Chapter 3 Two
Mierda, the blood just kept coming.
"Don't you dare close those eyes on me, cabrón."
Lorenzo's mouth moved, but nothing came out that made sense.
"Save it. You can complain after I stop you from bleeding out. Again." I pressed down harder on the wound in his side, and he tried to twist away from my hands. "Yeah, I know it hurts. Bitch about it later. Right now, you hold still or I swear on my abuela's santos I'll tie you down myself."
"Go... fuck yourself," Lorenzo got out, which meant his brain still worked and he remembered who to be pissed at. I'd count that as a win.
"Eight. Bathroom sink. Medical kit. Grab every towel in the house. Go."
She ran off to get it while Jasper slid his hands under Lorenzo's shoulders.
"Count of three," I said. "One, two..."
We hauled him up on three. Lorenzo cursed me in Portuguese, then Spanish, then something that might've been Italian, and honestly, that was a good sign. You don't have the energy to insult someone's mother in three languages if you're actually dying.
"Tranquilo, hermano. You're not bleeding out on my kitchen floor. I mopped last week."
"Bullshit," Lorenzo forced out through gritted teeth. "You've never mopped this floor in your life."
"Insulting my cleaning habits while you ruin my floor. Real nice. See if I use the good thread on you."
Eight brought the kit and some towels, then stepped back to the counter, arms at her sides.
I gave her a nod. “Good job. I’ve got it from here.”
Jasper squeezed my shoulder as he moved past. He disappeared before I could turn my head. That man could lock down a feeling faster than anyone I'd ever met, but sometimes one would slip past his defenses and hit me square in the chest. I filed it away for later and grabbed the scissors.
"Just so you know, you're getting blood all over my second-favorite shirt."
"Put it on my tab," Lorenzo muttered.
"Your tab could fund a small military." I cut through his shirt and got my first real look at the damage.
The wound ran deep and jagged, way past what our kit could actually handle.
Lorenzo needed an ER, a trauma surgeon, several bags of blood.
None of which existed in rural Spain on a Tuesday.
"Okay. Fair warning, this is gonna suck. "
"Everything already sucks. Narrow it down."
"I'm gonna stitch you back together with whatever we have, which isn't nearly enough, and you're gonna lie there and take it, and if you criticize my stitching even once, I'm using the dull needle."
"Rafael wouldn't do this to me."
"Rafael put a ring on your finger. The man's suffered plenty."
He cursed me the entire time, which kept us both focused on something other than the fact that I was holding him together with prayers and fishing line, hoping like hell it'd be enough.
When it was done, Lorenzo was unconscious and my hands were slick with his blood. I washed my hands at the sink and dried my hands on my jeans because every towel we had was under Lorenzo soaking up blood.
Jasper had the laptop open and was puffing on a lit cigarette. He'd set his jaw, typing like he was picking a lock that kept changing on him.
"Talk to me," I said. "What’s going on? Is Zeus making a move?"
“It looks like there were simultaneous attacks in New York, Rio, and Lagos. No word from Luka, Rafael, or Hades, but in the space of a few hours, they’ve disappeared and someone has already stepped up to take over each directorship.”
“It’s a coup,” I murmured. “Zeus is making his move.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve got bigger problems.” He spun the laptop toward me, but he might as well have been showing me a screen full of Greek. Actually, Greek would be better. I spoke a little Greek.
“What am I looking at, guapo?”
“They burned us,” he said. “Everything's gone. Primary accounts, backups, every alias I've ever used. All of it.”
I crossed the kitchen and stopped behind his chair, close enough to read the screen over his shoulder, close enough that the heat off his back reached my chest through the gap between us. He didn't lean away.
"Shit, everything?”
He ashed his cigarette and lit another. “We’ve got the emergency cash reserve, and that’s it. They cleaned out my accounts and INTERPOL is putting out BOLOs on our aliases. We won’t be able to sneeze without someone somewhere putting us on Zeus’ radar.”
“Shit. We need to move. How long do we have before they catch up to us here?”
