Chapter 60 Bastian
BASTIAN
last ticket /last ?tikit/: noun
The third time I die will be the one that counts.
The door closed minutes ago. Or maybe it was hours; I can’t be sure. Time doesn’t mean anything anymore when you’re bleeding out on concrete. Regardless, neither Aleksei nor the men in black masks have come back. They’ve left me here to suffer in silence.
This death feels different than the others. The first time Bastian Hale died, the air smelled like the butane in the blowtorch I used to sear off the Greek mobster’s fingertips.
The second time Bastian Hale died, it smelled like the musty funk of a parking garage sealed against the wind. A concrete tomb.
This third time, it’s rotten meat in my nose. I no longer know whether it’s the factory’s stench, embedded into the bricks, or if my own body is what’s decaying.
I know that, whenever I choose to get up, there will be a car waiting for me outside.
In it will be faceless, nameless, speechless men who will not answer any questions or provide me any last rites.
They will simply drive me to a place and leave me there.
I will board a plane filled with more faceless, nameless, speechless men, I will fly across an ocean, and then I will be left there to wander for the rest of my days.
I will be a faceless, nameless, speechless man. A wraith. A ghost. Not even a memory.
The deal is made. Sworn on our mother’s grave. I cannot go back now.
Or at least, I cannot go back to the world as it was before. The world I saw from the top of that skyscraper with Eliana in my arms.
The only world I can go back to is the world I’ve made up in my head.
So I go back there, one last time.
I go back to the kitchen.
It’s still as golden as it was when the men with their wrenches and knives started on their work of destroying my body.
But the sun has almost set behind the trees now.
Eliana is on the swing on the back porch, watching our daughter as she frolics in the grass.
I stand in the threshold of the doorway, neither in nor out, watching them.
Our daughter’s frog friend leaps from her hands and she screams with joyous laughter as she goes chasing after him. Eliana grins, and so do I.
It’s so raw and painfully real that I feel my chest clenching up as if I’m having a heart attack. This moment that will never be, the last time I let myself fall into it. It’s sweet as honey, pure as spun sugar.
A beauty.
A blessing.
An impossibility.
Then Eliana turns to look at me—and her eyes are full of accusation.
I recoil, because her eyes aren’t her eyes—they’re my eyes, black and turbulent with hatred. “You could have fought,” she snarls in a voice utterly unlike her own. “You could have fought for us, if you chose to.”
Choices—that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? I told Aleksei that, but I’m just as guilty as he is of choosing things and acting like my hands were tied.
The kitchen goes away for the last time. The swing, the frogs, the fireflies, our daughter’s laughter—all of it melts into nothing, leaving me alone on this blood-slick floor with nothing but choices.
Die here, or die somewhere else. Either way, I’m gone. No matter what I decide, my loved ones are still at risk. How can I trust Aleksei? The moment I board that plane and disappear into whatever godforsaken corner of the world he’s chosen for me, I become a loose end.
And loose ends get cut.
He’ll call off Brandon tonight, sure. I believe he’ll honor the letter of our deal.
Then, in a week or a month or a year, when I’m too far away to do anything about it, he’ll decide that maybe promises sworn on the grave of a woman who never bothered to love us don’t matter too much. They are not binding.
There is only one way to keep them safe: Burn it all to the fucking ground.
I take inventory.
My right hand is a ruin. Three of my fingers are bent at strange, grotesque angles, and they won’t move beyond a slight wiggle no matter how hard I try. But my left hand still works, more or less. Swollen, yes. Aching, yes. But functional. Mostly.
Most of my ribs are cracked, many of them broken. Every breath is a knife between the bones. But air goes in my lungs and air goes out, and if it hurts, well, fuck it. Pain is no longer a deterrent.
I flex my legs experimentally. Again, the nerves and muscles cry out, but they obey eventually.
As for my mind… my mind is the sharpest it’s been in hours. Because there’s nothing left to cloud it. Neither hope nor fear.
Just purpose.
My gaze goes to the table where the masked men laid out their instruments. They left it all behind, unbelievably. Scalpels, pliers, knives, saws, a still-warm blowtorch, All still there, glinting under the lights.
Most ridiculously of all, they left me unchained.
Careless. They truly thought they’d finished me.
They’re about to find out how fucking wrong they are.
