Every man in my family had stood here and worn the ground smooth. I'd already left a blood trail from the tree line, so that was done. I crossed to my spot and turned to face Danior.
He was painted, freezing, bleeding from a gash on his shin he'd picked up somewhere on the climb. He stood straight, and for half a second, I didn't see my opponent; I saw the primo who'd stayed when I left, who'd kept the lights on and buried people and done all the unglamorous shit that keeping a family alive actually required.
Valentina walked in from the far side in the same black dress she'd worn yesterday and the day before, back straight, face like stone. She crossed to the center and stood between us with the black handkerchief in her hand, and the entire mountain held its breath.
She looked at Danior, then at me. Then she opened her hand, and the handkerchief dropped.
I stepped forward and Danior came to meet me.
He was faster, I'd known it on the mountain and I knew it now, but I didn't give a shit because the first exchange told me everything about how they'd trained him. He was technical, precise, ready for anything that made sense, which was perfect because I wasn't planning to make sense.
He caught my first combination, redirected the second, and drove his elbow into my already split lip. I went white for a second, but the clan didn't move. A wound already opened didn't count, which was the only reason I wasn't on my ass right now.
I spat blood and grinned at him because his face when I did it was absolutely worth the pain.
Danior read the grin wrong and thought it meant something about my head instead of what I was about to do with my hands. He came forward and I let him come.
He loaded his weight onto his right foot half a second before he threw it. The setup was clean and completely predictable. He went for it on the third exchange, and I took the hit straight to the ribs. Taking it put me inside his reach, and the pain was worth it.
I wrapped both arms around him, drove my shoulder into his chest, and we went down. The ground hit like concrete. I had his left arm, the one he'd been favoring since the first switchback. I caught it, turned it, and he arched off me with a sound that went straight through my teeth. I rode it and flipped him face-down, shifted my weight on top of him, and drove his face straight into the dirt.
I broke his nose on impact and mierda, everyone in the circle knew it. Somebody said something in Romani I didn't catch, and then the circle went dead quiet. First blood had just happened, and we all knew it.
I drove my knee into his spine anyway and pressed my forearm across the back of his neck because first blood ended it, but I needed to hear him say it.
"Yield," I said. "Danior. Yield."
He pushed back against the hold and cabrón was stronger than I'd given him credit for, even bleeding into the grass. I pressed down harder.
"He was my uncle, too." I sounded rough. "I know. Yield."
He went tight for one second, every muscle locked, and then the fight went out of him all at once and he pressed his forehead into the grass.
I let go, pushed off him, stood up and tried not to look like every part of my body was screaming about what I'd just put it through.
He stayed down for maybe two seconds before he pushed himself up and climbed to his feet. He spat blood on the ground and stepped back over the stones.
Valentina was already there. She crossed to me, took my hand in both of hers, and held it up.
The clan made a sound I registered in my sternum, that low rumble they make when it's done and decided and you can't take it back. Acknowledgment, not celebration. Every border crossing, every safe house, every route Emilio had built from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Turkish coast was mine now, and I'd paid for it in blood on stone.
I stood there with my hand up and paint cracked across my chest, and my lip still bleeding, and I thought about Emilio in his shop with grease under his nails and that switchblade I'd left in the ground with him. I pressed my tongue to the split in my lip and tasted copper and salt.
Then I looked for Jasper.
He was exactly where I'd left him, at the tree line, collar open, gauze at his throat, hands loose at his sides. He'd held that spotthrough the whole climb and the whole fight, and when he found me across the clearing, he went completely still and just looked at me like I'd done something worth looking at.
I stepped back over the stones.
My grandmother was waiting with a cloth and the face she used for things she'd predicted six months ago. She pressed it to my lip.
Behind me the clan started moving, heading back to the house, back to coffee, arguing, the long work of figuring out what the hell came next. Below us, somewhere on that red dirt road, the Pantheon was still parked and waiting, but that was a problem for later.
I held the cloth to my lip and walked toward Jasper. He stayed put, like he always did, and let me come to him. I crossed the grass and put my palm against his jaw.
He turned his face into it, and his pulse beat against my hand, steady and alive.
I stood there with the mountain in my legs and blood on my lip and Jasper's heartbeat under my fingers, and I held on.
