Bastian's Storm

Chapter Six

At some point in the middle of the night, I woke and hobbled over to the bathroom. I was still a little drunk and thought I might be sick again. I crouched down and leaned against the tub as I stared into the toilet water.

I’d fucked up, big time. I had no idea what Raine was going to do in the morning, but I knew it wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs for me. She said she wasn’t leaving, but did she just mean tonight or at all? Was there any room in her for forgiveness when she had already told me she wouldn’t put up with me drinking again?

I had to convince her it was a one-time deal.

It was, wasn’t it?

As fucked up as it was, I already wanted another drink. It was the only coping mechanism I knew when shit got too deep for me to handle. Knowing my son was out there alone in the world definitely fell into that category.

Raine and I both knew I had a kid out there somewhere, but somehow hearing that it was a son, a son who was now orphaned like I had been, made it all hit home a lot harder. When I told Raine about him last night, she had agreed to wait until morning before we talked about the subject anymore. She knew I was in no shape for any kind of rational discussion, and I had passed out soon afterward.

I dragged myself from the bathroom floor and went out on the balcony. It was dark and cool outside, and the only sound in the air was from the surf far below. I lit my cigarette and smoked half of it before tossing it into the metal bucket. I also picked up the ones I had missed before and tried to sweep the ash over the side with my hand.

If I was going to start serious training again, I was going to have to cut back on the smoking. At least Raine would appreciate that. It was one topic she and Landon would agree upon wholeheartedly.

Probably the only one.

I still didn’t know who had been in our condo, and I was probably going to have to tell her about that as well. Now that I had talked to Landon, the possible suspects had increased by five—representatives from the five crime families I’d be battling against in the tournament. Any one of them could be scoping me out. Their bosses probably wouldn’t let them kill me before the tournament started because there were rules against that, but they wouldn’t have any problem with removing Raine from the situation in hopes of throwing me off my game.

It would probably work, too.

There was the added problem of what to do after the tournament was over. What would keep Landon or Franks from calling on me again? They would always be able to hold threats of Raine and my son over my head, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to stop them. I couldn’t even manage to get Franks to end up in jail when he’d ordered the deaths of sixteen people, including Raine’s father. There was no way I could go to the cops with information about tournament games without landing myself in prison for life, so that wasn’t an option either. I’d learned the hard way that informing on organized crime wasn’t a wise option.

I couldn’t cope with this shit. Even if everything went down exactly how it needed to, and I came out a winner, it wouldn’t be over. Franks and his organization would always be able to make me play again. That fact didn’t change the situation. I was going to have to do this. I was going to have to fight for my family.

My family.

For all I knew, Raine wouldn’t want anything to do with it. Assuming she did forgive my recent transgression, that didn’t mean she was going to want to help me raise a kid that wasn’t hers, and I couldn’t give her one of her own. Maybe she didn’t even want a kid.

No, that wasn’t true. I’d seen it in her eyes before whenever my vasectomy had come up. It was a great way to have sex without pregnancy risk, but now that I was with Raine, other options with less permanent effects would have been preferable.

Assuming Raine doesn’t think better of it and ditch me as soon as she wakes up.

One hurdle at a time. I had to make sure she wasn’t going to tell me to get lost as soon as she got out of bed. Despite my inclination to cut back, I chain smoked for the rest of the night and came up with ways I could try to apologize.

In the morning, I started by making her breakfast.

My head was pounding, and despite four large glasses of water to wash down pain relievers, the usual hangover remedy wasn’t doing anything for me. The smell of the food made me want to get sick again. I was woozy, and nothing sounded better than just passing out on the couch with the TV playing some movie I’d seen a hundred times before. I felt like total shit.

Totally deserved shit.

“You’re up early.”

I startled a little before glancing over my shoulder to find Raine in her bathrobe, watching me. I smiled half a smile and motioned toward the cooking bacon.

“I figured I at least owed you breakfast.”

She raised her eyebrows and sat down at the kitchen table as I poured her coffee and brought the flavored creamer she liked out of the fridge. She blew across the top of the cup before taking a sip.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

I just shrugged.

