Chapter 11
Diego was inside being the man everyone needed him to be, but I couldn't be in that house for one more second.
I stepped off the porch, and the cold hit me through the fabric.
The SUVs at the end of the road sat where they'd been since last night, one at each exit, headlights aimed inward.
Achilles had added a third sometime after the fight.
I lit a cigarette and walked toward the far end of the property because I needed to be somewhere that didn't have music and opinions and Diego's voice coming through the walls doing things to my chest I couldn't afford.
The grass soaked through my boots. I followed the stone wall past the courtyard, past the kitchen window where someone was arguing about leftovers, and around the back where the olive trees started. The katana hung across my back, and the weight of it kept my shoulders level.
A crack split the air, and I stopped.
Eight stood at the base of the largest olive tree with her arm coming forward. A knife buried itself in the trunk. She walked to retrieve it, yanked it free, and walked back to her mark without looking at me.
She threw again. The blade struck low and left. She frowned at it.
I leaned against the wall and smoked.
She threw six more times. The grouping tightened with each one, but her release was late, and the blade kept burying at an angle that would glance off bone instead of punching through. She knew it, too. Her frown deepened each time she pulled the knife from the bark.
"Your grip is wrong," I said.
She turned.
"Here." I pushed off the wall and crouched beside her. "Let me show you."
She held the knife out. I repositioned it a quarter turn in her palm, adjusting where her index finger sat along the spine. Her hand was cold and small under mine. I held the position so she could memorize the pressure, then stepped back.
She threw.
The crack came back sharp and clean, and the blade buried straight, flush to the hilt.
She stared at it. Then she walked to the tree, pulled the knife free, and came back to her mark. She adjusted her grip exactly where I'd placed it and threw again. Same crack. Same angle.
She looked at me. I couldn't read the expression, but something in it had changed from the flat assessment she used for threats and strangers. I was in a different category now. I didn't know which one.
"Again," I said. "Same grip. Let the wrist do the work."
She threw. The blade punched into the trunk an inch from the last hole.
"Good."
She retrieved the knife. This time when she came back, she stood closer to me. Close enough that I could see the dirt under her fingernails and a scratch on her wrist from the olive bark.
I sat on the low wall and lit another cigarette.
She threw again, adjusted, and threw again.
The rhythm of it settled over us: the soft thud of her boots on the grass, the crack of the blade in the wood, the quiet pull as she worked it free.
I smoked, and she threw, and neither of us needed it to be anything else.
The music from the house pressed faintly through the stone. Someone laughed, and a door opened and closed. The SUV headlights at the end of the road burned steadily, white against the dark.
Eight came back from the tree and sat on the wall beside me. She left a gap the width of her fist between us and put the knife across her knees.
I glanced at her hands. She'd wrapped the knife handle in electrical tape the same way I wrapped my hilts. I'd never shown her that. She'd picked it up from proximity, the way kids pick up everything, by standing close and paying attention.
She had tape residue on her thumb. I had the same residue on mine.
I looked away and took a drag.
She put the knife down between us with the handle toward me.
I looked at it. Then at her.
She kept her eyes on the road and waited.
I picked up the knife and turned it in my fingers.
The balance was off, weighted too far back for throwing, and the edge needed work.
I pulled the small stone from my pocket, the one I used on the katana, and started running it along the blade.
The scraping sound was thin and steady in the cold air.
Eight pulled her knees up and tucked her chin against them, still keeping watch on the road. She leaned toward the sound. Just barely. Just enough that I could tell.
She had her mother's jaw. I'd known it since the first time I saw her on my screen. Nadia had that same frown. Nadia had used it on me the first time I'd said something stupid, which was the first time I'd opened my mouth, and she'd kept using it until the last time I'd seen her face.
I ran the stone along the blade and kept my breathing even.
Eight's hair had fallen across her forehead the way Nadia's used to when she leaned over a book. I kept sharpening.
I tested the edge with my thumb. It bit back. I handed the knife to her. She took it and turned it in her palm, testing the new weight. She ran her own thumb along the flat of the blade, the same place I'd just tested the edge, and I had to look at the road.
Then she stood and threw. The blade went through the bark and into the green wood underneath with a sound like a branch snapping. She stared at the handle sticking out of the trunk.
I stubbed the cigarette on the wall.
"I need to tell you something," I said in Russian and lit another cigarette because I needed something to do with my hands. "I'm saying it in Russian because I don't think you can understand me, and that's the only reason I can say it at all."
She pulled the knife from the trunk and turned to face me. Her expression gave me nothing.
"I'm your father."
She stood by the tree with the knife in her hand, and I sat on the wall with my elbows on my knees, and ten feet of wet grass sat between us.
"Your mother." I stopped. "Her name was Nadia. She had your jaw. Your frown. She was..." I stalled out and tried again. "She was smarter than me. Smarter than anyone I've ever met. And she deserved better than what I gave her."
I ground the cigarette into the stone.
"I wasn't good to her. I couldn't figure out why. Why I went cold every time she got close. Why I couldn't be what she needed." I stared at the grass between my boots and didn't finish the sentence.
She stood still. The knife hung at her side.
"She died, and I didn't even know about you.