"Twelve hours, give or take." He tried another login and hammered the keys hard enough to rattle the table. "Safe houses are either flagged or completely offline. All my contacts are dark." He typed, paused, and typed again. "Luka's dark. Vincent's dark. Rafael's..."
He stopped.
"Dark."
Lorenzo spoke from the table, voice barely there. "Run that by me again."
Mierda. I turned. Lorenzo had his working eye open, locked on Jasper like he could force a different answer through sheer willpower, even as his focus wavered.
"Rafael's offline," Jasper said. "Can't get through to him."
Lorenzo stared at the ceiling. He closed his eye. "Try it again."
"Lorenzo..."
"I said try it again."
Jasper tried. I put my hand on Lorenzo's shoulder because the expression on his face belonged to a man deciding whether to stay present or just check out entirely, and I needed him to pick option one.
"Hey." I squeezed once. "We're gonna find him."
He didn't respond. He gripped the table edge hard enough to turn his knuckles white and clenched his jaw.
Jasper shook his head.
Lorenzo let go. He turned his face toward the wall.
"Lorenzo." I leaned in close. "Listen. Rafael's the most stubborn son of a bitch we've ever known. He survived a goddamn plane crash and a cardinal trying to kill him and you. He's not dead. The network's down; that's why he's dark. That's it."
His words scraped out of him, rough and wrecked. "Don't make promises you can't fucking keep."
I squeezed his shoulder one more time and backed off. The kitchen went quiet.
Eight had wedged herself into the narrow space between the fridge and the wall, knees pulled up, back pressed into the corner.
She found the tightest spot whenever things went sideways, whatever crack gave her the most wall coverage and the clearest view of the door. She'd been doing it since week one.
He pulled something up on the laptop. A woman's face filled the screen: dark hair, sharp jawline. The kind of permanent scowl that came from bone structure, not mood.
I knew that scowl.
“Jasper, who is that woman?”
He slammed the laptop shut.
"Jasper..."
He looked at me, and whatever was on his face said back off in a language I'd learned to read in Brussels. "It doesn’t matter," he said. “What matters is that we’re fucked, Diego.”
He stood up and paced to the sink, putting the whole kitchen between us. He braced both hands on the edge and dropped his head. The line of his shoulders pulled tight under his shirt. I stayed where I was. Jasper needed the distance to think, and I'd learned that the hard way.
"Okay," I said after a few minutes. "So what's the play?"
"I don't know."
That stopped me cold. Jasper always knew.
Jasper had backup plans for his backup plans.
Jasper had once rerouted us through four countries because one safe house smelled off, and he'd been right, because Jasper was always right.
Now he stood in my kitchen with blood still on his sword and absolutely nothing behind his eyes.
"Then we go to my people," I said. "Zeus can torch every account and every fake name you've ever used, and it Won't matter if we’re using the Kalderash network."
The Pantheon had spent decades trying to map us and never got close.
When I was nineteen, I'd moved a family of six from Thessaloniki to Cádiz through routes that crossed four borders without touching a single checkpoint.
We slept in safe houses that existed only as a name passed from one cousin to the next.
The Kalderash left no paper trail, no digital footprint.
They ran on phone calls in Romani and doors that opened when you knocked the right way.
Zeus built his empire on servers and aliases.
The Kalderash built theirs on blood and memory and handshakes that held for generations.
They didn't need his infrastructure because they'd been running their own since before his grandfather was born.
Jasper shot me a doubtful look. "You can't just walk back in."
"No. But I can ask."
“Diego…”
I stood. "Start packing," I said. "Everything we can carry. I need to make a phone call."
He moved closer and grabbed my arm, sending a shudder up my spine that I fought to suppress. “Diego, don’t burn any bridges for me. I’m not worth it.”
Oh, Jasper, I thought. Didn’t he realize I’d have done anything for him? I’d burn a thousand bridges, entire towns, torch the whole goddamn world for this man, and he didn’t even know it.
“Yes, you are,” I said quietly. I could argue with him all night and he’d never believe me. I glanced past him to Eight. “And so is she.”
He let me go and stepped back.
I called my grandmother.
