"Good," Vihaan said. "Move. Guard rotation in three minutes."
We retraced the path. The wound on my shoulder had settled into a steady burn that pulsed with my heartbeat. Vihaan fed me turns, and I followed them. Eventually, Mr. Nobody fell into step beside us, though I wasn’t quite sure when.
I glanced around. “Patroklos?”
“Alive,” Mr. Nobody confirmed, and then looked over at me. “I was hired to distract him. Not to kill him.”
Something about the way he said it sent a shiver through me.
Guards found us at the next junction. The alarm had woken every armed body in the compound. The katana settled into my grip, the same weight and balance I'd trained with since I was fourteen, and my body remembered the language before my brain caught up.
We cut through them. That was the ugly truth of it, reduced to its simplest form. Rhadamanthys's revolvers cracked in controlled pairs. Nevada fired a dead guard's pistol from a position against the wall, picking shots with the calm of someone who'd been waiting weeks for the chance to stop pretending.I opened anyone who got close enough for steel. Hot blood sprayed across my neck and jaw on the second kill, and the babushka in my head said what she always said.You always were good at the ugly work.
"Vihaan, we need a clear path," I said.
"Working on it. North exit. Patroklos is heading for the garage. Move now or you're not moving at all."
We fought toward the exit. The burn in my arms had gone deep, the kind of tired that lived in the bone, and the shoulder wound made every swing cost more than the last. The katana did what it was made to do. I tried not to think about what I looked like doing it.
We hit the exit. Cold night air slammed into my face. The vehicle sat twenty meters away, engine running, lights off. Diego had the driver's side window down.
"Go," Rhadamanthys said, turning to cover our backs. "I've got this."
Nevada ran. I followed. My boots hit the gravel. Rhadamanthys walked backward toward the vehicle with both revolvers still firing, dropping anyone who tried to follow us through the door. Mr. Nobody came through last.
We piled into the vehicle. Diego gunned it before the last door closed. He dropped a hand from the wheel for half a second and gripped my knee, one hard squeeze, then back to ten and two. He didn't look at me. The ghost pressure of that grip stayed warm under all the copper and adrenaline drying on my skin, and I let it.
Then his gaze flicked to the rearview mirror, and I caught the moment he clocked my shoulder. The blood had soaked through the jacket and spread down my sleeve. Diego's eyes went back to the road, but his knuckles went white on the wheel. He didn't say a word. He didn't need to. That jaw was making promisesabout whoever had put steel through me, and Patroklos' name was going to come up before the night was over.
Gravel sprayed from the tires. We fishtailed once, caught traction, and shot forward.
Through the rear window, I caught Patroklos emerging from the compound. He stood framed in red alarm lights, completely still, just watching us drive away. Then he turned and walked toward a motorcycle parked against the fence.
"He's coming," I said.
Diego checked the rearview. "I know."
The motorcycle's headlight appeared behind us, growing brighter.
The headlight got brighterin my rearview.
I floored it through a turn, and Vihaan's laptops went sliding. The vehicle fishtailed, and I yanked it back into line. My first smuggling run across the Strait, I was sixteen. My tío rode shotgun, told me to thread the needle, or we'd both end up in a Spanish prison. I threaded it. I'd do it again.
Tonight I had five people in this vehicle, and Patroklos wanted all of them dead.
"Left in two hundred meters," Vihaan called from the back. His face glowed blue from three laptop screens. "Construction zone. Might slow him down."
"Might?"
"He's on a motorcycle. Physics is on his side."
I took the left hard. Jasper braced against the door without looking up, one hand on the katana across his lap.
The calm poured off him like cold water. He sat beside me with his sword ready, no panic, just that flat tactical focus he wore like armor.
The streets were chaos at this hour. Vendors packed up their stalls, auto-rickshaws drove like they wanted to die, cows wandered through intersections because nobody had told them they couldn't. I cut between two trucks with maybe a hand's width on either side.
Rhadamanthys twisted in his seat with both revolvers up. "I can take the shot."
