a remote, maybe—glances off his temple.
“Get your fucking hands off her!” Sage roars.
Brandon’s grip in my hair loosens. Just a fraction. A heartbeat.
But a heartbeat is all I need.
Thank you, I think as I move. Thank you, Sage. Thank you.
My hand, the one that’s been tucked behind my back, rises up in a fist closed around the huge shard of glass I’ve been palming since I hit the coffee table.
Knowing I’ll die if I miss, I drive the makeshift blade into the soft meat of his inner thigh, where the femoral artery pulses fat and vulnerable beneath the skin.
Brandon screams. It’s a beautiful sound. High and shocked and afraid.
I twist the glass and yank it free, feeling the hot gush of blood coat my fingers.
He doesn’t go down right away. Cockroaches like Brandon never die easy.
Instead, we crash to the floor together, him on top, driving the air from my lungs.
More of the broken glass shreds me anew, like it hasn’t done enough of that already.
The wet splash of his blood spraying across my face paints me in the evidence of his dying.
But he’s not dead yet.
And he might still take me with him.
His fingers claw at my throat. I drive my elbow into his windpipe. He gags, loosens, and I knee him in the groin. We roll again, and now, I’m on top, straddling his chest, my bloody hands finding his face.
My thumbs find his eye sockets. My teeth find the meat of his shoulder. My fingernails carve trenches down his cheeks while his blood soaks through my clothes.
It’s a race to see who Death will claim first. My airway is collapsing under his grip. I’m swatting at his wrists, but his blood makes everything slick and impossible, and the strength is leaching out of me with every second I can’t breathe.
My consciousness starts to narrow. White spots bloom in the field of black. The edges of everything curl inward like burning paper.
My hand scrabbles across the floor, desperate, searching for anything—
And closes around something familiar.
Aluminum. Cold. Grooved handle.
Excalibur.
My cane must have been kicked here during the earlier chaos. My faithful companion, finding its way back to me one last time.
With the last of my air, I raise the cane up and drive it down.
The handle end impales Brandon’s eyeball with a terrible crunch. The sound of eggshells cracking. His hands go slack around my throat. His body slumps forward, heavy, sudden, and finally, finally still.
I roll off him and fall to the floor. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering, clicking together in a staccato rhythm I can’t control. My entire body is slick with blood—his and mine, impossible to separate, soaking every inch of me.
I just killed a man.
I just killed a man with my bare hands and my cane and a piece of broken glass.
But there’s only a vast, ringing emptiness where the guilt should be.
This is what Bastian felt on that day I looked down that alley at him. This is how it feels to have blood on your hands.
Who am I now? What have I become?
Slowly, other sounds filter back in. It’s Sage, somewhere across the room, calling my name over and over.
“… Eliana? Eliana! Are you okay? Please, God, please tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” I manage to mumble. “I’m okay, Sage.”
Zeke and Yasmin are ominously quiet. I strain to hear his breathing, movement, anything—but there’s nothing. Only the drip of blood and the rasp of Yasmin’s ruined lungs.
My hands slip in the blood as I crawl toward my best friend.
Every movement sends more pain rippling through my battered body, but I keep going, following the sound of her breathing like a lighthouse in the dark.
When I find her, she’s curled in a fetal position, arms wrapped tight around her stomach.
“Yas,” I whisper, gathering her close. “Yas, it’s me. He’s gone. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
All she can do is shake. I press my forehead to hers and hold on.
Behind me, I hear the scrape of duct tape being torn away. Mom’s voice, ragged and hoarse: “Eliana? Baby?”
“Here, Mom. I’m here.”
She rushes over. Her hands find my shoulders, my face, touching every bit of me. “Oh, God, oh, God, there’s so much blood—”
Sage drags himself across the floor. When he reaches us, his hand closes around my ankle as silent reassurance. With his other hand, he pulls out his phone and calls 911. I listen as he speaks. He gives them our address, then the phone falls from his grip.
We all huddle together on the blood-soaked floor, broken and bleeding, waiting for sirens that feel like they’ll never come.
It’s my whole world falling to pieces around me. Well, almost my whole world. As the sirens grow closer, I think of the one person who isn’t here.
I don’t know where he is right now. The not-knowing is its own kind of torture. A wound that won’t stop crying blood.
But there’s another heartbeat inside me. A tiny, stubborn pulse that survived tonight’s horrors. The one good thing to come from all this darkness. I press my bloody palm against my stomach and feel the baby squirm.
I just killed a man. Reached into some primal part of myself and found teeth I didn’t know I had. Would Bastian be proud? Horrified? Both? In the end, it doesn’t matter. I did what I had to do to protect the people I love.
And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
“Help is coming,” I whisper against Yasmin’s hair, pulling her closer. “We’re going to be okay.”
I have no idea if either of those things is true.
But I say them anyway.
For all of us.