My head drops between my knees. The nausea surges up my throat, and I have to breathe through my mouth to keep from puking in my lap.
What’s making me sick to my stomach is a realization that’s been a long time coming. I’ve tried to ignore it, to keep my head stuck in the sand, but there comes a point when you can’t do thatanymore, and it turns out that that point is when the father of your child beats a man to death two feet away from you.
The realization is this: Bastianisn’ta good man who’s done bad things.
He’s abadman trying his hardest to be good—but when push comes to shove, he’s willing to be bad again.
Badforme, yes—but can I live with that? Are myhands dirty just because his are? Or does he dirty his so I don’t have to?
I don’t know. I no longer fucking know anything.
Bastian lowers himself onto the curb beside me. “He was going to hurt you,” he continues. “I saw the belt in his hand, Eliana.”
I flinch at the memory.The cold tile against my bare skin. The hiss of leather sliding through loops.
“When I broke through that door, you were exposed, terrified, and he was standing over you with his pants undone. I didn’t think; I just reacted. I won’t apologize for that. Because if I’d been even thirty seconds later...”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. I know exactly what would have happened if Bastian hadn’t followed me.
He lied—for me.
He killed—for me.
And he’d do it all again—forme.
“Thank you,” I whisper. There’s more to say, but I don’t have the breath, the courage, or the vocabulary to say it right now.
Bastian’s hand encircles mine. His fingers are gluey with drying blood as they thread through my clean ones, but I no longer mind. I need the grounding.
We sit like that on the curb, two broken people clinging to each other while traffic hums past and the afternoon sun beats down on us without mercy. The world keeps spinning, indifferent to our trauma, indifferent to the dead man cooling on an exam room floor, indifferent to the tiny heartbeat still thrumming steadily beneath my ribs.
We sit like that until the blood crusts and the shadows lengthen and my ass goes numb against the concrete.
Here’s the thing about trauma: it doesn’t ask permission. It just barges in, rearranges all your furniture, and leaves you sitting in the mess wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to live here now.
Bastian’s the mess. Bastian’s also the only thing holding the walls up.
And so, when I feel his attention turn to me, I know my answer before he even asks the question.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks.
The courtesy of that stupid, simple request, after everything that’s happened, makes me want to cry all over again.
I nod.
His lips find mine with a gentleness that seems impossible from a killer. The kiss is soft at first, unsure, both of us testing whether this is allowed, whether we can have this after the horror of the clinic.
But then my hands fist in his bloodstained shirt and I pull him closer.
Bastian pulls me into his lap right there on the curb. His arms band around my waist as I straddle him. My mouth opens to accept his tongue and give him mine. I moan softly into the kiss and he growls right back.
I don’t care that we’re on a public street, or that I’m wearing nothing but his jacket, or that dried blood is flaking off his knuckles onto my skin. I just need to be closer to him, nestled in his arms, because that’s the only place left in this world that feels safe to me anymore.
Bastian’s teeth catch my bottom lip and tug just hard enough to make me gasp. When I bite his lip back, giving as good as I get, I feel him shudder beneath me.
His hands slide inside the jacket, beneath the shredded paper gown, and find my bare skin. His palms drag up my spine, leaving trails of heat in their wake. When I arch up toward him, the friction of his shirt against my nipples tweaks nerves that haven’t been tweaked in a long time.
I rock my hips forward without thinking. The movement grinds me against the hard length straining beneath his jeans, and the guttural he makes ripples through me.
