Chapter 31 #2
"Dios mío." She released me and crouched in front of Mila. "Mi corazón. Let me see."
Mila went to her without hesitating. Carmen tilted Mila's chin up and examined the bruises on her throat, the ones shaped like a grown man's fingers. She tightened her jaw but kept her hands soft.
"Are you hungry?" Carmen asked.
"Yes," Mila said.
My mother went still. She looked at Mila, then at me, then back at Mila. She blinked hard and fast.
"Then we fix that first." She cleared her throat and stood and wrapped one arm around Mila's shoulders, and steered her toward the main building. She glanced back at me with a look that said I will deal with you later, and also I love you, and also you are grounded until you are forty.
I turned to help Jasper, and Lorenzo was already there.
He leaned against the hangar door with his arms crossed and that particular grin that meant he'd been through hell and come out the other side pretty enough to brag about it.
He had a fresh scar on his jaw, a bruise across his cheekbone, and his left arm in a sling.
He looked at me like I was the best thing he'd seen all week.
"Porra, Diego." He pushed off the wall and walked toward us. "You look like absolute shit."
"Hermano." My voice cracked. "You're alive."
"Obviously." He stopped in front of me, and his grin softened into something real. "You think a few Myrmidons are going to take me out? Please. Rafael would kill me if I died."
He pulled me into a hug with his good arm, careful of my shoulder, and I held onto him. Lorenzo smelled like antiseptic and gun oil and the expensive cologne he wore even into combat because he said looking good and smelling good were non-negotiable.
"You scared the shit out of me," I said.
"I scared the shit out of myself." He pulled back and looked me over. "Rafael, doesn't Diego look rugged?"
Rafael appeared beside him the way he always did, quiet and already there before you knew you needed him. He kept his hand on the small of Lorenzo's back and looked me over like he was already triaging.
"He looks like he needs a hospital," Rafael said.
"He looks like he needs a shower," Lorenzo corrected. "And a meal. And maybe a priest."
Rafael gave him a flat look.
"What?" Lorenzo's grin widened. "I said maybe."
Lorenzo looked past me at Jasper, who leaned against the Cessna with his eyes half-closed. "Both of you. M?e de Deus, what happened in Kiev?"
"Long story," I said.
"I've got time." Lorenzo's gaze dropped to Jasper's bandaged head, then tracked to the katana still in his grip. "Is that blood on his sword?"
"It's a lot of people's blood on his sword."
"Hot." Lorenzo grinned at Jasper. "Looking good, lindo. Love the head wound. Very tortured protagonist."
Jasper opened one eye. "Lorenzo."
"Jasper."
"Shut up."
"Missed you too." Lorenzo blew him a kiss.
Rafael shook his head, but he almost smiled. He stepped past Lorenzo and gripped my good shoulder.
"Luka and Vincent?" I asked.
"Accounted for," Rafael said. "Luka took a knife to the thigh during the breach. He's already walking on it because he's insane. Hades?”
I looked past him to where Rhadamanthys stood near the entrance and shook my head. “No sign of him. He wasn’t at the compound in Kiev. But…” I sighed. “Listen Hermano. This is where we get off the ride. I mean, the Kalderash… We’ll continue to support the resistance, but me and Jasper…”
Rafael nodded. “I understand more than you know. We’ll work out the details after you’ve both rested and had something to eat.”
I nodded and took Jasper’s arm. "Come on," I said. "Let's get inside."
We walked toward the main building. Jasper leaned into me, and I took his weight on my good side.
Lorenzo fell in beside us, still talking, because Lorenzo always talked and the sound of his voice filled the spaces that silence would have made unbearable.
Rafael walked on Lorenzo's other side with his hand on Lorenzo's back.
We passed the Kalderash sector on the way in.
The courtyard where my cousins had strung lights and argued over coffee was half rubble now, the fountain cracked down the middle, the garden wall blown outward.
But someone had already swept the worst of the debris into piles.
