“And not just me,” Bastian adds as I chew through everything. “Foreveryone. You, Sage, Zeke, Yasmin, your mom. All of us. New identities, new lives, somewhere Aleksei can never reach.”
Hope is the dessert. It floors me—literally. Bastian has to catch me and then sink down at my side, both of us landing ass-first on the dew-soaked morning grass.
A way out.
After everything—the running, the hiding, the blood, the terror, the grief,so much fucking grief—after mourning Bastian twice and watching him kill a man in front of me and feeling our baby kick while men with guns hunted us through the streets of Chicago?—
There’s a way out.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “Bastian.Bastian.This is—we could actually?—”
I’m laughing and crying at the same time, tears streaming down my cheeks while joy springs up through my throat. I grab fistfuls of his hoodie and shake him, as if I can physically jar the reality into being.
“We could befree!” I exclaim. “We could raise our baby without looking over our shoulders. Sage could go to college. Yasmin could— Oh, God, Yas is going to lose her mind!”
I’m babbling, I know I’m babbling like I’m absolutely Looney Tunes, but I can’t stop. The future is unfurling in front of me like a red carpet, glittering with possibilities I’d stopped letting myself imagine. Weekend mornings without fear. Doctor’s appointments without looking over my shoulder for black sedans. Watching our child take their first steps in a home that’s actuallyours, with a door that locks against nothing more sinister than nosy neighbors.
There’s a way out.
But Bastian’s hands are hard claws on my shoulders, and the joy blooming out of me gets nipped in the bud.
“Slow down, Eliana,” he warns.
“‘Slowdown’?! Bastian, this is?—”
“This is a trap waiting to happen.” He pulls back. “You think I haven’t heard this song before, Eliana? Every time I let myself believe things might actually work out, the universe finds some creative new way to fuck me sideways. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Aleksei has judges in his pocket. Cops. Politicians. Solis even said so himself. What makes you think the FBI is any different? What if Solis is compromised? This whole thing could be just Aleksei dangling bait to smoke us out.”
“What’s the alternative? We just keep running forever?” I grab his face, forcing him to focus on me. “Bastian, I’mtired. I’m tired of hiding. Tired of being afraid every second of every day. We survived the alley. We survived the clinic. Your own brother shot you in the goddamn stomach and you’re still here.” I takea deep breath and paint him a picture. “Imagine waking up and your first thought isn’t,Who’s coming for us today? It’sWhat do you want for breakfast? We’d have a little house somewhere with a yard. All ours. Our baby would learn to walk on grass that belongs tous, Bastian. They’d go to school and make friends and we’d have a refrigerator papered with crayon drawings of our little one holding Mommy and Daddy’s hands.”
His breathing changes. I press on.
“Witness protection means new names, new everything, right? That means Aleksei would never find us. We’d be so boring, Bastian.Gloriouslyboring. Pancakes and PTA meetings. Don’t you want that? I do! I want that all so fucking bad, Bastian. And we can have it! It’s right here!”
He drops his forehead onto my shoulder and shudders. “Of course I want all of that, Eliana. I’m just afraid of what it feels like to want after putting it all off for so long.”
“Then let me be the hoper,” I tell him. “I’ll be the light. You can be the darkness that makes the light possible.”
I feel things changing in the rose-scented air between us. An unclenching in Bastian that mirrors the same process taking place inside me. We’re both daring to believe in the possibility that there is an end to all this, and against all odds, it’s not a bloody one. Not for us.
My skin is sizzling with electricity and every breath feels like a blessing unto itself. Bastian’s hands bear down on my hips as we drift closer and closer without quite knowing why. I’ve never felt so good before, I don’t think. Not in a long time, at least, and maybe not ever.
I can’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Bastian growls against my temple.
“Us.” I wave a royal hand at our surroundings, at the thorns poking into my back and the wet grass soaking through my leggings. “We’re hiding in a stranger’s garden like horny teenagers cutting class. And we might actually get a happy ending.”
It’s all just too absurd, from the breeze ruffling the rose petals to the wind chime strung up in front of the house we’ve chosen as our hiding spot, tolling out soft little notes into the summer morning.
So when Bastian leans in and kisses me, it doesn’t feel absurd to let him. It just feelsright.
The kiss is a tentative thing at first, but with us, that shyness never lasts long. Soon, chastely closed lips give way to clashing tongues and roaming hands. I sink onto my back and Bastian follows to press me into the damp earth. I smell soil and grass, roses and wintergreen, and that electricity on my skin keeps right on crackling. It’s finding a center at my center, all those sparks coalescing into this big, bright, beautiful ball of energy that’s somehow turned-on and turned-alive at the same time. When Bastian’s hand slips beneath the hem of my sweater to stroke the bare skin at my hip, that alone is almost enough to take me to the peak.
“This is a bad idea, right?” I whisper against his lips. “We shouldn’t do this?”
