Page 44 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

I grip his jaw. “Because you don’t want that girl to die.”

“I don’t. He won’t do anything?—”

I backhand him with no consideration to his ability to speak again. He goes down, but scrambles to his feet. “You fucking idiot!”

“Witte won’t hurt her?—”

I charge toward him, “What makes you think you can trust him—no.” I stop, two feet from him. “What makes you think that I pay you to think?”

“That’s your problem, Ivan. You don’t listen to us.”

I laugh, hard and sharp. “I’m listening to you now, Jaba. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”

“You were never going to move me up,” he says. “Fifteen years and I’m still a captain. That doesn’t happen to a man unless the man at the top has already decided.”

“And decided to get what you think you’re owed from Witte instead.”

“You never gave it to anyone.” His voice finds an edge. “You keep it all. Keep every man exactly where you put him, so no one ever gets close enough to matter.”

In the ring, nobody moves.

“So, you risk a young girl’s life to get what you think you’ve earned.”

He blinks away. His voice weakens. “He won’t hurt her.”

“Fine,” I say. “You want to make the calls? You want be in charge so badly? Take me. You take me, the organization is yours.”

The silence that follows this is its own kind of sound. I watch him search it for the trap.

But I wait in stillness. Breathing. Doing the math of doubling the Lavender Girl’s security somehow without her knowing about it. The only thought echoes in my empty head.

Jaba stands. He swings first, hard.

I roll inside the arc of it and drive my elbow into his ribs with enough force that the crack is audible in the silence.

He grunts. Adjusts. He’s fast, Jaba—I’ll give him that, always was—and he pivots and gets a hand in my collar and tries to use his weight.

I let him feel like it’s working for half a second. Let him think the weight matters. Then I drop my center, seize his lapel and wrist, and send him over my hip with enough torque that he leaves the ground completely before he hits the concrete.

A wet thud. Wet from sweat or blood, I don’t know. Don’t much care.

He gets up. This is the part about Jaba I have always respected. He gets up. He always gets up. It is the only courage he has ever had that was entirely his own, and it is the thing that has kept him alive in this organization for fifteen years. It’s the thing thatwill hurt him most tonight because it means he will keep getting up until he physically cannot.

He comes at me again, lower this time, smarter, trying to tie up my arms.

I let him get one. I use the other to hook the back of his knee and collapse him sideways, and we go down in a pile. Then I put a knee into his back and wrench his arm to the angle where the shoulder makes its decision. There’s a slide and then a sudden pop under my hand.

He makes a sound into the concrete. I hold it there for a moment—not long, just long enough—and then release. I stand. I wait.

He pushes up onto his hands. He’s breathing through his teeth.

“You’ve had fifteen years to be better than this. Fifteen years to train, to study, to become something I could not overlook. You spent them hoping to get more instead of earning it. You’re pathetic.”

He gets his feet under him. His left shoulder sits wrong.

He tries one more time. He’s telegraphing it before his weight even shifts. I step into him instead of back, forearm to throat, drive him back three full steps, and take him down onto the floor with the weight of my body behind it. His head bounces off concrete, and his chest empties under me. When I come off him, he is looking at the ceiling, eyes glassy.

His chest still drifts upward and downward. He doesn’t get up.