“But the baby?—”
“—is mine.” My hand palms my stomach automatically. “This baby ismine, Bastian. Not yours. You gave up any claim the night you chose to pick up that bone saw.”
I can hear him breathing, ragged and uneven, like he’s trying not to fall apart. I don’t allow myself to feel bad for him.Lethim fall apart.Lethim feel what it’s like to have something precious ripped away without warning or explanation or the chance to say goodbye.
I realize with an ugly, self-serving satisfaction that I’ve finally done it: I’ve shattered him completely. In the end, it didn’t take much. Just the simple truth of a gummy-bear-sized life growing inside me that he’ll never get to know.
“I never meant—” he starts.
“I know exactly what you meant and didn’t mean,” I say. “But intentions don’t matter anymore. This baby will grow up without you. They’ll never know your name, or hear your voice, or even get the chance to wonder why their father chose the things he did. As far as they’ll be concerned, you died in that warehouse. I’m going to do what I promised I’d do—for Sage’s sake, not yours—and then you’re going to hold up your end of the deal: You’re going to disappear forever.”
Even as I’m saying it, all these things I rehearsed, part of me wants to take it all back.
But I don’t.
Because this is what we are now—two people who loved each other once, standing in a shitty motel room, negotiating the terms of our mutual destruction.
Anything else is a lie.
15
BASTIAN
garde manger /?gärd män'ZHa/: noun
1: a cook who specializes in the preparation of cold foods
2: the place you’ve been put—close enough to watch, forbidden to touch, kept cold while she does all the burning alone.
Eliana might as well have ripped my spine out through my chest. Eight weeks, she said. The math is instant and automatic. It takes me back to the rooftop at Olympus, her skin silver in the moonlight and a moan that meant everything.
Now, there’s a baby. My baby. Our baby. Except no, not ours—hers. She’s made that crystal fucking clear.
The sorrow comes first, a serrated edge dragging through my soft tissue. Then hope, because I’m an idiot who never learned when to stop wanting things I can’t have. My kid is going to exist in the world, and I’ll be a ghost story they never hear. The rage follows. Not at her, no, never at her—but atmyself. For everything I’ve done that I can’t undo.
My hand strains toward her stomach. I want to feel it so badly, the proof that something good came from us even after I torched everything else. But her shoulders are pulled back, her chin lifted in that particular angle that meansTry it and you won’t be the only one of us who severs fingers.So I keep my hand at my side.
I force down all the shit that’s threatening to overwhelm me and check my watch. We have seventy-one hours until Aleksei’s plane touches down at O’Hare. In that time, I have to find Sage, extract him, and disappear before my older brother realizes the corpse in that warehouse wasn’t actually me.
It’s a fucking disaster in the making. Even if Frank comes through with solid intel tonight, we’ll need time to surveil the location, plan the extraction, and execute it without getting Sage killed in the crossfire. And that’s assuming Frank isn’t setting us up, which is a hell of an assumption, given the man’s track record.
“The meeting’s at Saints & Skinners,” I tell her, watching the way her nostrils flare in mild amusement at the name. “Strip club off Route 83.”
“Nice place?” she asks sarcastically.
I snort. “More like the kind of shithole where the cameras conveniently malfunction and nobody remembers faces.”
A muscle in her jaw starts jumping beneath skin that’s gone pale enough to worry me. The morning sickness is hitting her harder than she wants me to know.
“Frank picked the location,” I continue. “Which tells me he’s either scared enough to want neutral ground, or he’s setting meup for Aleksei. And I don’t trust the fucker as far as I can throw him, but desperation makes strange bedfellows.”
What destroys me most of all isn’t the danger. After all, I’ve been courting death since the night I got locked in Tolstoy’s freezer and listened to my brother commit murder.
It’s the fucking math again.
I now havetwopeople I can’t afford to lose. There’s Eliana, who’s already sacrificed her vision and her peace and God knows what else just by knowing me.
And the baby, this theoretical person-to-be who exists as cells dividing in the dark, who will grow up never knowing their father.
