Page 73 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Luna Ambrose,” the Walking Bruise says. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I don’t?—”

They put something over my head. I don’t fight it because there are three of them and one of me. I’m pregnant, and the math does not work in my favor. I go limp instead, trying to calm the panic in my chest. But they get me to my feet, and then something sharp pokes my lower back. One of the two men behind me says, “You can cooperate. Or don’t. I kind of hope that you don’t.”

I swallow that down. “I’ll go with you.”

“Damn.”

I count our steps, turns, time—left, then right, then up and into a vehicle. Fuck.

The drive isn’t long. But when we get out, I hear almost nothing. No city sounds. No traffic.

We go downstairs, and the air turns stale and wet and chilled. A basement? Concrete floor. When they pull the head bag off of me, my eyes have to adjust to the one bulb’s light.

No windows. The kind of room that was built to be exactly this.

The Walking Bruise stands in front of me. Up close, the damage to his face is even more thorough than I clocked in the dark. Someone did that to him recently. Someone who’s very good at it.

“We’ll see what you’re really worth to Ivan,” he says, and smiles with the half of his face that still moves properly.

I breathe. I breathe once, carefully. “I’m not worth anything to him,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expected it to. “We aren’t together anymore.”

He tilts his head. Then he reaches into his jacket, and the switchblade comes out, sparkling as he flicks it out. He leans close and smells like cigarettes and something medicinal, and I might retch if I weren’t terrified. I might anyway.

“If he won’t pay for you,” he says, quietly, conversationally, “I guess we can end this now.”

My mouth opens. “I’m pregnant. With Ivan’s child.” I have no idea if that makes a difference, but it’s all I’ve got.

The silence in the room is total.

He straightens. He looks at me for a long moment, and the smile that comes onto his face is the worst thing I have seen tonight, which is a night that has had several candidates. He folds the knife and puts it away. “He’ll pay plenty for you, then.”

He turns and goes up the stairs. The light stays on. The door at the top locks with a sound I feel in my back teeth.

I stand in the middle of the concrete floor, and I breathe. I breathe again, I look at the room, and start counting what I have.

One door. One bulb. No windows. No phone—they took it in the alley.

And somewhere above me, a city that doesn’t know I’m here.

30

IVAN

I text her at noon.

How is Hairy?

Something simple. Nothing that requires a response but leaves the door open for one.

I’ve been composing and deleting versions of this text for days, which I will never tell anyone. Three words. Casual. The kind of thing you send when you are not thinking about someone constantly and simply happen to think of them in passing.

Definitely not a sign of sheer desperation for contact.

I put the phone down. I pick it up four minutes later. No response.

I put it down again and go back to the quarterly numbers Armin has left on my desk, which require attention and which I give approximately forty percent of my attention to for the next hour, while the other sixty percent sits on my phone like a weight.