I stepped forward and Rhadamanthys dropped his hand to his revolver. I stopped.
"You want to explain what the fuck just happened?"
"Operational security," Luka said. "Every safe house in this city is being watched. We couldn't bring you in clean. Zeus has tracking devices the size of rice. We've pulled three out of people this month. The strip search, the burned clothes, the hoods. All necessary."
"So you traumatize us instead."
"Yes."
At least he didn't apologize for it.
"And Jasper?"
"Now."
A door opened and Jasper walked through wearing the same cheap cotton, his hair wet. He looked at me and held my gaze for half a second before dropping it. I took a step toward him before I knew I was moving but I caught myself and stopped. My hands had curled into fists, and I couldn't make them open. That was worse than anything they'd done to me in the last hour because I'd kept steady through the hood and the zip ties and the search.Jasper crossed to where I stood and bumped a shoulder against me.
Behind us, Rafael stepped toward Lorenzo. "Lorenzo..."
Lorenzo stood up in the corner. He took one step and then he locked up, just stood there halfway across the room, like his body couldn't believe it could close the distance. Rafael crossed the rest. Lorenzo grabbed the front of his shirt with both fists and pressed his forehead into Rafael's shoulder and just held on, shaking. Rafael put his hand on the back of Lorenzo's neck, and nobody in the room said a word.
Rhadamanthys stepped forward with his arms wide, all warmth now, like we were old friends instead of people he'd just terrorized for the last hour.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Welcome to the resistance."
"Here we are. Youraccommodations for the night." Luka pushed open a door, and the room behind him made my old Soviet apartment look decent.
Two narrow cots stood against opposite walls with barely a meter between them. A bare lightbulb hung on a wire. The whole place smelled like damp stone and old cigarettes. Luka said something about communal showers and breakfast at dawn, but his voice slid past me because Diego had already walked through the doorway and dropped onto the nearest cot like someone had cut his strings.
The door closed. Luka's footsteps faded down the hallway.
Diego sat with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging forward, staring at the floor. His hair was still wet from the shower where they'd stripped and searched us, and water dripped onto his collar.
My babushka used to say you could tell when someone was at the end by how they held their shoulders. Diego's curved forward, trying to fold in on themselves. He'd kept fortypeople organized since the gully, kept them moving through the mountains, stood stone-faced while they put his grandmother in the ground. Two days on fumes and stubbornness, and now the fumes were gone.
I crossed to him and put my hand on his shoulder. "Lie down."
He looked up slowly. His eyes took a second to focus. "What?"
"You need to sleep. Lie down."
He stared at me, then let me guide him back onto the cot. He rolled onto his stomach and turned his face to the wall.
I knelt beside him and put both hands on his shoulders.
My hands knew how to break bones, how to find the soft places between ribs where a blade would slide in clean, how to dislocate a shoulder with one sharp twist. Violence lived in the muscle memory. But this thing, making someone better instead of worse, had no training behind it.
I pressed my thumbs into the muscle on either side of his spine and found the knots there, working at them the way I'd work at a locked door.
Diego groaned into the pillow and dropped his shoulders.
Heat crawled up my spine and settled low in my gut.
I shifted on my knees, but my body had different ideas. Diego was making sounds under my hands, going loose because I was touching him, and apparently that was enough to get me half-hard on a stone floor in Casablanca.
I kept going. The tight places loosened one at a time under my thumbs. His shirt was damp and clinging to his skin, and after a minute I gave up on the cotton and pulled the fabric to his shoulders. His skin was hot and slick under my palms. I pressed into another knot, and a low noise broke out of him, deeper this time. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
"Jasper." His voice was rough. "You're hard."
