I squeezed Jasper's hand once, let go, and sat down to unlace my boots.
"Stop pacing," Diego saidfrom where he sat on the bed. "Save your energy, Jasper."
I couldn't help it. They'd taken my cigarettes. That alone would've been enough to put me in a dangerous mood, but they'd also taken my katana, my boots, my jacket, and my belt. I was padding around in socks and a t-shirt like a man on a psych hold while my daughter slept three doors down in a room full of stuffed animals arranged as sight lines. I'd counted the doors when the guards marched us here, and I'd counted what stood between us: two armed men in the hallway and a lock that turned from outside.
I could kill every person in this building with my bare hands. None of it mattered. The thing keeping me from crossing that hallway was the possibility that she didn't want me to.
She had a room. She had a birthday party tomorrow. She had a man who'd spent nine years learning her favorite cake flavor and carving her wooden horses, and I'd shown up covered in blood with a sword and proved every single thing he'd told her aboutme. Maybe she was better off here. Maybe Zeus was right. Maybe the best thing I could do for my daughter was stay on this side of three doors and stop pretending I knew how to be what she needed.
"Jasper."
Diego's voice landed between my shoulder blades. I kept walking.
"Guapo. Come on. Talk to me."
"Can't." My jaw had been clenched so long that the muscles along my temples hummed.
"Can't what?"
"Can't talk, can't smoke, can't get to her." I hit the wall and turned. "She's right there, Diego. Three doors. And she's in there with his puzzle boxes and his carved horse calling him Patéras like she's been saying it her whole life, and I'm out here wearing grooves in the hardwood in my fucking socks while he teaches her swordplay in a cardigan."
The mattress creaked as Diego stood.
"Don't." I kept my back to him. "I know what you're going to say. She's safe, she's fed, she laughed today. She's got a birthday party tomorrow with chocolate cake and raspberry filling because he knows her favorite. I know all of it. I've been repeating it to myself for an hour, and it's making me worse."
He stepped into my path anyway. Diego Reyes had never once in his life listened when someone told him to stay put. I pulled up short. Gauze and stubbornness held his shoulder together, and going through him would reopen it.
He cupped my face in both hands. The calluses I'd memorized in the farmhouse caught on my stubble, and underneath the antiseptic from his bandages I could smell his skin, warm, alive, so specifically him that I locked tight around it. He pulled my forehead down against his, and the contact ran through my skull like water into cracked earth.
"One breath," he said. "A real one where air actually enters your body, please."
I dragged it through my teeth. It burned going in. My lungs had been running shallow for so long they'd forgotten what a full breath tasted like.
"She ran to me because I made her eggs and sat with her at the window every night." His thumb pressed into the hinge of my jaw where the muscles had knotted into concrete, and the joint loosened. "That's not her rejecting you. That's a kid going to what she knows."
I grunted.
"You'll get your turn." His breath was warm on my lips. "When she's ready. When she knows what you are to her. But we get out of this room first, yeah?"
Someone knocked at the door.
I tensed. Diego clenched his fists. The door cracked open.
A man in a white coat stepped through with a medical kit in one hand and the kind of wire-framed glasses that made him look like he'd been patching up killers since before I was born. Two guards stayed in the hall behind him, rifles across their chests. They didn't follow him in. The doctor came alone, medical kit unlatched.
"I need to check the dressings," he said, setting the kit on the nightstand. The clasp popped when he opened it. "Shoulder first."
I sat on the bed and let him put his hands on me.
He peeled back the bandage on my shoulder with cool, latex-smooth fingers. The torn sutures pulled against raw skin, the same ones Diego had stitched by flashlight, and I locked my jaw against it. The stethoscope hung from his neck, the rubber tubing looped once against his collar, long enough to work with. He cleaned the wound, re-dressed it, and taped it down. Then he moved to my side. I pulled the hem of my shirt to my chest, andhe peeled back the tape over the gunshot wound below my ribs. Air found the raw skin underneath, and the sting traveled up through my side. I kept my hands flat on the mattress while he worked and tracked the tubing every time he leaned in. He stood exactly where I needed him to stand.
"No infection. Closing up." He turned to the kit for fresh gauze, and when he bent over it, his body blocked the doorway.
I yanked the stethoscope off his neck and crossed the tubing behind his skull. My shoulder tore, but the rubber sank into the soft tissue of his throat before he could draw breath to shout. He clawed at the cord, and I drove my knee into his diaphragm and folded him forward onto the mattress. What came out of his mouth was less than a whisper, a thin, wet nothing. I held the cross tight at the back of his head, kept my weight even, my breathing steady.
He scraped his heels against the floor twice. One of his shoes came half off. Then he went still under my hands, and I kept holding. Unconscious and dead are different things, and the Pantheon had been very specific about the difference. I counted in my head and held the cord tight against his throat until the count finished and the body underneath me was just a body.
I unwound the tubing and lowered him onto the bed. His glasses had twisted sideways on his face. I straightened them. My babushka raised me to show respect for the dead, even the ones I'd made myself.
