Chapter 27 #2
Mila shifted her weight toward me, just barely, like she kept recalculating where safe was.
Zeus leaned forward and wiped a smudge off the coffee table with his thumb. "Tomorrow I'm throwing her a birthday party," he said, inspecting the clean spot. "Witnesses from the Directorate will formalize her position as my heir."
"Your heir," Jasper said.
"Someone has to lead when I'm gone." Zeus softened as he looked at Mila. "Someone who understands that power isn't violence. It's control."
He stood. "You're welcome to attend. Eight deserves to have her father there."
"I'm not leaving without her," Jasper said.
Zeus smiled. "I'm not asking you to leave."
Mila looked at me, then at Jasper. "Do you want to see my room?"
The hope in it wrecked me.
"Yeah, pequena," I said. "We'd love to."
She grabbed my hand and pulled. I followed. Jasper came behind us, and when I glanced back his good hand hovered at his side. He wanted to reach for her. I could read it in the angle of his wrist.
Her room was at the end of the hallway. She pushed the door open and went in ahead of us.
It looked like a kid's room. She had a bed with a purple comforter and stuffed animals lined against the pillows. Books filled a shelf, colored pencils scattered across the desk, and drawings covered the walls.
My throat closed. This was what I'd wanted for her. A real room, a real bed, a place where she could be safe.
Then I looked closer at the drawings.
The walls showed tactical diagrams, guard rotations, and building layouts. She'd marked escape routes in red. The stuffed animals sat at even intervals along the bed, serving as line-of-sight markers. The books on the shelf mixed fairy tales with strategy texts, Sun Tzu next to Grimm.
My stomach turned over. The kitchen had hurt. This made me sick.
Jasper stood in the doorway and took it all in. He went blank the second he clocked the drawings. I stepped close until my shoulder pressed his, and he leaned into the contact.
Mila went to her desk and picked up a wooden puzzle box. "Patéras gave me this. You have to solve it to open it." She held it out to Jasper. "Want to try?"
Jasper took it. He shook, just slightly. He turned the box over, examining the mechanism.
"There's a trick," Mila said. She climbed onto her bed, cross-legged, watching him. "You have to think about what you can't see."
Jasper ran his fingers along the edges and found a hidden slide. A panel shifted. The lock clicked.
"Good!" Mila bounced once. "Now, the next part."
I leaned against the doorframe while Jasper solved a puzzle and his daughter coached him through it. The first time he'd played with her. The first time she'd shown him something she was proud of. And it happened in Zeus's house, with Zeus's gifts, under Zeus's roof.
The box opened. Inside sat a small wooden horse, hand-carved.
"Patéras made it," Mila said. "He said every princess needs a horse for when the dragon's sleeping."
Jasper held the horse like it might break. "It's beautiful."
"You can hold it if you want." She scooted closer to him on the bed. "Patéras says I have to be careful with my things because they're mine and nobody can take them away if I protect them."
"That's true," Jasper said quietly.
She picked up another box from her nightstand. "This one's harder. Do you want to try?"
"Yeah."
They bent over the second puzzle together.
Mila explained the trick, and Jasper listened, and the tension in his shoulders loosened the longer she talked.
She laughed when he got stuck. She showed him where he'd missed a step.
She clapped when he finally got it open, and Jasper smiled at her.
A real smile, the kind I'd only ever seen him give me, the kind that cracked open the armor and showed the man underneath.
Dios. If I'd loved him before, this finished me.
Zeus appeared in the doorway beside me. "She's brilliant, isn't she?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I've taught her everything I know. Strategy, tactics, how to read people, how to protect herself." He paused. "But also this." He gestured at the room. "How to have things that are hers. How to build something worth keeping."
"You're grooming her," I said quietly.
"I'm raising her." Zeus kept his voice low enough that Mila wouldn't hear. "I failed with Achilles. I broke Jasper. I won't repeat those mistakes."
He stepped into the room. "Mila, sweetheart. I think your daddy's getting tired. Would you like to help me show him and Diego their room?"
Mila looked at Jasper, then at the puzzle boxes between them. "Can we keep these?"
"They're yours," Zeus said. "They'll be here when you get back."
She slid off the bed. "You'll be right down the hall," she said to Jasper. "If you need anything."
"Thank you," Jasper managed.
She hugged me again before we left. Then she went to Jasper, hesitated, and hugged him too. He stood frozen for half a second before he wrapped his arms around her. He closed his eyes. Every muscle in his body locked against the thing trying to break loose in his chest.
