Chapter 16
The tunnel mouth spat me out into gray dawn light, and I went down on one knee, ribs on fire, lungs trying to remember how breathing worked. I dropped the lamp, and the glass shattered.
The smell of gunpowder and blood hit first, thick enough that I tasted copper on the back of my tongue.
A lot of blood covered these rocks.
Shell casings littered the gully floor. Bullet holes chewed through boulders that should have provided cover but hadn't. Drag marks scored the earth where someone had hauled bodies clear, boot prints heading south in a ragged column.
Diego's people had fought here. They'd gathered their dead and kept moving.
I scanned the ground for Eight's prints. Small boots, light tread, the pattern I'd memorized from every doorway she'd stood in for a year. I covered the gully twice and found nothing.
Lorenzo stumbled out of the tunnel behind me and bent over with his hands on his knees. Rhadamanthys limped out after him, favoring the leg Eight had opened, and Alonzo came last with his rifle still up.
"Merda," Lorenzo said to the ground.
The ridgeline told the story. Men had come down from the north in formation, set up a crossfire from the high ground, engaged, and pulled back.
They'd had every advantage, but they'd gotten what they wanted and left.
The boot prints heading south were fresh, ragged but organized.
Someone had been giving orders. That meant Diego might still be breathing.
I started walking.
Lorenzo caught up to me. "Jasper. Slow down."
I kept walking.
"Your ribs are fucked and you're going to pass out if you keep pushing."
"Then I'll pass out after I find them."
He grabbed my arm, and I spun on him, hand on the katana before I registered it was Lorenzo. He held his ground.
"Listen to me," he said. "Rafael is still out there. Eight is still out there. Running yourself into the ground helps no one."
He was right. I let go of the hilt and bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to get air past the fire in my ribs.
"Two hours ahead," I said to the ground. "Maybe less if they're carrying wounded."
"Then we keep moving," Rhadamanthys said behind me. "But at a pace that doesn't kill us before we get there."
I straightened up and kept walking.
The trail wound down the mountain through rocks and scrub brush. The boot prints led us around a switchback and into a valley that opened up green after all that red rock. Alonzo stopped short and pointed.
A building sat at the far end, tucked against the mountain.
The walls were stone, the roof rusted metal.
Smoke came from the chimney, and the wind carried the smell of it down the slope, wood smoke and something cooking underneath it, garlic and peppers, the kind of smell that meant someone's mother had taken over a kitchen.
Diego's safe house sat below us. People moved around outside, but the distance swallowed the details.
"Do you see her?" Lorenzo asked quietly.
I didn't answer.
We started down the slope. Someone at the safe house spotted us, and a shout went up, and people reached for weapons. I kept my hands visible and my pace steady.
A man stepped forward from the group, older, broad through the shoulders, holding a rifle but not pointing it. I recognized him from the funeral.
"Jasper," he said. "Diego's inside."
The front door opened before I reached it.
Diego stepped out,, and the sunlight hit his face. He looked like he'd aged a decade since I'd left him at the tunnel entrance.
My knees tried to give out. I locked them to keep from falling over. He was alive. That was something.
I scanned the yard behind him. Eight wasn't there.
"Inside," he said. "We need to talk."
My babushka used to say that when a Russian tells you to sit down, it's because the news will put you on the floor. Diego wasn't Russian, but I'd been around him long enough to know the sound.
I followed because what the hell else was I going to do.
The building was dim after the bright sun. The main room was full of people. Diego's mother sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face blank. Valentina stood by the window with her arms crossed.
Eight wasn't among them.
Diego crossed the room and pushed through a door at the back. I followed him down a narrow hallway that smelled like old stone and wood smoke. He stopped at the last door, opened it, and stepped inside.
The room was barely big enough for two people. A cot sat against one wall, shutters closed against the heat. Diego stood with his back to me, shoulders tight, fists at his sides.
I closed the door, and the latch clicked loudly in the quiet.
"Where is she?" I said.
Diego pulled his shoulders tighter.
"Tell me where she is, Diego."
"They took her."
I grabbed the doorframe. The room tilted, and I held on until the stone stopped moving under my hand.
"We came out of the tunnel into the gully," Diego said to the wall. "Patroklos was waiting on the ridge with at least a dozen men. They had us pinned. We lost three people in the first thirty seconds."
He spoke flat and mechanically, reciting facts that belonged to someone else.
"The shooting stopped. Eight walked out into the open." He stopped. Pulled in a breath. "She spoke, Jasper. First time I've ever heard her voice. She told them to stop."
I tightened my grip on the doorframe. The wood bit into my palm.
Eight hadn’t spoken a single word since the day I'd found her in that facility with blood on her hands and a number tattooed on her arm. I'd started to think maybe she couldn't, that whatever they'd done to her had taken that too.
Her first word had been stop, spoken in a gully with guns pointed at her from every direction. She'd spent a year hoarding silence like ammunition and used her first round to buy forty strangers their lives.
"She walked straight up to Patroklos and asked if he'd let everyone go if she went with him."
I pressed my hands flat against the doorframe.
"He nodded. One nod. That was the deal."
Diego turned around. "I had forty people behind me. Kids, elderly, wounded. Patroklos had the high ground and the guns and all the time in the world." His voice went flat. "I had to choose."
"You let her go."
"I had to, Jasper."
My fingers curled into claws, digging into the doorframe. "She's my daughter."
Diego went still.
"Eight." I tried to get the rest out. The words jammed in my throat the same way they'd jammed at the olive tree, calcified by a year of silence into something too big to pass. "She's mine. My daughter."
Diego stared at me. Everything hit his face at once.
"What? How? Who…”
"Nadia was pregnant when I left her." I stopped. Started again. "In Kiev. I didn't know."
