26. Ivan
IVAN
Her name on my phone at seven in the morning is not unusual. Her voice when I answer is.
Luna doesn’t panic. I’ve seen her receive news that would have unraveled most people, and she has met it with insane steadiness.
So, when I hear the controlled quality in her voice—not calm, controlled, which is different, which is what calm looks like when it is being held together by force—I’m already reaching for my jacket before she finishes the sentence.
“Someone broke into my shop,” she says.
“Are you there now?”
“Just arrived.”
“Stay outside until I get there.”
“Ivan—”
“Luna. Outside! Now!”
But then her tone shifts as she squeaks, “Hairy!”
“Luna!” I shout. “The fish is fine!”
“They could have hurt him?—”
“Please, Luna! No one is going to hurt your fish! Please wait for me!”
Her gasps break over and over. “Okay.”
I’m there in eleven minutes, and I park badly and don’t care and run the last half-block because the closer I get, the more I see the full picture before she sees me seeing it.
She’s standing on the sidewalk in front of the shop with her arms crossed, her jaw set, and her green eyes moving over the damage, with the expression of a person taking inventory because inventory is something to do, and something to do is better than nothing.
The front window is gone. Not cracked—gone, the glass spread across the sidewalk and into the shop in a scatter that caught the early light and threw it everywhere.
Through the empty frame, I can see the interior. Shelves pulled, product on the floor, the handmade display she’d shown me photographs of with the quiet pride of someone who doesn’t admit to quiet pride knocked sideways off its base.
I stand next to her and look at it. There are no words for how angry I am. “Let me go check on Hairy first, okay?”
She nods, tears in her eyes.
I step over the broken window into the shop, gun in hand. I check every possible hiding spot—that’s how some of these guys do it. Wait until you’re distracted from the damage, then grab their target. But there’s no one in here. Then, I check the fish.
I shout, “Hairy’s okay! You can come in now!”
She joins me, racing to Hairy’s bowl, where he swims back and forth. “Okay, little man. I can breathe again.” Then, she spies the devastation around us. “Don’t say anything reassuring,” she says, without looking at me.
“I wasn’t going to.”
She nods once. We stand there for a moment in the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling, and in that silence I’m doing several things at once—cataloguing the damage, estimating cost, and managing something in my chest that has no practical value but is present regardless.
I want to murder whoever did this. With my bare hands.
She picks up the broom from behind the counter—still upright, which strikes me as the kind of small detail that means something without meaning to—and begins sweeping glass.
I watch her for a moment. Her movements are efficient and quiet. There’s something in the set of her shoulders that breaks something in me cleanly and without warning.
I find a second broom in the back.
We sweep in silence for a few minutes. Then she says, without stopping, “There’s a quarter on the counter. Tail side up. They didn’t break into the cash register or the safe, so weird, right?”
I stop sweeping. “Yeah. Weird.”
I walk to the counter. The quarter is sitting in the center of it, placed, not dropped—the difference is visible if you know to look for it.
Tail side up. I look at it for a long moment and feel something move through me that is not anger yet, because anger is a feeling and what moves through me is colder than that and has more weight.
It’s Hugo.
The window, the inventory, the cruelty of it—all of that I had suspected from the moment I heard her voice on the phone. But the quarter confirms it in a way that removes suspicion and replaces it with fact.
It’s what we leave. My organization. A quarter, tail-side up is a message that you know who sent it, but there’s nothing you can prove. I’ve used it myself, in rooms that needed a reminder of where the power sat.
Seeing it here, on Luna’s counter, in Luna’s shop, placed by a man who used to sit across my table and eat my food?—
“Ivan.”
I look up. She has stopped sweeping. She’s watching me with those green eyes, and her expression is the too-calm one, the one that worries me more than distress would. “It means something, doesn’t it?”
I explain it. What it means, who it was. She nods. She looks at the quarter for a moment, then back at me.
I assure her, “I know it won’t happen again.”
“I believe you.” She sets the broom against the counter. “That’s what scares me.”
I wait.
“I’m not afraid for myself,” she says. “I’m afraid of what you’ll do.”
“That’s not something you need to worry about.”
“I’m in your life.” She says it simply, without heat. “That makes what you do mine, too. And vice versa.” A beat. “We’re in this together, right?”