“That bad, huh?”

“Been worse.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were wrong.

Note to self—say as little as possible today.

Instead of talking, I spoke with actions. I served up eggs, bacon, and toast to go with her coffee. I gathered up all the fruit in the condo and made a little fruit tray for her. I even squeezed fucking orange juice though just the pressure from pushing down on the juicing tool increased the tension in my muscles, and my head pounded harder.

I really wanted to pass out, but when I checked the clock, it was still an hour before Raine would need to head to class.

One hour. I can last that long.

The hour came and went. I cleaned up the remaining mess in the bathroom so Raine could take a shower, but after she got dressed, she sat on the couch and stared at me.

“It’s getting late,” I said.

“I’m not going to classes today.”

“You’re not?”

“No,” she said as she sat back against the throw pillow. “I think we have a little talking to do, don’t you?”

Fuck me.

I looked away and rubbed at my eyes. It did nothing for the throbbing in my head, but I hoped I would look pathetic enough to get a bit of pity.

“I’m not sure I’m up for it,” I said.

“I’m not giving you an option,” Raine retorted.

Fuck me twice.

“Fuck, Raine,” I groaned.

Oh there ya go, drop a few f-bombs on her. That’s bound to help.

She kept glaring.

So much for pity.

“I can’t do this.” I dropped my hand from my head and sat down on the opposite side of the couch. “I feel like shit, and everything I say is going to come out wrong.”

“You deserve to feel like shit,” she said. “I’ll keep it in mind while you explain yourself.”

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. I stayed that way until she cleared her throat and plopped her bare feet up on the coffee table.

I obviously wasn’t getting out of this, so I went for delay tactics instead.

“Can I run first?” I asked quietly as I looked back at her. “Clear my head a little?”

She glared at me. I thought I might have heard an actual growl.

“It really would help,” I pleaded. I was trying for something between pathetic and desperate, but I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Mostly I just needed some time to think about what I was going to say.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Be back in an hour.”

I nodded, got dressed, and took off for the beach.

It was later than my usual run, and there were already a few people milling about the sand. The skies were grey, so I had that going for me; at least the sun wasn’t making my headache worse. The pounding of my shoes against the sand wasn’t helping, but I trudged on.

As the clouds began to thicken, the sky turned a darker shade of grey. Each step along the beach reverberated through my legs and up into my torso and shoulders, keeping time with my throbbing temples. It should have been relaxing and cathartic, but it wasn’t. I wanted each step to take me farther away from the decision I had to make, but I knew it only brought me closer. Even as the huge condo buildings of Miami Beach fell behind me, I knew I couldn’t escape what I had to do.

What was I going to tell Raine?

Sandpipers pointed their beaks at me as they tried to scamper out of my way. I crushed shells under my shoes and dodged washed-up jellyfish as I ran. A Cuban dude with a metal detector walked along the beach just above the tideline with his blue jacket blowing around in the wind. He smiled and said good morning to me, and I ignored him.

It started raining.

Within minutes, I was drenched.

I didn’t care. I just kept pounding the sand with my feet and dodging whatever shit the tide brought in with the waves. If I kept my head down so I couldn’t really see the buildings off to one side or the few people wandering around, I could almost believe I was back on the island.

Except I was wearing a pair of pricey running shoes.

I stopped, ripped the shoes and socks off my feet, and tossed them to the sand up the beach. Maybe someone would steal them, but it wouldn’t matter much to me. I kept on running down the edge of the shore in my bare feet until I couldn’t run anymore. I slowed, walked a bit, and then dropped to the sand and stared out over the water.

My kid is out there.

My son.

I have a fucking son.

The initial shock I had felt over hearing of Jillian’s death had worn off, and all I could think about was him—Alex. My son. My fucking six-year-old son. Landon didn’t have a picture of him, just the name. I had no idea what he looked like. Did he have my color hair? Her eyes? Did he even know about me? Even if he did, would he want anything to do with me? He’d miss his mother and the man who had at least played the father role in his life so far, and he might very well hate me for all of it. If he didn’t know, well…I didn’t know how I was supposed to explain it to him.

