31. Luna
LUNA
He comes back.
I don’t know how long I’ve been down here. It’s been hours, at least. Maybe a day. Long enough for the fear to move through its first stage and into something else. Not sure what exactly. Cold in the base of my stomach, but organized. Manageable?
Or I’m just nuts.
I’ve been sitting on the floor with my back against the concrete wall because the floor is the only option besides the stairs, and the stairs are where the men come down. I don’t want to be any closer to them than I have to be. The wall is better than nothing.
I have been doing what I do when I’m frightened, which is make lists. What I know: one door, one bulb, no windows, no phone.
What I don’t know: where I am, how far from the shop, how long I’ve been here.
What I have: my keys, which they didn’t take, and which are useless for a locked door but are better than nothing, if I need to jab an eye out, and that the Walking Bruise is connected to Ivan, which means Ivan will eventually know something is wrong, which means I have to stay alive and functional until that happens.
I’m not crying. I notice this about myself with something that’s not quite pride but is adjacent to it—I’m sitting on a concrete floor in a basement with no phone and a locked door, and I’m making a list instead of crying.
That’s either resilience or dissociation, and tonight I’m choosing to call it resilience.
I’m still making the list when the door opens.
He comes down the stairs with the careful movement of a man whose body is hurting him, which gives me a small, mean satisfaction that I don’t show on my face.
In the light from the single bulb, he looks worse than he did in the alley.
He brings a chair from somewhere. A folding one, metal, the kind that belongs in a church hall or a school cafeteria, which is such a mundane detail of a kidnapping that my brain automatically notes it as new information to cling to.
He sets it in front of me and sits in it backward, arms crossed over the top, looking down at where I’m sitting on the floor like he arranged the geography on purpose. He probably did. Men like him usually do. Briefly, I wonder whether he plans to beat me with the chair.
“Jaba,” he says, like he’s introducing himself at a dinner party. “In case you were wondering.”
“Luna. But you already know that.”
“Ivan’s woman.” He says it like it tastes like something bad.
“Ivan’s ex. Like I told you.”
“You’re carrying his child.”
“That doesn’t make us together. People have children without being together all the time.”
He waves this off. “He’ll come for you. Men like Ivan always come for their things.”
The pregnancy is the only leverage I have in this room, and I have already spent it. It bought me a night in a basement instead of a switchblade, so I will take that trade. I’m not going to give him anything else for free. “Maybe.”
“This puts me at an advantage, you know. Something Ivan will never see coming.”
“Bully for you.”
“It’s funny. I never pegged Ivan as the sentimental type. But there’s you. Proof the old man’s gotten soft. Pathetic.”
I roll my eyes. “And you’re down here bitching about him to me because you’re so tough?”
Something flashes through his face. Anger.
Bravado. A mix. “Armin is going to flip on Ivan. When he sees how soft Ivan really is, that man will flip. The moment he does, all of Ivan’s smartest captains will, too.
I’ve been laying groundwork for months. Ivan’s legacy dissolves.
I step into the space it leaves. The organization continues, and everyone adjusts. That’s how this goes.”
I let him talk because men who want to be admired for their plans keep talking if you let them. Every word is information, and information is the only currency I have right now. “Why are you telling me this? Do you think I would help you ruin Ivan?”
He smiles. It’s the smile from upstairs, the sinister one, but there’s something else in it now—something that enjoys itself. Something that gets something from this specifically, from sitting across from a woman in a basement and watching her understand what her situation is.
“It’s fun to brag. Besides.” He tilts his head. “It’s not like you’re leaving this place alive.”
I feel it move through me—the cold, the lurch, the thing that wants to curl up against the wall and make itself small, silent, and invisible.
I learned a long time ago what bullies like. Star is a bully. My parents… they weren’t bullies, but they did nothing to put her in her place. They never corrected her behavior. They let her terrorize me for years.
Jaba wants me to be afraid. He’s feeding on it. On the sight of a woman, cowering before him.
Just like Star used to.
I straighten my shoulders as I stand. I let my face go easy. I look at him the way I look at things that are trying too hard, and I smile. “It’s cute that you think any of this will go how you want it to.”
Something shifts in his face. The enjoyment flickers. “Ivan will come,” he says.
“He will,” I agree, cheerfully.
“I’ll be ready for him.”
“I’m sure you think so.”
He stands up from the chair. He’s bigger standing, and he uses it, moving closer until there is not much space between him and me.
I smell him and stay where I am with my back against the wall. I don’t move one single inch toward the smaller version of myself that he came down here to find. He will not find her again.
“I’m going to kill him,” he growls. “And I’m going to kill you. And I’ll enjoy both.”
I want to vomit on him. Instead, I sigh.
Bored. “Ivan will beat you down. Again. And he’ll feed you your balls if I tell him to.
” I hold his gaze without blinking. “So why don’t you run along back upstairs and write your will?
I’m sure even a piece of shit like you has something to leave someone.
A houseplant, maybe. Or a grudge. Whatever you’ve got.
It’s certainly not soap by the smell of you. ”
The silence in the basement is total.
The backhand catches me across the left cheek, and the world tilts hard and goes briefly white. My shoulder hits the wall, and I use it—push off it, get my feet back under me, get my hand flat against the concrete—and I stay up. Barely. My vision comes back in pieces.
When the white finishes clearing, he’s already going up the stairs. He did not wait to see if I fell. That tells me something about him, too. The door at the top opens and closes, and the lock turns.
And he’s gone.
I stand with my hand on the wall for a moment. I listen to his footsteps cross the floor above me, heavy and uneven, and then nothing.
I let go of the wall. I let go of the smile, and I let go of every muscle I have been holding rigid since he came down those stairs. I shudder—once, hard, from the soles of my feet to the top of my head—the whole body releasing what it has been carrying.
My knees go properly this time, and I slide back down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor again. I could take the chair, but he touched it. Tainted it. I press the back of my hand against my cheek, where it’s already swelling, and I breathe.
The basement is quiet. Somewhere above me, through the concrete, is the faint suggestion of a city that does not know I’m here.
I think about Hairy doing his laps in the shop, slow and unbothered and completely unaware that anything has happened, which is the correct way to be a fish. Cherry will feed him. I know it.
And then, there’s Ivan. His text this morning—yesterday morning? The one I didn’t answer, the ones before it that I didn’t answer, and the accumulating weight of all that silence that felt like a boundary I was holding. Now, it feels like a waste of time I didn’t know I didn’t have.
What would I say if I could answer him right now? I know what I would say. I’m going to be furious at myself for all those unanswered texts if I get out of here, which I’m going to do, because the alternative is not something I’m willing to consider.
I press my back against the wall. I pull my knees to my chest. My cheek throbs. I breathe slowly and start making my list again from the beginning, because the list is what I have. I’m going to use everything I have, and I have more than Jaba thinks I do.
One door. One bulb. No windows. No phone. One metal chair.
Jaba. Armin. The organization. A man who does not know Ivan as well as he thinks he does.
A baby that needs me to get out of here.