32. Ivan
IVAN
The shop is dark at ten-fifteen.
I stand on the sidewalk with two coffees, look at the dark, and understand immediately that something is wrong. Luna’s shop is not dark at ten-fifteen.
Luna’s shop has been open at ten every morning since she signed the lease. The lights are off. The sign is not flipped. Hairy is doing his laps in the dark.
I wait.
At ten-thirty-five, Cherry comes around the corner with the energy of someone who is expecting to find a thing and is already confused that they haven’t found it yet. She walks like she owns the street, and I recognize her from the break-in.
She stops when she sees me. She looks at the dark shop. She looks back at me. “Where is she,” Cherry says. Not a question. An accounting.
“I don’t know. Has she ever been late?”
Cherry looks at me with an expression that answers the question before she does. “Never. She’s here like clockwork.” She pulls out her phone. “I’ve been calling since nine.”
I hand her one of the coffees because I’m holding two and have no use for both of them now. “I will check the apartment and call you the moment I know anything.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” She parts to open the shop, and I leave before she can ask me what I think happened, because what I think happened is not a thing I want to say out loud yet.
Was Hugo’s apology call a ruse?
If it was, he’s a dead man walking.
Luna’s apartment is empty. I know before I get the super to open it—the silence of a space where no one has been recently. The absence of the small sounds a person makes just by existing in a place. I walk through it anyway.
Kitchen: her coffee cup, clean, on the drying rack. Bathroom: tidy. No residual water droplets at the bath or sink. Bedroom: bed made, her jacket on the chair, her phone charger still plugged in on the nightstand. No phone.
I call Armin from the sidewalk outside her building. I tell him what I need. Her bank accounts, any activity since yesterday. Every camera within three blocks of the shop and four blocks of the apartment. Anyone he can reach at the transit authority. All of it, as fast as it can be done.
“How long?”
“An hour,” Armin says. “Maybe less, if we are very lucky.”
I go back to the apartment because it is her space, and it’s where the answers are most likely to come from. Also, I cannot stand on the sidewalk for an hour without doing something that will draw attention.
I walk the rooms. Stand in her kitchen and look at the coffee cup on the drying rack and the magnet on her fridge that says something irreverent about mornings and the small, framed photograph on the counter of her, Cherry, and a woman I don’t recognize, all three of them laughing at something outside the frame.
I will end Hugo. This has his fingerprints all over it. Has to be him.
I have pictured killing him many times over the years, and I will take a sample of all the methods and torture him. Call in my doctor to patch him up. Then do it again.
The anger builds in me quietly, from the bottom, filling upward. I want to break something. I want to put my fist through the wall and feel the impact, because it would be about what is moving through me.
I don’t break anything.
This is her apartment. These are her things—the coffee cup, the photograph, the magnet she probably got somewhere as a joke and kept because she found it funny, and Luna keeps things she finds funny.
I’m not going to break her things. My job right now is to keep her things exactly as they are until she comes home. Then she will come home, I will stand in this kitchen and watch her roll her eyes at that magnet, and I will not say a single word about it.
Armin calls back in fifty-three minutes. “Jaba. He took her.”
Not Hugo. Fuck. I go very still. “Where?”
“Bank camera on Aldine, two blocks from the shop. Last night, around seven-fifteen. Three men and a van. She went into the alley between the shop and the laundromat, and they were waiting for her.” A pause. “She didn’t fight them.”
She didn’t fight them because she is smart, and she knew the math didn’t work. Good girl. “The van.”
“The plates were covered. But Jaba’s safe house is on Decker, near the burbs. The one you flagged in March. It’s the smart place to go for a dumbfuck like him.”
The one Jaba thought I didn’t know about.
Every property, every lease, every storage unit—I’ve known where all my men keep their second lives for twenty years, because a captain who keeps secrets from the Pakhan is a liability waiting to become a problem.
I don’t wait for problems to announce themselves.
“Get me ten guns. Meet me on Decker in forty minutes. Bring what you need to breach a house.”
“Already pulling the team,” Armin says, and hangs up.
I drive to Decker with the anger sitting in my chest like a furnace door held shut. The fuck did Jaba think he was doing? Revenge? How that dumbfuck got it in his head that this is a good idea, I’ll never know.
It really doesn’t matter. The fix is the same.
I think about Luna in whatever room he has put her in, and I use the thinking to keep the furnace door shut. I need to be precise right now, and anger that gets out ahead of precision gets people killed.
