Chapter 13 #2
Amparo set the tongs on the rim. She picked up her clay cup and this time she drank.
"The Kris has spoken," she said.
Rhadamanthys stayed on the stool. He'd kept his hands on his knees through all of it, his mouth shut, which I had to respect even if I was planning to make his life difficult later. The man knew when to let other people do the talking.
Nicu stood. He buttoned his jacket before walking past Rhadamanthys without looking at him and took the stairs.
I stood, and my knees reminded me exactly how long I'd been sitting on that stone.
Rhadamanthys cleared his throat. "So, amici." His Calabrian accent filled the cellar now that everyone else had left. "Do I live to fight another day, or should I straighten my tie and prepare for the noose?"
"You live. Three to two. One didn't give a shit either way."
He exhaled through his nose. He pushed himself up off the stool, all his weight on the good leg, the bad one leaving a fresh line on the stone. He stood breathing, putting something away before it had a name.
Then he tugged his jacket straight, and the mask came back on. "Well then. I believe I owe you a drink. Several, in fact."
"Make it tequila. The good shit, not whatever you've been drinking."
The cellar window exploded.
Glass hit the floor, and I was flat on my back before the sound finished. The second shot punched through the wall above the stairs, and plaster rained into my hair. Rhadamanthys went down off the stool, his bad leg folding under him, and he rolled behind the brazier.
Hijo de puta.
I took the stairs on my hands and knees.
Glass covered the kitchen counter from the sink window.
A hole gaped in the plaster above the stove.
Beni's eldest stood at the hall closet, pulling shotguns and handing them down the line.
My mother had three kids by their collars, driving them toward the back with the focus of a woman who'd decided bullets were someone else's problem.
Dios. My mother in a firefight looked exactly like my mother at Sunday dinner.
Jasper came through the kitchen door with the katana in his hand and hauled me up by the collar.
I could feel his pulse hammering under his jaw.
I grabbed the front of his shirt, held on for half a second longer than I needed to, because the man I loved was standing in my grandmother's kitchen with a sword while the whole world came apart outside.
"Eight," I said.
"With me." He jerked his chin toward the back hall. She stood in the doorway with a knife and her back against the frame, covering the corridor like she'd done it her whole life.
She had. That was the problem.
“Achilles and the Myrmidons?” I asked.
"Looks like it," Jasper said. "Must’ve gotten tired of waiting."
Lorenzo came off the back porch with his hand pressed to his side, looking like a man who'd expected exactly this and was furious about being right.
"How many?" he said.
"All of them," Jasper said.
Another shot took a chunk of the doorframe. I pulled Jasper and Eight back from the hall, and the three of us pressed against the kitchen wall with plaster dust in our hair.
Rhadamanthys came up the cellar stairs dragging his leg, one hand on the wall, the other holding a shotgun someone had shoved at him. He took position by the cellar door, racked it one-handed, and said nothing.
A shape came through the courtyard at a dead sprint. I got the shotgun up before I recognized him.
Danior. Shirt untucked, jaw still showing my fist from the mountain, rifle in one hand and two of his men behind him. He came through the door and pressed his back against the counter, chest heaving.
He was here. He'd lost the mountain. He'd lost his claim. He'd stood in that circle with my fist in his face and yielded. And when the shooting broke out, he ran toward it instead of away.
"Road's gone," he said. "Both ends. They've got vehicles across the bridge and men in the tree line on the south side."
"How many on the south?"
"Enough." He checked the rifle's magazine. "We're boxed in, Diego."
Jasper pulled me into the back hall. He gripped my arm hard enough to bruise, and I let him because his grip meant he had a plan.
"House won't hold," he said. "They're pinning us until the full line gets down from the ridge. When it does, they come through every door and window at once."
"So what do we do?"
"We leave."
"Jasper, they blocked the roads."
"Not the roads."
Eight stepped between us. She tugged my sleeve hard and pointed down, at the floor, at the stone under the floor. She pointed toward the back of the house with the kind of certainty that only comes from someone who's already mapped every exit in every building she's ever been inside.
She meant the tunnel.
My grandmother's house sat on a cellar that sat on a passage running under the mountain to the valley on the other side.
My tío had shown it to me when I was twelve, a candle in one hand and my wrist in the other.
This is how we survived when surviving wasn't supposed to be possible, he'd said.
The passage was old. The stone was older.
Generations had kept it clear and kept it secret because a door nobody knows about is the only door that's always open.
Eight had found it on day one. Of course she had.
I turned to Jasper. A shot punched through the back wall and hit a shelf. Something ceramic shattered. Neither of us flinched.
"Women and children first," I said. "Lorenzo. The wounded. Everyone who can't fight."
"Yes."
"Then us."
He didn't answer. He put his hand on the back of my neck and pressed his forehead to mine.
His skin was cold. His breath came fast and shallow.
The shots kept coming through the walls around us, and he held me there for two seconds that cost him something I could measure in the pressure of his grip.
Then he let go.
"Get them moving," he said. "I'll buy you time."
The kitchen window blew inward, and I turned toward the cellar stairs and started giving orders.