But I say them anyway.
For all of us.
60
BASTIAN
last ticket /last 'tikit/: noun
1: final order of the night before the kitchen closes.
2: one more time. one more. just one.
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.Iwill 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 wasbefore. 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’remyeyes, 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.