I drag myself to my feet.
The world swims dangerously, then stabilizes. My vision swims with black spots that pulse in time with my heartbeat. But I’m vertical. That’s a start.
The scalpel goes into my left palm, hidden against my wrist. It’s small and unassuming, but deadly if you know where to put it.
I know where to fucking put it.
The door isn’t locked. Why would it be? I’m a dead man walking to his own funeral. No threat to anyone anymore.
I limp through the basement, past the drain and the hooks, past the ghosts of my own screams still reverberating off the walls. The stairs are torture. I grip the railing with my ruined hand and bite through my lip to keep from crying out.
The car idles outside, just like Aleksei promised. The driver’s side door opens as I approach. A man in a dark suit steps out, face impassive, hand already reaching for my elbow to push me into the back seat.
He expects a broken prisoner. A man eager for escape.
He gets a scalpel through the soft tissue beneath his jaw.
The driver’s body hasn’t hit the ground before the second guard comes running from the passenger side, hand reaching for his holster.
He’s fast. I’m faster.
I wrench the dying man’s pistol from his waistband and fire twice through his own chest—using him as a meat shield, feeling the bullets punch through his back and into his ribcage. The second guard catches one round in the shoulder. He staggers, fires wild, the shot going wide into the night sky.
I drop the corpse and close the distance.
My broken fingers scream as I grip his gun arm and twist. A gruesome snap as his wrist gives. He opens his mouth to scream and I shove the scalpel through his throat, sawing sideways until the sound dies in a gurgle.
He drops.
I drag the bodies into the shadows behind a rusting dumpster.
It’s not my neatest work, but it’ll buy me time.
Not much—an hour, maybe two, before Aleksei’s men at the airport start wondering why their ride never showed.
When they connect the dots, they’ll call it in, and the whole rotten machine will lurch into motion. I have to make my move before then.
I take the car keys from the second guard’s pocket. They’re slick with blood in my palm. I slide behind the wheel and drive, my eyes barely able to track the road.
I know where I need to go.
And it’s not Skokie.
If I lead Aleksei to the safe house, I’m handing him everyone I love on a silver platter. Brandon might be dismissed by now, but that doesn’t mean shit if I bring the whole Bratva down on their heads.
No. I need to draw my brother out somewhere else. Somewhere that matters.
The waterfront materializes through my windshield, fog rolling off Lake Michigan in thick gray waves. And there, rising against the predawn sky like a monument to everything I almost had…
… Project Olympus.
The building looms above me, beautiful and doomed.
I kill the engine and sit there for a moment, staring up at what should have been my legacy.
This place was supposed to prove I’d clawed my way out of the gutter for good.
Violence wasn’t my only inheritance—there was some beauty left in the world, one perfect bite of it, and I’d put it on a plate to show everyone watching that these hands could do more than cut and kill and maim.
What a fucking joke.
I get out and drag my way across the lot. When I get to the front door, I press my palm against the stone. It’s cool beneath my ruined fingers. Solid. Beautiful.
Goodbye, I think. I’m sorry.
This late, all is empty and still. That’s good. It gives me time to gather what I need from the construction supplies. Acetone. Paint thinner. Propane tanks staged for the outdoor grills.
This building will burn beautifully.
I work as quickly as I can, even as my body threatens to quit on me.
I dose the liquid accelerant on every square inch of flammable material I can find.
I stack chairs in a huge pile, flipping tables around the edges, strewing napkins and tablecloths all around.
When I run out, I duck into the kitchen in search of more—
—and pause.
The walk-in freezer door looms at the far end. A heavy steel door, almost black in the darkness. I don’t consciously decide to go to it, but I blink and find myself there, within arm’s reach. My hand goes out to flatten against the cold surface.
As soon as I touch it, it drags me backwards in time.
Aleksei, let me out. Aleksei, please. ALEKSEI—!
It’s my own voice I hear, shot through with terror, screaming itself raw while something unspeakable happened on the other side of that door. The muffled sounds of a man begging, then not begging. Living, then dying.
Then the door opening again. Aleksei, framed there, a silhouette edged with blood.
“I’ll carry it for both of us,” he’d sworn. “You stay clean, Semyon. You stay good.”
And I’d believed him. For years, I’d believed that was love.