"Insulting my cleaning habits while you ruin my floor. Real nice. See if I use the good thread on you."
Eight brought the kit and some towels, then stepped back to the counter, arms at her sides.
I gave her a nod. “Good job. I’ve got it from here.”
Jasper squeezed my shoulder as he moved past. He disappeared before I could turn my head. That man could lock down a feeling faster than anyone I'd ever met, but sometimes one would slip past his defenses and hit me square in the chest. I filed it away for later and grabbed the scissors.
"Just so you know, you're getting blood all over my second-favorite shirt."
"Put it on my tab," Lorenzo muttered.
"Your tab could fund a small military." I cut through his shirt and got my first real look at the damage. The wound ran deep and jagged, way past what our kit could actually handle. Lorenzo needed an ER, a trauma surgeon, several bags of blood. None of which existed in rural Spain on a Tuesday. "Okay. Fair warning, this is gonna suck."
"Everything already sucks. Narrow it down."
"I'm gonna stitch you back together with whatever we have, which isn't nearly enough, and you're gonna lie there and take it, and if you criticize my stitching even once, I'm using the dull needle."
"Rafael wouldn't do this to me."
"Rafael put a ring on your finger. The man's suffered plenty."
He cursed me the entire time, which kept us both focused on something other than the fact that I was holding him together with prayers and fishing line, hoping like hell it'd be enough.
When it was done, Lorenzo was unconscious and my hands were slick with his blood. I washed my hands at the sink and dried my hands on my jeans because every towel we had was under Lorenzo soaking up blood.
Jasper had the laptop open and was puffing on a lit cigarette. He'd set his jaw, typing like he was picking a lock that kept changing on him.
"Talk to me," I said. "What’s going on? Is Zeus making a move?"
“It looks like there were simultaneous attacks in New York, Rio, and Lagos. No word from Luka, Rafael, or Hades, but in the space of a few hours, they’ve disappeared and someone has already stepped up to take over each directorship.”
“It’s a coup,” I murmured. “Zeus is making his move.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve got bigger problems.” He spun the laptop toward me, but he might as well have been showing me a screen full of Greek. Actually, Greek would be better. I spoke a little Greek.
“What am I looking at, guapo?”
“They burned us,” he said. “Everything's gone. Primary accounts, backups, every alias I've ever used. All of it.”
I crossed the kitchen and stopped behind his chair, close enough to read the screen over his shoulder, close enough that the heat off his back reached my chest through the gap between us. He didn't lean away.
"Shit, everything?”
He ashed his cigarette and lit another. “We’ve got the emergency cash reserve, and that’s it. They cleaned out myaccounts and INTERPOL is putting out BOLOs on our aliases. We won’t be able to sneeze without someone somewhere putting us on Zeus’ radar.”
“Shit. We need to move. How long do we have before they catch up to us here?”
"Twelve hours, give or take." He tried another login and hammered the keys hard enough to rattle the table. "Safe houses are either flagged or completely offline. All my contacts are dark." He typed, paused, and typed again. "Luka's dark. Vincent's dark. Rafael's..."
He stopped.
"Dark."
Lorenzo spoke from the table, voice barely there. "Run that by me again."
Mierda. I turned. Lorenzo had his working eye open, locked on Jasper like he could force a different answer through sheer willpower, even as his focus wavered.
"Rafael's offline," Jasper said. "Can't get through to him."
