Chapter 15
The Cessna touched down in New Orleans. We'd stopped in Mexico at dawn for fuel, Jasper chain-smoking on the tarmac while Diego threw cash at someone who didn't ask for names.
Nobody talked because what was there to say?
We were going to New Orleans to beg a stranger for help that would probably get us killed.
The silence in the cabin pressed down on my chest until breathing became work.
Lorenzo sat across from me during the descent, cleaning his blades. The movements were so automatic they looked like meditation. When he glanced up and caught me staring, he smiled, like nothing had changed between us.
Like we hadn't spent an hour on a warehouse floor fucking until we were both covered in cum and blood.
I looked away first, focusing on the window.
New Orleans spread below us in all its contradictions.
Not the tourist bullshit of wrought iron and beignets, but the real city underneath.
Industrial zones and shotgun houses, green spaces swallowed by humidity, the Mississippi cutting through it all brown and thick as old blood.
The wheels hit tarmac hard enough to rattle my teeth.
We taxied to a private hangar where Diego passed bills to a man speaking rapid fire Spanish. The Louisiana heat hit like a fist when we stepped outside, thick enough to taste. The air was heavier than in Rio, wetter.
Lorenzo fell into step beside me as we walked to Diego's waiting car. His shoulder brushed mine. I shifted away, putting space between us.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. His eyes tracked the movement, his jaw tightening briefly before his expression went blank. Then he shrugged and kept walking, like my rejection was no big deal.
Maybe for him it wasn't.
The safe house was the color of old teeth. Inside, the rooms were narrow and deep, lined up one after another. Diego tossed his bag on the sagging couch and Jasper disappeared into the first bedroom.
That left Lorenzo and me standing in a hallway barely wide enough for one person.
"You want first shower?" Lorenzo asked, like we were normal people discussing normal things.
"Yeah."
I grabbed my bag and escaped to the bathroom before he could say anything else. The water pressure was shit and the temperature couldn't decide between scalding and freezing, but it was still the first real shower I'd had since Brazil. Pink water spiraled down the drain.
I scrubbed until my skin turned raw, trying to wash away the memory of how he'd tasted. When the water went cold, I stepped out, dried off and yanked on clean clothes.
Lorenzo was waiting in the hallway when I opened the door.
He'd stripped down to his boxers, golden skin on display, bruises in the shape of my fingers blooming purple-yellow across his hips. The bite marks on his neck and shoulder had faded to shadows.
My mouth went dry and I suddenly wanted him all over again.
"Bathroom's yours," I said, and moved past him in the narrow space.
His hand caught my elbow. "Rafael."
I couldn't look at him. "What?"
"You okay?"
Was I okay? I'd watched Lorenzo kill my father, abandoned the Church, jumped through a window, covered him in cum and teeth marks and claimed him like an animal. Now I couldn't even look at him without wanting to do it again.
"Fine."
His grip tightened slightly. "You sure? Because you've been acting weird since—"
"I said I'm fine." I pulled away and kept walking to the bedroom, shutting the door before he could follow.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and put my head in my hands.
What the hell was wrong with me?
The bathroom mirror had shown me someone I barely recognized. Bruises marked my neck, scratches ran down my chest, and beard growth shadowed my jaw from days without shaving. My eyes looked hollow and fevered.
I looked like exactly what I was: a man coming apart at the seams.
My bag sat at my feet. I reached in and pulled out the only thing I'd taken from the catacombs besides the clothes on my back. My collar. The white tab and stiff fabric fit in the palm of my hand.
I'd worn one every day since my ordination at twenty-three, putting it on every morning and taking it off every night. It had been the physical reminder of vows I'd taken, the person I'd promised to be: celibate, obedient, devoted to God above all else.
I'd broken every single one.
The collar was clean, at least. It hadn't been around my neck when Lorenzo killed my father, when we'd fucked on that warehouse floor, when I'd bitten him. It was pristine. Innocent of everything I'd done.
I should have thrown it away, or left it in the catacombs with the version of myself who'd believed in redemption and divine calling and knowing the difference between right and wrong.
Instead I'd grabbed it and shoved it in my pocket like a talisman. Like some part of me still needed to carry it, even if I'd never wear it again.
I turned it over in my hands. The weight of it was familiar.
But that man was gone. That man had died the moment Lorenzo's hands had touched me and I'd wanted it. Wanted him. Wanted everything we'd done and more.
I set the collar on the nightstand and stared at it.
Through the walls, I could hear Lorenzo moving around in the living room, and Diego and Jasper talking in low voices. Normal sounds. People living normal lives.
Nothing about this was normal.
We headed out after dark when the streets were crowded enough to provide cover. Lorenzo walked ahead with Jasper, not beside me. Every time I glanced at him, he was looking anywhere else.
Diego fell into step next to me. "You two need couples therapy."
"We're not a couple."
"Right. You just fucked on a warehouse floor and now you're doing this whole wounded gazelle routine." He lit a joint. "Very healthy."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Noted." He took a drag. "But for the record, Lorenzo looks like someone kicked his puppy, and you look like you did the kicking. So maybe think about that."
He moved ahead to walk with Jasper, leaving me alone at the back.
