face and noticed the dozens of messages from Benny and Lena. “Oh, my God!”
“What?”
“Vivian is in labor!” I hastily typed a message in the group chat. Seconds later, Benny replied with an update. “This is so exciting!”
“Is it?” Ruby seemed uncertain.
“Of course, it is! Babies are always exciting.”
“If you say so,” she replied, still unconvinced. “I need to stop by the gym or have Ivan bring home my bag. I left it in the break room.”
“I’ll tell him.” I swiped my phone screen and tapped his number in my recent calls list. The ring tone repeated four times before going to voicemail. “Hey, it’s me. We’re headed back to the Warehouse. Ruby left her bag. We’re going for dinner after if you want to come with us or we can do takeout for the house. Call me back. Love you.”
Beside me, Ruby was on her phone. As I drove across the church parking lot, she said, “I’m making a list of all the guards I remember and the ones I think were in the room that night. Do you think Ivan knows anyone that can get into the employee records at the jail? Someone who can get copies of the work schedules? We could figure out who was working that night and make a list of potential perpetrators in that room. Then, we could see if any of them have ties to Mueller or Teague.”
“He knows someone,” I said, thinking of Kostya.
“Good.”
I didn’t tell her that there might be another angle we could work to get more help from Ivan’s old crew. If Mueller and his cronies were trying to push into Houston and become bigger players in the underworld scene, Nikolai would want to stop him. If we could dig up connections between Mueller and what was happening in the jail, Nikolai could use that to run Mueller out of town.
“Where’s Ivan’s SUV?” Ruby asked when we pulled into the Warehouse parking lot.
“No idea.” I parked in my usual spot. “He probably had to run out on an errand.”
But, as I stepped inside the gym and caught Paco’s attention, I realized something was very wrong. He shuffled toward me, his arthritic legs moving as fast as they could, and my stomach clenched with anxiety. I hurried to meet him and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Ivan,” he said in a rush. “Something happened in the office. He was upset. He looked like he was having a heart attack. He said he to go, and he left.”
“Did he say where he was going? To the hospital?” I asked, starting to shake with fear. “Do you think it was a heart attack?”
“I don’t know, Erin,” Paco admitted, just as upset as me. “He looked bad. Pale, sweating, breathing hard.”
“Was it a panic attack?” Ruby asked after hearing the description.
“You said he was in my office?” I prompted Paco. “Doing what?”
“He was behind your desk. He may have been reading email?”
Without another word, I raced to my office, my heels clacking as I precariously maintained my balance. Ruby jogged by me and said, “I’m going to grab my bag. I’ll be right back.”
In my office, I moved to the chair behind my desk and sat down to see if anything was different or missing. I noticed a note in Ivan’s terrible handwriting to ask Ken about a physical therapist. I quickly woke up my computer and found myself staring at my inbox. My gaze settled on the one read email at the very top of the inbox. It was from the fertility clinic.
My heart flipped in my chest. Was this what had sent him into a tailspin? Was it what I feared most? Was I completely infertile? Or worse? Had they found something seriously wrong with me in the ultrasounds and bloodwork?
I opened the email and quickly scanned the message from the nurse. My legs went wobbly, and I was glad I was sitting down as I reread the part about Ivan’s semen analysis. Oh, no! Oh, God!
No wonder he panicked and left. All this time, we had assumed the problem was me. He must have been blindsided to learn he was almost sterile. He was a proud man, alpha and aggressive and protective, but under that hard exterior, he had a gentle and loving heart. He had spent so much of his life feeling unworthy and unwanted. To find out that he was the reason we weren’t conceiving must have been like a knife to the chest.