This is not one of those times. I won’t allow it.
Armin is already there when I arrive, which is not a surprise. Ten men arranged around two vehicles, dark coats, ready. He hands me a vest without a word, and I put it on. We stand at the hood of his car, and he shows me the building.
Three floors. Side entrance with a camera they haven’t covered, which tells me Jaba’s operational planning has always needed work. Two confirmed on the ground floor from the thermal Armin’s tech pulled in the last twenty minutes. Unknown count upstairs.
“There will be no mistakes,” I say. “Mistakes get bullets.”
“Understood,” Armin says.
The breach is fast, loud, and total. The side entrance goes first—two of Armin’s men go through it before the camera can be a problem—and then the front. After that, it is the kind of organized chaos that my men are trained for.
Jaba’s ground floor guys fall in under two minutes. The second floor takes longer because there is a man on the stairs who has decided to make himself a problem, and he gets a bullet to the brain, and we move.
I take the third floor myself with Armin behind me. Two rooms, one bathroom, one man in the first room who swings wide and catches nothing but air before I put him down. The second room is Jaba.
He is sitting in a chair like a man who expected this and is trying to remain calm about it, a performance I have watched fail many times. His face is in worse shape than I was told, and he looks at me with the one eye that still opens fully and says nothing.
“Where is she?”
He smiles. “Miss me, Ivan?”
I cross the room in four steps and have him by the collar before the smile finishes forming. “Where?”
“You’ll have to look.” He is trying to sound bored. His pulse is racing in his throat. “I hope you’re thorough.”
I drag him out of the chair. We go through the house—Jaba staggering because I’m making him stagger, because he is going to be useful until he isn’t.
I move through rooms, open doors to look and nothing, nothing, nothing, until I see a seam in the wall of the kitchen, barely visible.
It’s the kind of thing you miss if you’re not looking for it and can’t miss once you know it’s there.
I put Jaba through the door first.
He goes down the stairs in the way of a man who has not chosen to go down stairs—badly, loudly, bouncing at the bottom with the sound of impact on concrete. I follow him down.
Luna. Eyes wide. Alive.
The room is lit by a single bulb. She’s in a chair in the middle of it, wrists bound behind her, ankles tied to the legs. Her face is turned toward the stairs. Her left cheek is swollen.
Everything in me goes white.
Not blank. White—the white of a temperature so high it has passed through all the other colors and come out the other side. There’s nothing in me in that moment except what I’m going to do, and I turn to Jaba, where he’s trying to get up from the floor.
I don’t let him get up.
What follows is not a fight. It’s a reckoning.
I bring the full weight of everything I’m down onto him on the concrete floor of his own basement, and I don’t stop until there is nothing left but pulp and bone and viscera.
I stand and breathe once. I turn away from Jaba’s mess, and I cross to Luna. I don’t have words left in my mind. That roar—the one that always comes with violence—is the only sound in my head.
I crouch in front of her, and I look at her face. The swelling, the exhaustion beneath it, the shadow around her eyes that is dehydration and shock. I untie her as fast as my bloody hands let me.
Then, I take her face in both hands as carefully as I have ever touched anything in my life. “No one is going to hurt you again. I will spend whatever I have left to make sure of it. Even if you don’t want me near you. Even then.”
She looks at me for a half-second.
Then she comes forward out of the chair and into my arms, and she locks her arms around my neck, and she doesn’t let go.
I hold her, I don’t let go either, and the basement is quiet around us.
Her body heaves against mine, like she’s trying to vomit her tears and can’t.
I stay steady for her until she releases me.
She doesn’t really. She still leans against me, like I’m the reason she can stand.
I keep one arm around her and walk her up the stairs, through the house, and out into the air, where Armin is waiting with a car and a blanket and a bottle of water.
For a moment, she merely breathes in the fresh air.
“The house,” I say to Armin, over Luna’s head.
“When you’re clear.”
I get Luna into the car and sit beside her. I tell the driver to go. Behind us, as we pull away from the curb, the first window of Jaba’s safe house begins to glow.
I don’t look back. I look at Luna.
She is looking at me. Her face is swollen, and her eyes are wet. But she’s still here, still herself, and hasn’t let go of my hand.
I don’t look back, but I see Armin’s fire reflecting in her eyes. When he’s done with the place, no one will find evidence of our presence.