I stopped again. The next part was worse, and my throat had closed around it.
"Zeus kept her alive." Each word scraped out like I was pulling shrapnel from my own chest. "Long enough to cut the baby out. Eight is mine."
Diego took a step toward me and balled his fists.
"I left her mother to die in a field." I stared at the stone between my boots because looking at him while I said the rest was beyond what I could do. "Zeus raised her. Turned her into a weapon. I didn't even know she existed until I found her in that facility."
"You knew." Diego's voice dropped to something quiet that made the hair on my neck stand up. "You knew she was yours and you never fucking told me."
"Diego..."
"Don't." He closed the distance and shoved me hard against the wall. "I had her for a year. A whole fucking year. You pulled a gun on her in that facility, and the whole time she was your daughter?"
He twisted his fists in my jacket and pinned me there.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
"I couldn't say it." I got that much out. "Saying it made it real. And if it was real, then I'd left my own..." I stalled. Tried again. "My own daughter. With the man who killed her mother. For nine years."
"You let me fall for that kid." He was shaking. "I fed her. I taught her it was okay to sleep without a weapon. I sat with her every night she had nightmares, and you just stood there."
"I know."
"You said nothing."
"I know."
"And now I have to live with letting her go." His voice cracked. "I made the same call you made. Forty people or one child. I chose the mission. Just like you did with Nadia. And I didn't even know she was yours."
"I was going to tell you. After. I kept waiting for after, and after never..."
He grabbed my collar and yanked me forward off the wall, close enough that I could count the capillaries in his eyes. My jacket caught on the stone as he hauled me in, and I took it the way I'd taken Eight's fists in the grass at the olive tree, the same debt paid in the same currency.
"You should have told me," Diego said, and his voice had gone quiet. "Before I got attached. Before I had to look her in the eye and promise I'd come for her while Patroklos walked away with your daughter."
He slammed me back against the wall. His face stayed inches from mine. Rage and want and grief all jammed into the space between us.
He shook where he gripped my jacket. I could track the war in his jaw, the way the muscles clenched and released.
I grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him in.
The kiss was hard enough to hurt. He growled against my mouth, something raw and furious, and then he kissed me back with teeth and grief and every ounce of anger he'd been holding in since that gully.
He bit my bottom lip, and I tasted copper. I fisted my hand in his hair and yanked his head back, dragged my teeth down his throat. He shoved me harder against the wall. My ribs lit up, and I didn't care.
He pulled back and dug his nails across my chest through my shirt.
My whole body arched into it. He dragged down hard enough that the sting burned through the fabric, and my hips jerked forward.
"Fuck you," he said against my jaw.
"Yeah." I bit his collarbone through his shirt. "Fuck you too."
He shoved me around to face the wall. I braced against the stone. He yanked my shirt up and set his nails against my bare back and dragged down from my shoulders to my waist, ten lines of fire that lit up every nerve between my skin and my spine. The sound that came out of me bounced off the stone.
He did it again, harder. The welts rose under his nails. I pressed my forehead against the wall and shook.
"You hid from me for a year," he said against my shoulder blade. "Right here. Right now. You don't get to hide."
He reached around and went for my belt. The leather cracked when he yanked it open.
He got my jeans down and wrapped his hand around my cock, and the contact sent everything sideways.
My knees buckled. He caught me against the wall with his body, pinning me there with his weight while he stroked me.
He raked his nails down my back again, digging into the welts he'd already left. Everything narrowed to Diego. He stroked my cock and pinned me against the stone with his chest, breathing ragged against my neck.
He scored his nails across my hip, and I jerked in his grip, but he held me tighter and kept going, dragging marks across my stomach, my ribs, my sides, each one sharper than the last.
"Diego." My voice broke on the second syllable.
"I know." He pressed his nails into the raw skin over my ribs and dragged down while he stroked me faster. "And tomorrow, when you can still feel where I've been, you're going to remember that you owe me the truth. Every time. About everything."
My whole body seized. I came hard into his hand, and my legs gave out. He caught me against the wall and held me through it while the aftershocks jerked through my muscles. I couldn't stop the sounds or the way my knees buckled or any of it.
He held on until I stopped. Then his belt buckle rattled behind me.
He pressed himself between my thighs and leaned his forehead against the back of my neck, breathing hard.
He gripped my hip where he'd scored the welts, fingers digging into the marks he'd made.
He rocked against me, and a sound built in his chest that I tracked through the vibration against my spine, low and tight and breaking apart at the edges.
He came in three rough strokes, spilling hot against my skin, and the sound that tore out of him was more grief than release.
We stayed there, breathing hard. Then he stepped back.
Water ran. A cloth hit my hand.
"Clean up," he said. His voice was flat and emptied out.
I cleaned myself off and pulled my jeans up. My belt lay on the floor in two pieces where he'd torn it open.
I needed a cigarette. The craving sat in my chest like a second heartbeat.
Diego stood by the window with his back to me.
He'd buttoned his shirt wrong, and bruises already marked his neck where I'd held him during the kiss.
The welts on my back and stomach throbbed under my shirt, and I pressed my arm against my ribs to feel them sting.
"We need to get her back," I said.
"I know." He didn't turn around. "I made her a promise."
"I left her mother to die." I stared at his back. "I'm not leaving her."
"There's an airstrip half a mile from here," he said to the window. "I can get us in the air. Rhadamanthys says he knows where the resistance is gathering."
"When?"
"Tonight. Soon as it's dark."
Koschei buried his soul on an island because love was the thing that could kill him. I'd spent ten years proving that right. The soul wasn't buried anymore, though. It walked around in a nine-year-old body with Zeus's men, and we were going after it anyway.
"Then we go tonight," I said.