"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 thesentence.
"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."