Zeus never told me. I found out after, and by then he had you and I was atimia.
Gone." I closed my fist around the lighter in my pocket and squeezed until the metal bit.
"I told myself you were safer without me.
That was a lie. You weren't safer. I was just scared. "
"Alaska." The word came out flat. "I put a gun to your head. You need to know why."
She didn't move. I kept going because stopping would be worse.
"Zeus had you for nine years. I needed to know if..." I stopped. Started again. "If there was anything left. Of you. Or if they'd turned you into something else." The cigarette burned down to my fingers. "So I put the barrel against your temple and I looked at you."
I swallowed.
"You looked back. Didn't blink." The lighter dug into my palm. "And you were still in there. All of you. After everything they'd done."
She hadn't moved. The knife stayed at her side. Her eyes stayed on my face.
"Your mother was like that. She never..." I stopped again. The cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I dropped it and let it die in the grass. "Nadia never broke either. I don't know what to call that. Whatever it is, you have it, and you didn't get it from me."
The quiet stretched between us. The music from the house had stopped, or I'd stopped tracking it. The SUV headlights burned white at the end of the road. Eight stood by the olive tree with her mother's face and my blood and a knife she'd learned to throw by standing close to me.
She crouched. I almost said something, but she wasn't coming toward me. She pressed her finger into the bare dirt at the base of the tree and dragged it through the soil. When she stepped back, I saw she’d written two words in Cyrillic, scratched into the dirt in block capitals.
Я ЗНАЮ.
I know.
My lungs emptied. I gripped the stone railing because the ground had tilted and I needed something solid.
She understood Russian. She'd understood every word I'd said in front of her for months.
Every curse, every muttered aside, every time I'd talked to myself because I'd assumed she couldn't follow.
She'd kept it the way she kept everything. And she'd waited.
I looked at the letters in the dirt, then at her. She held my gaze, and for half a second she was just my kid, standing in the dark with dirt on her fingers, telling me she'd been listening the whole time.
"Lorenzo and I are leaving tonight. After everyone is asleep."
She tightened her grip on the knife.
"You stay with Diego." I switched back to English. "He needs someone on threat before it arrives. You do that better than anyone I've trained. I'm putting you on him."
She dropped the knife. It stuck in the dirt next to the Cyrillic letters.
"Can you do that?"
She spun and came at me.
The first hit caught my sternum and rocked me back against the wall.
The second hit my collar. She was sloppy, swinging with her shoulders instead of her hips, and the Pantheon would've beaten that out of her, but I was glad they hadn't because it meant she was hitting me like a kid, not like a weapon.
I got my arms up, and she got under them. She clawed at my shirt, my throat. She drove her knee toward my thigh and missed, caught my hip, and shoved with everything she had. I planted my boots in the grass and let her shove.
She caught me across the ear, and it rang. Her knuckles were too small to do real damage, but she put her whole body behind each one.
Tears poured down her cheeks, and she scrubbed them off with one wrist while the other hand kept swinging. She scrubbed, and she swung and she couldn't get rid of them fast enough.
She hit me in the chest again. I took it.
She hit me on the shoulder. I took that too.
A sound tore out of her, low and raw. She opened her mouth and her whole body strained toward something, her throat working, her jaw stretching around a shape that was almost a word. Then it collapsed into a gasp, and she closed her mouth and hit me instead.
Both fists were in my jacket, and she was shaking me. She braced her feet and pulled and shoved and pulled again, trying to move something that wouldn't move. Her breathing came in ragged, hitching pulls, and she kept scrubbing at her face between each one.
I went to my knee in the wet grass.
She hit me twice more from above. The blows landed on my shoulder, my neck. I kept my hands open at my sides, letting her hit me until she wore herself out.
Then, when her chest was heaving, and her chin quivering, and her arms hanging limply at her sides again, I put my arms around her.
She stiffened and shoved my chest. I held on, arms around her shoulders, and I pulled her in.
She shoved again, weaker.
I held on.
She stopped shoving eventually, standing rigid in my arms with her fists still balled in my jacket, breathing hard, every muscle braced for the next thing that was going to hurt her.
I bent my head and pressed my lips to the top of her hair.
"Prosti menya, dochka."
Eight tightened her grip on my jacket. She pulled in. She pressed her forehead into my chest and held on with both fists, and a shudder ran through her that went from her shoulders to her knees.
I tightened my arms around her and put my chin on the top of her head. She was shaking. I was shaking. The grass was cold and wet through my jeans, and the SUV headlights burned at the end of the road, and none of it mattered because my daughter was holding onto me for the first time in her life.
I closed my eyes.
She pressed harder into my chest, and I held her tighter.
The cold pressed in around us. Inside the house, Diego's voice rose above the others for a second and then dropped back, and my chest pulled toward the sound the way it always did, but I stayed where I was.
Something moved at the edge of the property.
I had Eight behind me before I'd finished processing it. I grabbed the katana from my back and drew it in one motion, placing myself between her and whatever was coming through the dark.
Metal tapped stone with every step. Then a man stepped into the light from the house and stopped.
He wore a Stetson and pearl-handled revolvers at both hips, gold rings on every finger. "Hephaestus." His Calabrian accent rolled through the cold air. "We need to talk."