She answered on the fourth ring. "Diego,” said and I immediately knew something was wrong.
“What’s happened?”
"Your tío. He's gone, mi vida."
The floor tilted beneath me. I grabbed the counter.
Tío Emilio always had grease under his nails, always tried to get me to stay for one more meal. I was always in too much of a hurry.
"When?"
"This morning. Two men came in, shot him, and left." Her voice had already shifted. The grief was still there, but she'd moved it to the side and put the part of her that ran a network across three countries in its place. Amparo Lucenio mourned on her own time.
Two men walked into a repair shop and executed my tío the same morning someone burned the Pantheon down? That couldn’t be a coincidence.
"Abuela, listen. I'm coming back. I'm bringing people, and I need you to trust me."
She went quiet long enough for me to know she'd run the math: who I'd been working with, what kind of trouble followed them, what it would cost her people to take that on while they were already burying one of their own.
My grandmother could fit more meaning into quiet air than most people fit into entire conversations.
"Come home," she said finally. "We'll talk when you get here."
The line went dead. I stood there with the phone against my ear, the dial tone buzzing, and my tío's laugh still echoing somewhere in a shop he'd never walk into again.
Jasper stood in the doorway with a bag slung over each shoulder. Whatever he found on my face made him set the bags down slowly.
"What happened?"
"My tío's dead. Shot at his shop this morning." My fist clenched around the phone until the plastic groaned. “Zeus did this.”
“And you’re about to bring the man he wants most to their doorstep.” Jasper frowned. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” I said quietly, looking back at Eight. “But we’re out of good ideas. Time to start trying the bad ones.”
Lorenzo insulted me in three languages all the way to the SUV. Spanish, Portuguese, and something inventive that might've been Catalan. He was still breathing, still full of opinions about my technique, so I figured he'd live.
"Easy, hermano. Almost there."
Eight had the back door open with a blanket already spread across the seat before we even got there.
She climbed in after Lorenzo and positioned herself beside him.
I wanted to say something to her, wanted to crouch down and explain she didn't have to be on guard every second of every day.
I kept my mouth shut because we didn't have time, and because she'd just look at me with that flat stare that meant I know things about survival you don't, and she'd be right.
I drove. Jasper took shotgun with the katana braced in the footwell.
He'd gone somewhere I couldn't reach, deep inside his own head, and the only sign he was still in there was the way he kept tracing the same line along the sheath with his thumb.
The farmhouse got smaller in the rearview and then vanished completely.
I'd spent two months in that place. Yesterday morning I'd stood at the stove making pancakes and Jasper had reached past me for the coffee, his chest against my shoulder, and stayed there a little too long.
I'd kept my eyes on the pan and my hand steady, and neither of us said a word about it, same as we never said a word about any of it. All of that was gone now.
I checked the mirror and narrowed my eyes. "Jasper."
"Already see them." He had the katana in his hands. "Suka. Hit the brakes."
Two black SUVs blocked the road ahead, parked nose to nose.
The SUV behind us flipped on its high beams, and the whole cabin went white. Lorenzo made a pained sound. Eight drew her knees up tight in the back seat, pressing herself into the smallest shape she could make, and my gut twisted.
Jasper reached for the door as soon as we stopped.
"Everyone stays in the car."
"Jasper."
"Diego. Stay. In. The. Car."
A man stepped out from behind the lead vehicle with his hands in his pockets, standing in the headlights like he had somewhere better to be.
"Hephaestus. You and I should have a conversation."
Jasper turned to face me. I knew that look from Brussels. In Brussels, that look had meant yes. Right now it meant goodbye.
"You remember our plan for if we get separated? " he said.
I swallowed and nodded. Drive to the nearest town. Check into the chain hotel under Mr. Safe. Wait. If he didn’t show up within 24 hours, repeat.
Jasper grunted, grabbed his sword, and stepped out, shutting the door behind him.
He walked straight into the headlights. The man with his hands in his pockets smiled. Jasper’s katana hung loose in his grip.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, guapo,” I murmured. Then I threw the car into reverse, steered around the SUVs, and floored it.