Chapter 17
"There are three cells," Rhadamanthys said, spreading a map over the kitchen table. "Here, here, and here."
I leaned in, tracking where his finger landed.
S?o Paulo, Manila, somewhere in the Balkans that might've been Serbia or Croatia.
The borders on this map were older than I was.
Someone had creased the map down the middle and covered it with notes in at least three different hands.
Red circles, blue X's, numbers that probably meant something to someone who wasn't me.
Jasper stood across from me on the other side of the table.
My fist curled. I could grab him by the jacket, shake him until he explained how he'd kept this from me for a year.
Or I could press my face into his shoulder and just fucking break.
Eight was gone. I'd let her go. He knew what that cost. He'd done the same thing, and it dragged us both under.
I kept my hands flat on the wood instead.
"More here," Rhadamanthys said, tapping the map. He traced across continents to Lagos, then Prague, then Buenos Aires. "Small operations. Five, maybe ten people each. Survivors of Zeus's purges. Some walked away before he could burn them. Others just got lucky."
Lorenzo stood at the end of the table with his arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn't sat down since we'd started this. He couldn't sit down, probably, not with Rafael's name sitting in the air between us and wherever the hell he actually was.
"The main hub is here." Rhadamanthys tapped the Moroccan coast, and my pulse spiked before my brain caught up to why. Casablanca.
I leaned in closer. The city sat right there on the Atlantic, maybe two hundred kilometers from where I stood, practically our backyard.
My family ran people and cargo across the Strait of Gibraltar the same way my grandfather had before I was born.
He used to say smuggling was romantic. My mother said it was profitable and occasionally fatal.
She was the one still running the operation.
"You're coordinating everything out of Casablanca," I said.
"We are." Rhadamanthys looked up. "You have a problem with that?"
"No." I traced the coastline with my thumb. "I have routes."
Jasper looked up and met my gaze for half a second before dropping it back to the map. That was all we gave each other right now. Half a second at a time, tactical exchanges, everything else locked down until after we got Eight back.
"How many people can you move?" Rhadamanthys asked.
"Forty's nothing. We've done twice that in a single night." I straightened up. "The family knows what they're doing. My mother's been running operations since before I could walk. She won't have a problem."
"Just bodies?" Rhadamanthys asked.
"Bodies, routes, and everything that comes with them.
We have communication lines across the western Mediterranean that nobody's tapped because nobody knows they exist. We have contacts in every port from Tangier to Marseille who move cargo without paperwork and don't ask questions.
My cousins run counter-surveillance in three countries.
" I tapped the strait on the map. "You need a forward operating base. The Kalderash are it."
Rhadamanthys studied me, trying to decide whether I was bullshitting or telling the truth. "We need everyone in Casablanca within three days."
"They'll be there in two."
Lorenzo coughed. When I looked over, he had both hands pressed flat on the table and he shook. He wasn't laughing. He was holding still when every muscle in his body wanted to move.
"Rafael's there," he said to the map.
"He's there," Rhadamanthys confirmed. "Alive. Running intelligence operations."
Lorenzo pressed harder against the pine until his knuckles went white. Since the network burned, he'd checked his phone like the laws of telecommunications might bend if he just looked often enough. And now someone had told him Rafael was two hundred kilometers away and breathing.
"We leave tonight," Jasper said, voice stripped to nothing but logistics. "Four of us take the plane. Everyone else follows by boat."
I found my mother with Valentina and the elders.
Took me five minutes to explain the plan.
My mother listened, gave me one nod, and told me to get the hell out of her way so she could work.
Valentina agreed. These women smuggled people across the strait the same way they had since before I was born, and they weren't about to start doubting themselves now.
The plane sat on a dirt strip an hour south, right where I'd left it. A small twin-engine Cessna that had seen better decades but still had all its important parts attached. I did the preflight check while the others loaded gear.
Jasper moved around the plane's exterior with me, checking flaps and fuel levels without being asked. We'd done this before. Brussels, Prague, that disaster in Gdansk. The routine lived in muscle memory, and we fell into it without speaking because speaking meant acknowledging each other.
Lorenzo threw his bag in the back and immediately pulled it out again to check that he'd packed his sat phone. Then checked again. Then a third time. He couldn't hold still, kept shifting his weight like his body had forgotten how to just exist in one place.
"Last time I got on a plane with you, we crashed in New York," he said.
"Someone shot us down," I corrected. "And the fact that we survived proves I know what I'm doing."
"Semantics."
"Lorenzo." I grabbed his wrist. His pulse hammered under my fingers. "Hermano. He's alive. Rhadamanthys confirmed it. We'll be there by dawn."
"I know." He shoved the bag back in and climbed into the cabin. "I know."
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
Rhadamanthys settled into the co-pilot seat with his revolvers across his lap and his Stetson somehow still intact despite everything. Jasper took the seat behind me, two feet back and a thousand miles away.
I ran through the startup sequence. Fuel mixture, throttle, magnetos. The engines coughed and caught. The propeller started turning, and the whole frame shook the way it always did, rattling like it might fall apart before we cleared the trees.
We didn't fall apart.
I pulled back on the yoke, and we lifted off into the dark, heading west toward the coast and whatever waited in Casablanca.
The wheels hit the runway three hours later, and I let the Cessna bounce twice before she settled. I killed the engines and sat with my hands on the yoke while the prop wound down and the vibration faded through my palms.
