Page 65 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

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 shesees 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.