“Yes, you are,” I said quietly. I could argue with him all night and he’d never believe me. I glanced past him to Eight. “And so is she.”
He let me go and stepped back.
I called my grandmother.
She answered on the fourth ring. "Diego,” said and I immediately knew something was wrong.
“What’s happened?”
"Your tío. He's gone, mi vida."
The floor tilted beneath me. I grabbed the counter.
Tío Emilio always had grease under his nails, always tried to get me to stay for one more meal. I was always in too much of a hurry.
"When?"
"This morning. Two men came in, shot him, and left." Her voice had already shifted. The grief was still there, but she'd moved it to the side and put the part of her that ran a network across three countries in its place. Amparo Lucenio mourned on her own time.
Two men walked into a repair shop and executed my tío the same morning someone burned the Pantheon down? That couldn’t be a coincidence.
"Abuela, listen. I'm coming back. I'm bringing people, and I need you to trust me."
She went quiet long enough for me to know she'd run the math: who I'd been working with, what kind of trouble followed them, what it would cost her people to take that on while they were already burying one of their own. My grandmother could fit more meaning into quiet air than most people fit into entire conversations.
"Come home," she said finally. "We'll talk when you get here."
The line went dead. I stood there with the phone against my ear, the dial tone buzzing, and my tío's laugh still echoing somewhere in a shop he'd never walk into again.
Jasper stood in the doorway with a bag slung over each shoulder. Whatever he found on my face made him set the bags down slowly.
"What happened?"
"My tío's dead. Shot at his shop this morning." My fist clenched around the phone until the plastic groaned. “Zeus did this.”
“And you’re about to bring the man he wants most to their doorstep.” Jasper frowned. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” I said quietly, looking back at Eight. “But we’re out of good ideas. Time to start trying the bad ones.”
Lorenzo insulted me in three languages all the way to the SUV. Spanish, Portuguese, and something inventive that might've been Catalan. He was still breathing, still full of opinions about my technique, so I figured he'd live.
"Easy, hermano. Almost there."
Eight had the back door open with a blanket already spread across the seat before we even got there. She climbed in after Lorenzo and positioned herself beside him. I wanted to say something to her, wanted to crouch down and explain she didn't have to be on guard every second of every day. I kept my mouth shut because we didn't have time, and because she'd just look at me with that flat stare that meantI know things about survival you don't, and she'd be right.
I drove. Jasper took shotgun with the katana braced in the footwell. He'd gone somewhere I couldn't reach, deep inside his own head, and the only sign he was still in there was the way he kept tracing the same line along the sheath with his thumb. The farmhouse got smaller in the rearview and then vanished completely.
I'd spent two months in that place. Yesterday morning I'd stood at the stove making pancakes and Jasper had reached past me for the coffee, his chest against my shoulder, and stayed there a little too long. I'd kept my eyes on the pan and my hand steady, and neither of us said a word about it, same as we never said a word about any of it. All of that was gone now.
I checked the mirror and narrowed my eyes. "Jasper."
"Already see them." He had the katana in his hands. "Suka. Hit the brakes."
Two black SUVs blocked the road ahead, parked nose to nose.
The SUV behind us flipped on its high beams, and the whole cabin went white. Lorenzo made a pained sound. Eight drew her knees up tight in the back seat, pressing herself into the smallest shape she could make, and my gut twisted.
Jasper reached for the door as soon as we stopped.