The humidity pressed down like a hand on my chest. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back. Every breath tasted thick and wrong.
We turned onto Bourbon and the crowds thickened. There were tourists everywhere, beads hanging from balconies and music pouring from every open door. Lorenzo navigated through them like water. I followed in his wake, trying not to lose sight of him in the chaos.
A woman stumbled into me, drunk and laughing. "Sorry, honey!"
I steadied her automatically, then looked up to find Lorenzo had stopped. He was watching me over his shoulder, expression unreadable. Our eyes met for half a second before he turned away.
The distance between us felt like miles.
"So this Oracle," I said when we'd moved to a quieter street. "Jasper said Zeus can't touch her. Why?"
Jasper glanced back. "She's a broker. Information, specifically. Been running her operation out of New Orleans for thirty years, maybe more. She knows everyone in the Pantheon's business. Every deal, every kill, every secret people are desperate to keep buried."
"How?"
"She collects debts. You come to her needing information, you pay with information.
She's built up the most comprehensive intelligence network in the organization.
Knows who's skimming, who's planning coups, who killed who and where the bodies are.
" He lit another cigarette. "Zeus can't touch her because if she dies, everything she knows gets released. Letters to the FBI. To rival organizations. To the families of people who thought their loved ones died in accidents. Kill her, and she’ll take the entire Pantheon down with her. "
"Mutually assured destruction," Diego added. "Very Cold War. Very effective."
"And she'll help us because?"
"Because we have something she wants," Jasper said. "Everyone does. The question is whether we're willing to pay her price."
Lorenzo had stopped walking again. This time when I realized, I didn't turn back immediately. Let him stand there, let him be the one waiting.
When I finally looked, he was staring at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"What?" I asked.
"You tell me." His voice was flat. Carefully neutral. "You've been acting like I don't exist since we landed. So either tell me what I did wrong or stop looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you want me and hate yourself for it."
I ground my teeth together and bit my tongue to keep from telling him how right he was.
"We fucked, Rafael. That's it. We fucked. Why are you acting like I'm radioactive?"
"I'm not—"
"You are." He moved closer, not touching but close enough that I could smell him. "You won't talk to me. You won't look at me. You walk behind me instead of next to me. So either you regret it or you're scared of it. Which is it?"
Both. Neither. How could I explain that I didn't regret him, I regretted me? That I wanted him so badly my hands shook with it, but every time I looked at him I saw my father's blood and I didn't know how to reconcile the two?
"You killed my father," I said quietly.
The words hung between us like smoke.
Lorenzo's expression didn't change. "I know."
"You stabbed him in the back of the neck and I watched it happen."
"I know."
"And then less than two days later later we—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Yeah." His eyes were dark and steady on mine. "We did. And you didn't seem to have a problem with it then."
"I don't—" I stopped. Started over. "I don't know how to want someone whose hands are covered in my father's blood."
"You were going to kill him if I didn’t," Lorenzo pointed out. "And you were planning to torture him so don't pretend this is about guilt or morality or whatever Catholic bullshit you're trying to hide behind. You want me. You're just scared of what that means."
He was right. God help me, he was right.
"We need to keep moving," I said.
Lorenzo stared at me for another long moment. Then he turned and kept walking, and this time I followed at a distance.
Diego appeared at my elbow. "That went well."
"Shut up."
"Just saying. If you were going to kill your old man anyway, you can’t really call him a murderer."
"I didn't call him a murderer."
"You implied it pretty heavily."
I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
We eventually turned onto a street where the houses pressed so close together you could reach from one porch to the next.
The Oracle's house sat in the middle of the block, distinguished from its neighbors only by the wind chimes hanging from the porch and the small hand-painted sign that read Fortunes Told, Futures Revealed.
This was it. Our last chance. If the Oracle couldn't help us, then we were walking corpses. Constantine would find us. Or Zeus would. Didn't matter who got there first.
The porch steps creaked under our weight. Jasper pulled out the offerings he'd brought: good tobacco, aged rum, raw coffee beans. Traditional signs of respect when asking someone to save your life.
We stood there waiting. The air felt heavy, electric with the promise of rain. Thunder rumbled somewhere over the river.
Lorenzo stood in front of me, so close I could have reached out and touched him. His shoulders were rigid, his breathing carefully controlled. Every line of his body screamed tension.
I wanted to say something. Apologize, explain, anything. But the words stuck in my throat.
His hand moved slightly, like he was going to reach back for me. Then he stopped himself and curled his fingers into a fist.
The distance between us was maybe six inches. It felt like a canyon.
Jasper knocked.
Footsteps approached and lock turned with a heavy click, then another, then a third.
The door opened and light spilled out onto the porch, framing a woman in the doorway. She was older than I'd expected, maybe sixty, silver-white hair wrapped in a crimson scarf. Her eyes swept over the four of us, pausing on each face before moving to the next.
She looked between Lorenzo and me, taking in the space between us, the way we weren't looking at each other, the tension that probably radiated off us like heat.
"Well," she said, smiling slowly. "Look what the cat dragged in."
Thunder rumbled in the distance, closer now.
"Come, come," she said, waving us inside. "No sense in you all standing out here in the rain. We have much to discuss, and I suspect you boys have even more to sort out between yourselves."