"We're not staying," Jasper said.
"You are." Zeus kept his voice even. "Because the alternative is fighting your way through my guards while your daughter listens from down the hall." He let that settle. "And I know you think your rebellion would welcome her. But what do you think Luka Aleksandar would do if he knew I was raising my heir?"
The blood drained out of my hands.
"He'd kill her," Zeus said. "Not because she's a threat now. Because of what she'll become. To your rebellion, she's not a nine-year-old girl. She's the dynasty continuing. And I'm the only thing standing between her and people who'd call her murder justified."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say Luka would never, Lorenzo would never.
But I'd seen what Luka was capable of. And Zeus was right about this much: to the resistance, Mila was more than a kid.
"You created that danger," Jasper said.
Zeus tilted his head. "Speaking of dangers I've created." He leaned against the doorframe. "Achilles came to see me yesterday. He dragged Hades through my front door in chains, beaten half dead, and laid him on the floor like a dog bringing home a kill."
The air in the room changed. Jasper went very still beside me.
"He wanted me to be proud," Zeus continued. "Stood there with blood on his hands, waiting for approval. The way he used to wait after training exercises." Zeus examined his fingernails. "So I told him the truth. That he was disappointing. That Hephaestus would have brought me leverage, not a broken man. That you were the better weapon, and the reason I gave Eight to myself instead of to him was because he lacked the discipline to raise anything worth keeping."
Silence pressed against my eardrums.
"He left," Zeus said. "Took nothing. Just walked out into the snow." He paused. "I imagine he's still walking."
Jasper spoke first. "You told a man who kills for your approval that he'll never have it." The words landed flat, stripped clean. "Then you let him leave."
"I told him the truth."
"You pointed him like a gun and pulled the trigger." Jasper took a step forward, and the guards shifted. "Achilles doesn't walk away. You know that. You built him. He's going to come back, and when he does, he won't come for your approval anymore."
Zeus raised an eyebrow. "A dramatic interpretation."
"The only one." Jasper kept his voice dead level. "A rejected son with nothing left to lose. I know because you did the same thing to me. The only difference is I had somewhere to go." He looked at me when he said it, quick, involuntary, like he turned toward me before his brain caught up.
Zeus caught the look. He thinned his lips for half a second, then the expression vanished.
"Achilles has nowhere," Jasper said. "No one. And you just told him the one thing guaranteed to send him back swinging. Not for you. For her." He jerked his head toward Mila's room. "Because she's what you chose over him. She's the proof he wasn't enough."
Zeus went quiet. Behind the mask, he recalculated. For the first time all night, he had no answer ready. "My security is more than adequate."
"I guess we’ll find out, won’t we," Jasper said.
Zeus looked at us, then back toward the hallway, toward Mila's room. The mask slipped for half a second, and I caught what lived underneath: a man rearranging the board because a piece he hadn't accounted for had moved.
"All the more reason for you to stay," Zeus said. "Goodnight, gentlemen. Tomorrow will be a long day."
The door shut. The lock clicked.
Jasper stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard. I crossed to him and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I always did when he started to spiral. He let me. He tipped his head forward until his forehead rested against mine.
We stayed like that until his pulse slowed under my palm. Then he pulled away, jaw set, eyes dry.
"Joder," I said. I drove my fist into the wall and every torn knuckle from the tunnel lit up on impact, a bright, stupid pain that shot through my wrist and up my forearm.
Jasper caught my wrist before I could swing again. He pulled my hand down, turned it over, and ran his thumb across the split knuckles. He held my ruined hand in both of his and studied the damage like he'd caused it.
I closed my fingers around his. We stood there in Zeus's guest room with one bed and a lock on the wrong side of the door. Our daughter slept down the hall in a room full of weapons dressed up as toys. We had no guns, no blades, no plan.
But we had each other. And I had a comm unit in my boot that nobody had found.
