Even then... I was fucking fine.
I wasn't a goddamn China doll.
"I'm holding up," I said, giving him a small smile, already half-distracted with all the work I needed to do. "Malc is really excited for the sleepover this weekend. Thanks again for having him."
"He keeps Junior from driving us up a wall," he said as his wife walked over toward him. "We're happy to have him."
"We'll drop in again in a day or two," Alex said, giving me a smile. "Text me if you want me to drop anything off for you."
"Will do. And thanks, Al. For being the only one who didn't think I was too weak to handle the truth."
"You? Weak? Never," she said, jerking her chin at me and walking out.
I dropped down on the window seat, put my laptop on my lap, the coffee and the energy drinks at my side, and got down to work.
Really, it didn't take as long as one would think. But maybe that was only because I was personally invested, determined, hyped up on way too much caffeine, and with a desperate need to put an end to the chaos.
Because while personally, for me, it was all about Wolf. He wasn't the only victim. In fact, he was the luckiest so far. He was the only one who had been targeted who was still alive. There was over a dozen dead.
And they weren't going to stop, not when the strongest members were still alive and willing to fight it out to protect them and theirs.
It needed to end.
By early the next morning, I had been able to track them via traffic cams.
"Where you going?" Digger asked from the doorway, him being Wolf's guard for the day. He also knew me well enough to know I was too wound up to just be running for coffee.
"Malc has a school slip I forgot to sign," I lied, internally cringing at using my own kid as a cover, but it was for the greater good.
He was the son of a Henchmen.
He would never be safe until the situation was settled.
So mama had some business to handle.
I left the hospital, hopping in Digger's car, and driving to the outskirts of town, up the obnoxious hill toward mine and Wolf's cabin, expanded from where it used to be a small one-room structure. It currently had two bedrooms, since we had no plans on more children, and a goddamn ever-loving laundry room. In the house, not in that freaking shed a mile away. That shed was a clubhouse for the kids when they came to play.
I parked, climbed out, and grabbed a pair of gloves out of the house that almost felt unfamiliar it had been so long since I had been there, then went back outside and started walking.
Wolf was maybe the only person who knew the exact location of where I went when I needed to do some building. And he only knew because he helped me build it- ten feet under ground with reinforced walls, a hidden door, and several booby traps to keep anyone from stumbling upon it.
Because I wasn't the kind of woman to build dollhouses or model ships.
No.
I built bombs.
And when there were times that I couldn't work at the place Hailstorm had set up for me, like back when I blew Lex's place to kingdom come and didn't want anyone to know I was in on it. And like right then.
Because if Hailstorm knew I was there, they would know why, and then the calvary would come to stop me.
And fuck that.
I wasn't poor little heartbroken Janie. I was mother fucking Jstorm and someone was coming after half of the people I held near and dear and that shit would never fly.
I was not going to be that girl. I wasn't going to break. I wasn't going to sit around and woe-is-me and wring my hands and bemoan how unfair the world was.
I was going to right the wrongs.
I was going to make them pay for thinking we were weak, that we would lie down and take the fucking, that we weren't going to fight back.
Because, for all the fanfare, for all the carefully plotted attacks, Little Ricky's organization wasn't as bulletproof as he thought it was. At least not to me, not to someone hellbent on finding them.
Little Ricky himself, who was every bit as gigantic as Alex had said, was still in Long Island. Because just like he was power and money hungry, he was a coward. He sent others to do his dirty work.
I would leave him be.
First, because a vindictive part of me wanted him to suffer, wanted him to know what it felt like to lose his organization, to worry for his own life, for a while.
Second, because The Henchmen would never forgive me for stealing the chance for them to get their vengeance.