I didn’t know how to explain the process of getting him to Raine either.

She’s going to fucking freak out.

As much as I had told her about my past and the people in it, she wasn’t going to understand that there was no way I could avoid the tournament. She’d want us to run, and I’d have to convince her there was no place to hide. If we did run, I’d never find my son.

This was so screwed up, I realized all the shit I had already seen in my life was a goddamn birthday cake with fucking whippy icing compared to this clusterfuck. The freaking sprinkles on top were Landon’s voice popping into my head.

“When all odds are against you, and there’s no way out, you can’t lose your focus. That’s the time you have to find that point inside of yourself—the one that knows there is no such word as defeat—and fucking tie yourself to it, you hear me? If you don’t, you’re lost.”

Strangely enough, the words calmed me. I breathed deeply and leaned my arms across my knees.

I needed to put it all in perspective. I needed to find that focal point inside of myself and cling to it. Once I had my focus, I’d be able to complete the tasks necessary to get all of us out of this mess.

First things first: I got drunk.

Raine was pissed, and I was going to have to explain how it happened. I had the option of glossing over it for the really nasty shit that would follow in hopes that she kind of forgot the whole night I spent off my rocker, but I was pretty sure her short-term memory was better than that. The only other option was promising it wouldn’t happen again and apologizing profusely.

At least I was good at that. With a partial plan in my head, I stood and brushed sand from my ass before heading back in the other direction at a slow jog.

Assuming Raine didn’t pack a bag and head for the door at that point, it brought me to the next item—my son. She knew about him from our time on the raft together. When you’re in a situation you don’t think you’ll survive, there’s no point in hiding anything from each other. I’d told her every sordid detail about my life, the pregnancy of my former girlfriend included. I’d also promptly forgotten about the whole topic because thinking about it fucking hurt.

It was all a lot more real now, and sweeping it under the rug wasn’t an option any longer. I had to deal with it. There was only one way I could face it, and that was with Raine by my side. If she wasn’t there for me, there would be no point in any of the rest of it. If she was there for me, I knew she’d also be there for my son.

And now for the big one: I had to fight in another tournament.

Strangely enough, the fight itself wasn’t my biggest concern. On one level, I knew it would be dangerous—it always was—but it wasn’t the fear of losing my life that caused my concern. No, my worry was what would happen after the battle was over. When I was standing over the last dead body, what would Franks demand next in exchange for Raine and Alex’s safety?

Anything and everything, because he was a cold-hearted motherfucker.

I wasn’t sure if Landon really believed what he had told me or not, but I knew Franks wasn’t going to let me off so easily. I’d testified against him, and there was no forgiving that. He would always use it against me, always hold a grudge. He would want more when the time came, and he’d always know exactly what to hold over my head to get it. There was only one way to stop that cycle.

I’m going to have to kill Joseph Franks.

It wouldn’t be an easy task. A guy like that is never without his personal security. Even if I managed to do it, which was a long shot, there would be one other person who couldn’t allow it to happen without punishment—Landon Stark.

I’d have to kill Landon, too.

My steps faltered at the thought. Though there had been plenty of times I’d wished him dead, and more than one occasion when I seriously considered killing him myself, this was completely different. Despite everything that had happened in the past and everything that was happening now, I didn’t hold any anger toward him. I knew he was only doing what he was told to do. It was part of the life, and he was just as buried in it as I was.

Does Franks have something on Landon?

I had no idea. As far as I knew, Landon had no family, no ties, nothing at all to hold over his head except his loyalty to Franks’ organization and his dedication to the fighters he trained.

Back to the more immediate issue: explaining all of this to Raine. She wasn’t just going to be pissed off; she was going to shit kittens over the whole idea. She knew about the kind of people I had been associated with from her father’s days as a cop, but she’d never been immersed in it. Raine prided herself on being a good, upstanding citizen. She hated what I had done in the past. It’s not like she was the kind of girl who would have married into the mafia for any reason. She was with me under the pretense that I was no longer involved in any of that shit.

