I hung up and then stood alone with my daughter's body, my granddaughter in my arms. The machines were silent. The cord lay on the floor where I'd dropped it.
She was mine. The last thing Nadia had made, and the first thing I was going to build from scratch. She would be stronger than her mother. Stronger than Hephaestus. Stronger than Achilles. Stronger even than me.
Diego Reyes needed toput on a fucking shirt.
Another minute of this and I was either going to kill him or fuck him. I hadn't decided yet, and at this point it didn't really matter.
The kitchen was too small for three people and actively hostile to Diego shirtless at the stove. The exhaust fan had died our first week here, and August in Spain was miserable. He stood at the counter chopping an onion, and I wanted to bite him.
I’d watched the same hands wire a bomb in Jordan, and steer through a closed border crossing in Algeria. Those hands wrecked me in a Brussels hotel room until I forgot how to speak Russian almost two years ago, and I still couldn’t stop thinking about them.
I scowled and turned back to my laptop. I'd spent the last hour staring at Diego's back instead of doing my actual job. The cameras showed nothing but empty fields and a dead dirt road. Diego's chest hair was much more interesting to stare at. I'd once rebuilt an entire security system with a concussion and twobroken fingers, but apparently a half-naked smuggler cooking eggs was my breaking point.
Babushka always said God punished Russians by giving them exactly what they wanted and making it hurt.
"Gotta let the oil get hot first, cariño," Diego told Eight, who stood on her step stool with her arms crossed.
She was nine. The Pantheon had been training her to kill since she could walk. Cooking eggs wasn’t a needed skill for child assassins, which was why Diego had spent the last two months trying to teach her. She still hadn't stabbed him for it, which was a wonder.
"Come on, pequeña! You want muscles for kicking ass, you gotta eat protein!"
Eight looked at the eggs like they'd personally offended her.
Diego laughed and bumped her with his hip, like she were any kid in any kitchen and not a weapon the Pantheon had spent nine years building.
He cracked an egg one-handed, flicked the shell aside, and I dragged my eyes back to the laptop before my body did something my brain hadn't approved.
I'd had two months of this. Two months of Diego cooking shirtless, calling me guapo in that rough voice, trailing gunpowder and garlic through every room like he owned it. I couldn't get through breakfast without wanting to climb him like a tree. And the worst part? The absolute worst fucking part?
He knew.
He absolutely knew, and he pretended he didn't, which was peak Diego and the reason I was going to lose my mind in this kitchen.
I minimized the security feed and stared at the background on my computer, an artist's rendering of Koschei the Deathless. In the old Russian tales, he was a sorcerer who wouldn’t be slain because he’d hidden his soul in a needle, stuck the needle in anegg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, the hare in a chest, and buried the whole thing on an island nobody could reach. Living without a soul had made him immortal and evil. But perhaps he was lonely, too. He had to be, living up there in his tower, in the cold, unable to feel anything but spite and rage.
Diego reached past Eight for the salt and caught my shoulder with his arm. I froze, and he grinned at me. “Sorry, guapo. Small kitchen.”
I closed the laptop and stood up. "I need a cigarette."
Diego’s eyes dropped to my mouth before darting back up. "Those'll kill you," he said.
"That's the idea."
I made it down the hall before I had to stop, forehead pressed against the wall, listening to him talk to Eight in that low Spanish he saved for her. That smooth voice had worked on border guards and spooked animals and apparently also on me, because my pulse had kicked up and I couldn't make it settle.
The laptop beeped from the kitchen, and I pushed away from the wall. That was the proximity alert, the one wired to the property line. Someone was inside the perimeter.
I was back in the kitchen grabbing my katana from beside the door before the second beep. The second my hand closed around it, everything settled.
The weight fixed everything. It straightened my spine, dropped my shoulders, and evened out my breathing.
The sword and I had an understanding. It didn't ask questions. It didn't cook shirtless. It had cut my palm open once because I'd held it wrong, and I'd respected the editorial feedback.
Diego grabbed the shotgun from under the sink. “Eight.”
She nodded and dropped off the step stool, sliding against the far wall.
I went out the back door low, staying against the side of the house. The sun hit like a fist. Two hundred meters of openfield stretched to the trees, and something sleek and black tore through them.