Beni crouched by the fountain with a trowel and a bucket of mortar, patching the base.
He looked up when we passed and nodded once.
Someone had boarded over Rosario's kitchen window, and the board had a handwritten sign taped to it: KITCHEN OPEN.
COME EAT. The walls stood, and somewhere in the main building my mother was feeding my daughter.
Jasper laced his fingers through mine as we walked through the door together.
Someone had set up a medic station in the hallway outside the briefing room. I sat on a crate while a field medic peeled the bandage off my shoulder, and Luka's voice carried through the open door.
"Achilles is dead. Myrmidons scattered. Three of Zeus's directors went dark in the last forty-eight hours, two more are crawling back through intermediaries trying to cut deals."
Lorenzo's voice cut in from inside. "Begging. The word you're looking for is begging."
"Lorenzo." Rafael, flat.
"What? I'm helping."
The medic prodded the wound, and I hissed through my teeth.
Jasper sat against the opposite wall with Mila asleep in his lap, her head on his chest, her hand curled into his shirt.
My mother had fed her rice and chicken. The girl had eaten two plates before she dropped.
Now Jasper rested his chin on her hair and tracked me through the stitching with that half-focused look that meant the concussion still ran the show.
"Aeacus and I are vetting replacements," Rhadamanthys said. His voice carried the same flat weight it always did, like the words cost him nothing and meant everything. "People who held their posts before Zeus gutted the structure. It'll take months."
"We don't have months," Luka said.
"Then it'll take less. But it won't be clean."
The medic threaded a needle. I gripped the edge of the crate.
"The Pantheon's not gone," Luka said, less like a report and more like a line drawn in the dirt. "Zeus lost his army, his son, his network. He's running. But he's dangerous as long as he's breathing, and every one of us in this room knows what he does when he's cornered."
The needle went in. I locked my jaw and breathed. Jasper tracked the medic's hands, reading every stitch. When the medic pulled the thread tight, he twitched his fingers against Mila's back like he wanted to do it himself.
The room went quiet.
"I'll find him," Rhadamanthys said.
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. But the silence sat differently from the silence in the Cessna. That silence had been empty. This one was full of men deciding what they were willing to do next.
The medic finished the last stitch and taped a fresh bandage over the wound. I flexed my fingers and everything moved, so that was good enough.
Luka stepped into the hallway. He looked at me, then at Jasper, then at Mila asleep on Jasper's chest.
"You two did good in Kiev," he said.
"We got lucky in Kiev," I said.
"You got her back." His gaze stayed on Mila. "That's not luck. That's stubborn."
"Runs in the family," I muttered.
Luka grinned. “Good thing, too,” he said, and then went back inside.
I slid off the crate, crossed the hall, and sat down next to Jasper. He shifted Mila's weight to make room. I put my back against the wall and our shoulders pressed together. The concrete was cold through my shirt, and I was so tired the hallway swam.
Jasper found the back of my neck with his fingers. He pressed his thumb into the knot at the base of my skull, and the tension I'd been carrying since Kiev started to loosen.
"Hey," I said quietly. "You okay?"
He looked at Mila. Then at me.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I am."
I believed him. Zeus was still out there, and the rebuild would take months, more fights, and more blood, and more nights where the outcome sat on a knife's edge. But the running had stopped. For us, at least, the running had stopped.
Mila stirred. She reached out without opening her eyes and found my wrist, and held on. She kept her other hand on Jasper's shirt.
My shoulder throbbed under the fresh bandage. My head was cotton and static. The hallway smelled like antiseptic and coffee and, faintly, whatever my mother had baked that morning before the world tried to end.
I tipped my head back against the wall. Jasper's thumb moved in slow circles on my neck. Mila's pulse tapped steadily against the inside of my wrist.
Somewhere deeper in the building, a door opened and closed. Boots hit concrete. Someone gave orders in a voice too low to make out.
I closed my eyes. The people I loved breathed beside me, and the war breathed just past the door, but everything was going to be all right.