Page 80 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

He goes down the stairs in the way of a man who has not chosen to go down stairs—badly, loudly, bouncing at the bottom with the sound of impact on concrete. I follow him down.

Luna. Eyes wide. Alive.

The room is lit by a single bulb. She’s in a chair in the middle of it, wrists bound behind her, ankles tied to the legs. Her face is turned toward the stairs. Her left cheek is swollen.

Everything in me goes white.

Not blank. White—the white of a temperature so high it has passed through all the other colors and come out the other side. There’s nothing in me in that moment except what I’m going to do, and I turn to Jaba, where he’s trying to get up from the floor.

I don’t let him get up.

What follows is not a fight. It’s a reckoning.

I bring the full weight of everything I’m down onto him on the concrete floor of his own basement, and I don’t stop until there is nothing left but pulp and bone and viscera.

I stand and breathe once. I turn away from Jaba’s mess, and I cross to Luna. I don’t have words left in my mind. That roar—the one that always comes with violence—is the only sound in my head.

I crouch in front of her, and I look at her face. The swelling, the exhaustion beneath it, the shadow around her eyes that is dehydration and shock. I untie her as fast as my bloody hands let me.

Then, I take her face in both hands as carefully as I have ever touched anything in my life. “No one is going to hurt you again. I will spend whatever I have left to make sure of it. Even if you don’t want me near you. Even then.”

She looks at me for a half-second.

Then she comes forward out of the chair and into my arms, and she locks her arms around my neck, and she doesn’t let go. I hold her, I don’t let go either, and the basement is quiet around us. Her body heaves against mine, like she’s trying to vomit her tears and can’t. I stay steady for her until she releases me.

She doesn’t really. She still leans against me, like I’m the reason she can stand. I keep one arm around her and walk her up the stairs, through the house, and out into the air, where Armin is waiting with a car and a blanket and a bottle of water. For a moment, she merely breathes in the fresh air.

“The house,” I say to Armin, over Luna’s head.

“When you’re clear.”

I get Luna into the car and sit beside her. I tell the driver to go. Behind us, as we pull away from the curb, the first window of Jaba’s safe house begins to glow.

I don’t look back. I look at Luna.

She is looking at me. Her face is swollen, and her eyes are wet. But she’s still here, still herself, and hasn’t let go of my hand.

I don’t look back, but I see Armin’s fire reflecting in her eyes. When he’s done with the place, no one will find evidence of our presence.

33

LUNA

It’sdark and it’s cold and I’m on a concrete floor and the bulb has gone out. I can’t hear anything, I don’t know how long I’ve been here and?—

I open my eyes and scream.

Not a small sound. A real one, the kind that comes from somewhere below the chest, and I’m sitting up before I’m fully conscious. My hands are out in front of me because my hands were tied but they’re not tied anymore, and the room is not concrete, it’s?—

Ivan comes through the door. He has a cup of tea in his hand, which is such an ordinary thing that it reaches me before anything else does.

He crosses the room in four steps, and he sits on the edge of the bed, and he doesn’t grab me, doesn’t reach for me, just puts the tea on the nightstand. He turns toward me and waits, his face still.

I breathe.

The room assembles itself around me in pieces—his room, his sheets, the pale late-morning light coming through the curtains, the cup of tea steaming gently on the nightstand, Ivan on the edge of the bed with his face arranged into the careful expression he gets when he is managing himself for someone else’s sake.

I press my hands flat on the mattress, and I breathe until the basement stops being the room I’m in.