“Yeah, well. Blunt force trauma from a fuckin’ psycho will do that.” He touches his jaw gingerly, then drops his hand. “You got a minute?”
I glance back at the door. Inside, Aleksei’s cleanup crew is probably already at work, erasing evidence of what I just did.Making it like that man never existed. As if his children won’t spend the rest of their lives wondering why their father never came home.
I’ll tell your kids I’m sorry.
“Not here,” I say.
“Where, then?”
I think about our old spots—the dive bar in Pilsen where we used to shoot pool, the coffee shop near his apartment with the barista Zeke used to crush on. All those places feel like they belong to a different person. Not me. Couldn’t possibly be me.
“Millennium Park,” I say finally. “The Bean.”
Zeke’s eyebrows rise above his sunglasses. “Tourist central? That’s your idea of private?”
“That’s the point. No one pays attention to anyone else.”
He thinks about that, then nods. “Alright. Twenty minutes?”
“Yeah.”
He turns to leave, then pauses. “Bash?”
“What?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He doesn’t blink or look away. “Just so you know. I’m still your best friend. No matter what’s happened or what you’ve done.”
He leaves without waiting for me to reply. I watch him walk away, his gait still slightly uneven from the attack.
The bruises will fade.
The memories won’t.
Half an hour later, I find him standing beneath the Bean’s curved chrome belly. He’s looking up at his reflection in the metal. It’s distorted, distended, ugly, wrong. I don’t dare look up to see mine.
“You remember when we brought Sage here?” he says without preamble. “Must’ve been, what, five years ago? He made us take like a hundred photos.”
I remember. Sage was eleven, still figuring out how to navigate the world from a wheelchair. Floppy-haired and braver than I could ever be.
“Why are you here, Zeke?”
He turns to face me, and even through the sunglasses, I can see the exhaustion in his eyes. “I’ve been looking for them. Eliana and Yasmin.”
I pretend like something cold isn’t dripping down my spine. “And?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “No credit card transactions. No social media activity. No sightings. It’s like they vanished into fucking thin air, man.”
I say nothing. I keep my face expressionless.
“The police are still looking for them, too,” Zeke continues. “Witnesses for Brandon’s trial and all that jazz. But Bash…” He pauses. “They’re gone.”
I close my eyes and exhale. That’s as close as I’ll get to falling to my knees in relief.
She’s gone—gone from me, specifically, which is the smartest fucking thing she could ever do. She saw what I truly am and ran for the hills. She’s always been a bright one, that Eliana.
And yet there’s still a part of me that wants to ask Zeke to keep looking. Hire a private investigator and turn over every stone in this godforsaken city until we find her.
But that would be the most selfish thing I could do.
