My Bestie's Dad Likes Me Wet-Chapter 133 I Had To Come Get You.

NALA POV

I heard the commotion before I got to the long ass corridor.

I could hear low and sharp voices which caused me to increase my pace. This was unusual, then there was the specific kind of quiet that men use when they are two seconds from not being quiet anymore but my brain caught up with why.

Lena was behind me and she grabbed my arm once like she was considering stopping me and then let go because she had clearly already learned something about trying to stop me.

I turned the corner and my stomach dropped at the sight that greeted me.

Three guns held by three of Ivin’s men and they were all pointed at the same place, and in the middle of all of it standing with his hands half raised and his jacket looking like it had lost a fight was Ethan.

Ethan? I looked again to be sure..

Yes it was my brother and somehow he was here in a hidden underground tunnel for me.

My first thought was relief like something I had been clenching without realizing I finally let go. My brother cane did me despite the risks and all.

My second thought arrived immediately after and cancelled most of the first one out.

"Nala." He saw me the same second I saw him and said my name like it solved something I don’t know about.

"Don’t move." One of the men stepped forward.

"He’s my brother." I was already walking into it. "He is my brother put the guns down."

Nobody put anything down, well to be honest it’s not like I was their boss, I was the only outsider and now the only person to come for me is looking suspicious.. I even suspected something weird about Ethan’s sudden appearance but that will be addressed later.

"He’s not armed just look at him—"

"Miss Nala, step back please."

I did not step back, instead I stepped forward and put myself between my brother and the nearest gun because my body made that decision before I had any input on it and once it was made I was committed.

Ethan looked terrible and thinner than I remembered, a cut healing badly above his left eyebrow, wearing that jacket he had owned for three years that I had told him three years ago to throw away.

He had the particular look of someone who had not slept properly in days and was performing calmly with the energy of someone who absolutely could not afford for the performance to slip.

Something is wrong... my brother is acting weird.

He looked at me over my shoulder with an expression that was trying very hard to be relieved and kept sliding into something guiltier underneath.

"You tracked the phone." I said it low, realization hitting me cold that I’ve risked everyone’s safety just to hear from Ethan. If he was able to track me down, who else would take advantage of this?

"I had to come get you."

"You tracked Nova’s phone Ethan."

"I came to get you out." He said it like those were the only words that mattered and everything else I had said was background noise he had decided not to process. "You called me and you didn’t know where you were and you’re my sister so I—"

"You asked me for five hundred dollars."

His mouth closed.

"While I was sitting here not knowing what was happening or how long I was going to be here, you asked me for money. You gave away my bag. You told me to just endure it because at least you were walking around free."

I heard my own voice and it was quieter than I expected, not the usual yelling kind of angry, "And now you’ve shown up here with no plan and no warning and no idea what you just walked into and there are children sleeping somewhere in this building Ethan." 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

He looked at the floor briefly as if having a second thought, just a second, and then back at me.

"I wasn’t followed." He said it with less certainty than the words needed.

"You tracked a phone. If you can do it someone else can too and you don’t know who was watching when you did it." I stopped because I was getting louder and louder was not helping anyone right now. I turned to the nearest security man. "He stays. Nobody touches him, nobody moves him, nobody does anything until Ivin knows he’s here. That is all."

The man looked at me for a beat longer than was comfortable.

I held the eye contact and did not move.

He lowered his weapon and the other two followed a half second later, not all the way down, but enough.

I turned back to Ethan.

He was doing the look. The specific look I had been on the receiving end of my entire life, every time I had shown up to pull him out of something, this particular combination of relief and guilt and the outline of an apology that he could never quite finish forming because finishing it would mean sitting in what he had done long enough to fully own it and Ethan had always found a way to be somewhere else before that part arrived.

"You look different." He said it quietly.

"You look like you haven’t eaten."

"I haven’t really." He said it like a small admission, like he was offering it up in place of the bigger ones.

I looked at my brother and I felt everything I always felt looking at him. The love first, always the love first, and right behind it the specific exhaustion that came with loving someone who kept making you pay for it.

The two had been running together in me for so long I couldn’t remember what one felt like without the other and standing here in this corridor with guns that had just been pointed at him I felt both of them so loudly I couldn’t separate them.

"You should have called me back." I said it finally. "When I hung up. You should have called back."

"I know." He said it and for once it sounded like he actually did.

We stood there for a second in the particular silence of two people who share too much history for any single conversation to cover and then behind me, from somewhere down the corridor, a door opened.

Ethan’s eyes moved from my face to somewhere over my shoulder and I watched his expression do something I had never seen it do before in all the years I had known my brother’s face.

It went completely still.