But I was. I am. On some level, I always would be.

There was no getting out of it once you were in unless it was in a coffin or tossed in a convenient body of water. Around here, they even had the added bonus of gators to clean up the mess. I had never discussed any of this with Raine because it simply hadn’t come up. I wasn’t expecting my retirement from the games to be subject to recall.

Pretty fucking naïve.

There was only one way to make her understand, and that was to tell her everything. It was going to scare her half to death, and I didn’t want to do it, but if she didn’t realize all our lives were on the line, she was going to fight me the whole way, and I couldn’t have that.

If I was going to keep us all alive, I needed her to have my back. I needed to know she would be there with me, even if she didn’t like it, all the way through to the very end. With her on my side, I’d make it.

I shook the raindrops out of my hair and looked at the watch on my wrist. I had about twenty minutes to get back, and I was going to have to run faster to avoid being late. Adding tardiness to Raine’s list of my screwups would be bad. I raced along the shore, grabbed my shoes and socks when I got to them, and made it back to the condo just in time.

In my head, I told myself I could do this. One more fight. One more fight would get me my son—the only child I would ever have. All of that was much easier than explaining to Raine everything that was happening.

Focus. One thing at a time.

I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Raine was still there on the couch, looking like she hadn’t moved since I left. She glanced over to me, picked the remote up off the arm of the couch, and flipped off the TV.

“You ready now?” she asked.

She’d been crying. I could hear it in her voice, and it threw me off my game immediately. I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms and tell her everything was going to be just fine, but that was a bigger load of bullshit than I could have pulled off.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Raine said. “Where are you going to start?”

“Are you going to leave?” I asked. I swallowed hard as I braced myself for her answer. If she decided she was going to leave, everything else was moot.

“That depends a little on what you say next,” Raine said as she crossed her arms. “I’m pissed at you, Sebastian Stark. I can’t deny that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasted, and I have no idea what to think about your finding out you have a son.”

“You knew I had one out there somewhere.”

“But you never knew anything about him,” she said. “You didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl before, and you never talked about him at all. Obviously, something changed. Did you see that woman?”

I shook my head. I had seen her, kind of, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. The picture of Jillian with her brains blown out scurried around in my head until I pushed it away.

Raine raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked at the floor for a moment to gather myself before I sat on the couch. She turned toward me and tucked one leg underneath her. After a moment of silence, it became clear that I was supposed to start.

“I got drunk,” I said quietly.

“That much was blindingly obvious.”

I nodded and went with what I knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not going to happen again. I just…I just slipped.”

“Into a bottle of booze?” Raine uncrossed her arms and leaned back against the arm of the couch with her elbows. I shrugged in response. She stared at me a long moment before sighing. Her expression softened. “Please just tell me what happened. How did you find out about your son?”

Might as well get it over with.

“I saw Landon yesterday,” I told her.

“Here?” Raine’s eyes widened. “He’s in Miami?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s been here for a while.”

“Where did you see him?”

“We went to lunch at that place up Ocean Drive,” I said. “The one attached to a hotel.”

“You went to lunch with him?” Raine gasped.

I could just see the mental images in her head of Landon and me sipping fruity drinks at some beachside café. It was almost enough to make me laugh but not quite.

“He didn’t really give me an option.”

“Why didn’t you just walk away?”

My arms tensed and I gritted my teeth, which did nothing for my headache. This was the part I didn’t know how to approach. I wasn’t sure I could explain what it meant to be tied to someone the way I was tied to him.

“I’ve told you about him before,” I reminded her. “He’s not the kind of person who lets you just walk away from a conversation he intends to have with you. He asks; I answer. That’s how it works. He had shit to tell me, so he told me over food.”

“And he chooses now to tell you about your son? He had to have known about him before now.”

“He did,” I nodded. “It’s just…well, circumstances have changed.”