My mother was out there somewhere with Valentina and forty people on the strait crossing. I was here to get Eight back before Zeus broke her past saving.
Karim's white van waited in the salt air. We loaded the gear without talking and climbed in.
The markets buzzed with vendors setting up their stalls. The call to prayer drifted across flat rooftops. The familiar scent of fresh bread came through the window, but my stomach clenched too tight to care.
Then Karim took a turn I didn't recognize.
Mierda. I dropped my hand to the gun at my waistband. “New route?”
“Construction,” Karim grunted.
The streets narrowed before we turned into a dead-end alley.
Karim killed the engine. I reached for the door and it opened from the outside.
Someone yanked me out and slammed me face-first into the wall.
Stone scraped my cheek and tasted like blood.
They disarmed me quickly and started checking for more weapons.
"Don't move. Hands behind your back."
I turned, and a gun pressed into my spine.
Zip ties bit into my wrists. Fabric came down over my head, and the world went dark. I couldn't pull air right through the hood pressing against my face.
"Jasper!" I twisted toward where he'd been. "What the..."
The gun jabbed my ribs. "Shut up."
They shoved me forward, and I went down hard on metal flooring. Lorenzo landed beside me with a grunt. I rolled toward where Jasper should have been.
"Diego?"
"I'm here, hermano. JASPER!"
A boot pressed into my back. "One more word and I gag you."
The doors slammed. The engine roared. I yanked at the zip ties until the plastic cut and blood made them slick. They didn't budge. My grandmother used to say the Reyes family was too stupid to stay still and too stubborn to stay dead.
Abuela, you should see me now.
The van turned hard and threw me into the side panel. Lorenzo swore beside me. I got my knees under me but couldn't balance with my hands behind my back and the hood blocking everything.
"Diego, stop. You're just bleeding."
"I don't give a shit. Jasper's..."
"I know."
The van kept driving, and I lost track of time in the dark, just trying to breathe through fabric that sucked against my mouth with every inhale.
I tracked turns out of habit. Left, right, long straight, another left.
Then I lost count and just listened to Lorenzo breathing beside me, steady enough to mean he was conscious, uneven enough to mean he was scared.
The van stopped, and they hauled us out, walking us through echoing corridors where the air turned cold, and shoved me into a room alone. The door locked behind me.
"Strip."
"What?"
"Clothes off. All of them."
"Fuck you."
They slammed me against a wall, and the gun pressed into my ribs hard enough to bruise. "Strip. Or we do it for you."
I pulled my shirt over my head, working blind, got my jeans down, kicked off my boots.
I stood there naked in the dark with the hood still on.
Someone put their hands on me. Between my legs, behind my ears, under my arms, between my toes.
The search was thorough, professional, and completely indifferent to the fact that I was a person.
I held still. My mother would've killed every man in this room with her bare hands.
My mother wasn't here. I stood there and took it.
I thought about Eight getting taken by strangers, whether she'd been searched like this, whether anyone had let her keep her clothes.
Then I stopped thinking about it because if I didn't stop, I'd tear someone apart with zip-tied hands.
New clothes landed against my chest. I fumbled with buttons I couldn't see, pulled on pants that hung loose without a belt.
"Move."
They walked me further, shoving me through another door, and it closed and locked.
I stood there, catching my breath. Fuck, Jasper. You’d better not be dead, guapo.
Silence, then footsteps, then someone grabbed the hood and yanked it off.
Light made me squint. The room was stone on all sides, a single bulb overhead, no windows.
Rhadamanthys stood by the exit with his revolvers and that fucking Stetson still on his head like the last hour hadn't happened.
Rafael stood beside him with the eyepatch and scars.
Luka pinned me with those cold blue eyes.
Lorenzo sat in the corner looking pissed but whole.
I met Luka's stare.
"Where's Jasper?"
"Safe. Being processed."
"You hooded him and stripped him and threw him in a cell."
"Yes."
I stepped forward and Rhadamanthys dropped his hand to his revolver. I stopped.
"You want to explain what the fuck just happened?"
"Operational security," Luka said. "Every safe house in this city is being watched. We couldn't bring you in clean. Zeus has tracking devices the size of rice. We've pulled three out of people this month. The strip search, the burned clothes, the hoods. All necessary."
"So you traumatize us instead."
"Yes."
At least he didn't apologize for it.
"And Jasper?"
"Now."
A door opened and Jasper walked through wearing the same cheap cotton, his hair wet.
He looked at me and held my gaze for half a second before dropping it.
I took a step toward him before I knew I was moving but I caught myself and stopped.
My hands had curled into fists, and I couldn't make them open.
That was worse than anything they'd done to me in the last hour because I'd kept steady through the hood and the zip ties and the search.
Jasper crossed to where I stood and bumped a shoulder against me.
Behind us, Rafael stepped toward Lorenzo. "Lorenzo..."
Lorenzo stood up in the corner. He took one step and then he locked up, just stood there halfway across the room, like his body couldn't believe it could close the distance.
Rafael crossed the rest. Lorenzo grabbed the front of his shirt with both fists and pressed his forehead into Rafael's shoulder and just held on, shaking.
Rafael put his hand on the back of Lorenzo's neck, and nobody in the room said a word.
Rhadamanthys stepped forward with his arms wide, all warmth now, like we were old friends instead of people he'd just terrorized for the last hour.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Welcome to the resistance."