Page 79 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

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 preciseright 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 manytimes. 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.