I look at her for a long time. The shop is quiet around us, glass on the floor, light coming in through the empty window frame. She stands in the middle of it with her arms at her sides and her chin level..
“Right. Together.”
Something in her face settles. She picks the broom back up. “I didn’t build this shop to bring violence into the world. I built it because I wanted to bring light into dark places.”
“I know you have no stomach for violence, Luna. But these things must be handled the right way the first time, or they will continue.”
She sweeps a slow arc of glass toward the dustpan. “If this is a Bratva thing, handle it your way. That’s your world, and I’m not naive about it. But if this is Hugo, and it’s just about us—don’t retaliate on my behalf. Okay?”
I swallow something down that’s been building since I saw the quarter on her counter. It goes down hard, and it sits in my chest like a coal. “Okay.”
It is the most I have ever conceded to anyone in my adult life, and she can probably see that, though she has the grace not to say so. She just nods and goes back to sweeping. I go back to sweeping.
Ten minutes later, the bell above the door opens, and her employees arrive in a rush—two of them, a young woman with a paint-stained jacket who immediately starts crying when she sees the shelves, and a tall young man who goes straight to the destroyed display and starts righting it with his hands before he’s even put his bag down.
The young woman shoots to Luna. “Are you okay?”
She puts a hand on the young woman’s back and says something I can’t hear, and the crying doesn’t stop but it changes register—less panicked, more the ordinary grief of someone who has been seen.
She gives the young man a task, and he takes it with both hands.
I watch her absorb their distress and redirect it into motion, calm and steady, the eye of the whole thing.
She’s good at this. She’s good at a lot of things I don’t think she gets enough credit for, including the hard work of making people feel less alone in a bad moment. It’s a skill I’ve never had and have never needed until recently.
I look at the two of them. They’re upset the way people are when something that matters to them has been damaged, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing useful I can do about their distress.
I’m a man who has never in his adult life not known what to do next, but now, I’m standing in a candle shop holding a broom and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
This is new. I don’t enjoy it.
It is not the kind of thing I’m known for. But I’ve been in enough rooms after enough hard things to know that sometimes the only move available is a small, warm, useless one, and that those moves matter more than they should.
I go next door, which is a diner that has been open since six, and I come back ten minutes later with two boxes of donuts and a carrier of four coffees.
Luna looks at me when I come back through the door.
Her employees look at me. I set everything on the counter next to the quarter, which I then pocket it without comment.
“Oh,” the young woman with the paint-stained jacket says, in a voice that is still wet around the edges. “That’s a good idea.”
“Eat something,” I say, my voice tinged with awkwardness.
The young woman with the paint-stained jacket takes a donut and says thank you in a voice that is still working its way back to steady. I nod at her and feel, obscurely, like I have done one right thing in a morning that has required several things of me I was not fully equipped for.
Luna watches me do all of this with an expression I cannot fully read, which is unusual—I’ve gotten reasonably good at reading her, and she has gotten reasonably comfortable letting me.
There is too much in front of me right now—broken glass, her employees, the quarter in my pocket doing things to my blood pressure I would rather not sit with—to sort through an expression. Later.
I stay long enough to be sure the display is going to be righted, the window is going to be measured for replacement, and the employees have their assignments and something to eat. Then I catch Luna’s eye across the shop.
She’s standing in the middle of her damaged inventory with a coffee in her hand and her employees around her, and the morning light coming through the empty window frame at an angle that makes the remaining glass on the floor glitter.
She looks at me with those green eyes and gives me a small nod. It feels like permission.
I go.
Helplessness is an itchy, ill-fitting suit. I wore it for forty-five minutes in that shop and I’m done with it. I intend to take it off in the most efficient way I know.
Hugo has answered my question. He did not choose option A or option B. He chose a third option that was not on the table, which tells me what he thinks of my terms and what he thinks of me. A miscalculation that belongs entirely to him and which I intend to correct.
Luna asked me not to retaliate if this was personal. I told her okay, and I meant it. And I mean it still.
This is not retaliation. This is consequence, and consequence is something else entirely. The difference matters to me even if it wouldn’t matter to most people I know.
He wants to play it this way?
Fine. We’ll play.