I looked away. Some things weren't mine to watch, even when I wanted to carry them for him.
She pulled back and went to Zeus, taking his hand. "Goodnight, Patéras."
"Goodnight, little one."
We followed Zeus down the hallway. Two guards fell into step from a side corridor.
The guest room looked like more suburban staging: one bed with a quilt, nightstands on either side, a bathroom with fresh towels. All of it built to make you forget where you were.
The door locked from the outside.
Zeus paused in the doorway. "My physician will see you shortly. I suggest you rest."
"We're not staying," Jasper said.
"You are." Zeus kept his voice even. "Because the alternative is fighting your way through my guards while your daughter listens from down the hall.
" He let that settle. "And I know you think your rebellion would welcome her.
But what do you think Luka Aleksandar would do if he knew I was raising my heir? "
The blood drained out of my hands.
"He'd kill her," Zeus said. "Not because she's a threat now. Because of what she'll become. To your rebellion, she's not a nine-year-old girl. She's the dynasty continuing. And I'm the only thing standing between her and people who'd call her murder justified."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say Luka would never, Lorenzo would never.
But I'd seen what Luka was capable of. And Zeus was right about this much: to the resistance, Mila was more than a kid.
"You created that danger," Jasper said.
Zeus tilted his head. "Speaking of dangers I've created." He leaned against the doorframe. "Achilles came to see me yesterday. He dragged Hades through my front door in chains, beaten half dead, and laid him on the floor like a dog bringing home a kill."
The air in the room changed. Jasper went very still beside me.
"He wanted me to be proud," Zeus continued.
"Stood there with blood on his hands, waiting for approval.
The way he used to wait after training exercises.
" Zeus examined his fingernails. "So I told him the truth.
That he was disappointing. That Hephaestus would have brought me leverage, not a broken man.
That you were the better weapon, and the reason I gave Eight to myself instead of to him was because he lacked the discipline to raise anything worth keeping. "
Silence pressed against my eardrums.
"He left," Zeus said. "Took nothing. Just walked out into the snow." He paused. "I imagine he's still walking."
Jasper spoke first. "You told a man who kills for your approval that he'll never have it." The words landed flat, stripped clean. "Then you let him leave."
"I told him the truth."
"You pointed him like a gun and pulled the trigger." Jasper took a step forward, and the guards shifted. "Achilles doesn't walk away. You know that. You built him. He's going to come back, and when he does, he won't come for your approval anymore."
Zeus raised an eyebrow. "A dramatic interpretation."
"The only one." Jasper kept his voice dead level. "A rejected son with nothing left to lose. I know because you did the same thing to me. The only difference is I had somewhere to go." He looked at me when he said it, quick, involuntary, like he turned toward me before his brain caught up.
Zeus caught the look. He thinned his lips for half a second, then the expression vanished.
"Achilles has nowhere," Jasper said. "No one. And you just told him the one thing guaranteed to send him back swinging. Not for you. For her." He jerked his head toward Mila's room. "Because she's what you chose over him. She's the proof he wasn't enough."
Zeus went quiet. Behind the mask, he recalculated. For the first time all night, he had no answer ready. "My security is more than adequate."
"I guess we’ll find out, won’t we," Jasper said.
Zeus looked at us, then back toward the hallway, toward Mila's room. The mask slipped for half a second, and I caught what lived underneath: a man rearranging the board because a piece he hadn't accounted for had moved.
"All the more reason for you to stay," Zeus said. "Goodnight, gentlemen. Tomorrow will be a long day."
The door shut. The lock clicked.
Jasper stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard. I crossed to him and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I always did when he started to spiral. He let me. He tipped his head forward until his forehead rested against mine.
We stayed like that until his pulse slowed under my palm. Then he pulled away, jaw set, eyes dry.
"Joder," I said. I drove my fist into the wall and every torn knuckle from the tunnel lit up on impact, a bright, stupid pain that shot through my wrist and up my forearm.
Jasper caught my wrist before I could swing again. He pulled my hand down, turned it over, and ran his thumb across the split knuckles. He held my ruined hand in both of his and studied the damage like he'd caused it.
I closed my fingers around his. We stood there in Zeus's guest room with one bed and a lock on the wrong side of the door. Our daughter slept down the hall in a room full of weapons dressed up as toys. We had no guns, no blades, no plan.
But we had each other. And I had a comm unit in my boot that nobody had found.
I squeezed Jasper's hand once, let go, and sat down to unlace my boots.