Two.
“Did Zeke go out?” I ask.
“No, I don’t think so.” Yasmin sounds as confused as I feel. “He’s been in the bedroom since he came home.”
I grip Excalibur and rise on unsteady legs. I position myself between the door and the rest of the house, planting my feet wide, ready to fight.
If this is Aleksei, I’m going down swinging.
Yasmin braces herself beside me. The door opens and swings inward on rusty hinges. As air wafts in, I smell…
… wintergreen?
Impossible, hallucinatorywintergreen,burning through my senses like a fever dream. It can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any damn?—
“Eliana.”
That’s my name, whispered in a voice I know better than my own heartbeat. The voice sounds like it’s been through hell and back, but no amount of hellfire could keep me from it now.
Then his hands are on my face. Calloused and warm andreal.
I scream.
I don’t mean to—it tears out of me like something feral, and then my fists are flying, battering his chest, his shoulders, anywhere I can reach. “You’re supposed to bedead!” I screech. “Zeke said—said you were gone—I’ve beenmourningyou for days while you were—where?Where were you?”
My knuckles connect with solid flesh. He doesn’t stop me.
“Howdareyou keep doing this to me?”
He absorbs it all, every strike and scream, without lifting a hand to defend himself. His body is a stone wall I throw myself against again and again, my fists connecting with muscle and bone while tears streak down my face and my lungs burn from the effort.
“I thought you weredead,” I choke out between strikes. “Again.I thought—I thought?—”
Still, he doesn’t stop me.
I don’t know how long it lasts. Minutes, maybe. An eternity of sorrow compressed into the space between heartbeats. Eventually, the fury drains out of me, leaving behind something hollow and trembling. My forehead drops against his chest and my fists uncurl into open palms that press flat against his torso.
That’s when I feel the bandages. They’re thick and stiff beneath the thin cotton of his shirt, wrapped around his midsection in endless layers.
His breathing is wrong, too. Shallow and labored. Each inhale catches on something painful.
“Bastian… What—what is this? What happened to you?”
His hand comes up to cup the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. “Aleksei shot me,” he says simply. “But I’m here. I came back to you. And I brought someone with me.”
Then another presence makes itself known.
A familiar perfume—floral and sickly-sweet, badly overdone, the kind you find in drugstore clearance bins—cuts through the wintergreen. I hear a tentative footstep on the threshold and a voice I haven’t heard in almost two months, saying my name like a question and an apology all at the same time.
“Eliana?”
Mom.
I go still in Bastian’s arms. My emotions are whiplashing so violently that nausea rises in my throat. Mom is here. Mom, who I’ve been avoiding. Mom, whose calls I’ve let ring out to voicemail again and again. Mom, who I left behind without explanation when I fled Chicago in the dead of the night.
Bastian steps back, giving us space, and I hear my mother’s shaky breath across the room. There’s a swoosh of fabric and a clack of her bangles as she wrings her hands.
“Baby girl,” she whispers. “I didn’t know if you were okay, or hurt, or anything at all.”