I took a minute to figure out how to continue, and Raine gave me the time. I turned to sit with my hands clasped together on my thigh. I twisted my fingers around themselves, wrapped them around my knee as some lame-ass support mechanism, and licked my lips before I went on.

“You know all about Jillian,” I started. “You know she got pregnant and then left with another guy. Well, they got married and were apparently raising my kid in Italy. Last week…”

I trailed off. I didn’t even know how to tell her this much. How was I going to get everything out? This was going to take a lot of talking if I kept stopping, though, and I had to get through it, convince her, and get prepared to fight. I couldn’t waste any time beating around the bush or whatever, so I just blurted it out.

“Well, they’re dead, and now he doesn’t have anyone.”

Raine bit down on her lower lip, and her forehead creased.

“What happened to them?”

“They were shot,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Murdered.”

She sat up a little straighter, and I could see both shock and sorrow in her eyes.

“Do they know who did it?”

It was just like Raine to be concerned about people she’d never met. Even if everything she knew about them was bad, she’d still be sorry something had happened to them.

“They’ll never know,” I said. “That’s usually part of being involved in the kind of business Jillian’s family runs. She’s related to Franks, so she grew up in it. She probably wasn’t expecting it to hit her like that, but the risk is always there.”

Raine eyed me.

“You know, don’t you?” she said. “You know who killed them.”

I took in a long breath and rubbed at my eyes. Apparently, I took too long to answer.

“Bastian?” Raine’s voice went soft, and I could hear the fear in her tone. “Did you…did you do it?”

“What?” I looked back to her quickly. “Fuck—no! Shit, Raine, when would I have gone to Italy?”

She scrunched up her face and glanced away before speaking so softly I could hardly hear her.

“You could have…had someone else do it.”

“Well, I didn’t!” As much as I might have hated Jillian, I wouldn’t have done something like that. The idea that Raine thought I was capable of taking out a contract on my ex pissed me off. “For fuck’s sake, Raine!”

I shook my head and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Well, who then?” she asked.

“I have my theories,” I admitted. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, they’re dead, and now Franks is holding my kid for ransom, basically.”

“He wants money?” Raine said, confused. “I would think he’d have plenty of that.”

“He’d always take more money,” I said with a humorless laugh, “but no, he’s not asking for any money from me.”

Raine’s face went pale.

“What does he want?” she said so quietly that again, I could barely make out the words.

She already knows.

I looked down at my hands on my leg. The words wouldn’t come at first even though they were right there in my head. As soon as they were said, I wouldn’t be able to take them back again. When I looked back at her, I could see she had herself braced for whatever impact the statement I was going to lay on her would have, so I went with it.

“He wants me to compete again,” I said. “He wants me to fight in another tournament.”

Her eyes flew open.

“He wants…he wants…he wants what?” She pushed back with her heels against the cushion and pulled her legs up to her chest. Her mouth stayed open like she was going to say something else, but no words came out. Her face said it all. Whatever she had been expecting, this wasn’t it.

Okay, so maybe I misjudged that one.

“I have to fight in one more tournament,” I repeated. “Just the one, and then he’ll give me my kid.”

“You mean…you mean like…like killing people?”

Ah shit, this was going to go even worse than I thought. It wasn’t that I expected her to take any of it well, but she was flipping out.

“No,” Raine said. Her eyes widened again. “No, Bastian! You can’t do that! You can’t do one of those…those death matches again!”

She stood up and took a step closer to me. With her fists balled up on her hips, she glared down at me.

“No way, Bastian!” she yelled at me. “If you decide to fight again, that’s it. We’re through, drunk or not! I can’t be with someone who would do something like that again!”

The focal point I had managed to find disintegrated. Tingles of dread crawled over my skin as her words sank in. Maybe she’d forgive a single misstep when it came to drinking, but this was too much for her. The idea of me killing again wasn’t something she would be able to handle, and she’d run.

I couldn’t do this without her. If she left, I was dead.

If she left, she was dead, too.

My greatest fear was actualized. At least for now, I was going to speak without thought.