I glared at him for one more moment before collecting my katana and stepping out.
The door closed, locked, and the SUV drove away so fast that the tires spat gravel against my shins. Taillights vanished around a curve.
The road stretched empty in both directions. I put a cigarette in my mouth and tried to light it. The lighter sparked once, twice, before catching. My hands weren't quite steady, but they would be by the time I got back to Diego.
I picked a direction and started walking.
I paced the carpetfrom the window to the door and back. The hotel room smelled like mildew and stale smoke, and the AC rattled every time it cycled on, which wasn’t often enough. I’d been wearing a track in the carpet for four hours now without any sign of Jasper.
My abuela would've smacked me upside the head and told me to sit down, pray, trust God. But God wasn't the one who'd let him walk into those headlights.
So I paced instead.
When he walked through that door, I was going to kiss him or kill him, maybe both, probably both. If he didn't walk through that door, I was going to find Zeus and everything Zeus loved and burn it all to ash, take my time with it, make it hurt.
"Stop, you're making me dizzy." Lorenzo pushed himself up on one elbow from the floor, moving carefully around the stitches in his side. "Sit down already. You look like a lost dog."
"Lorenzo, I will rip those stitches out myself and let you bleed on this carpet just to give me something else to think about."
"Listen, I’m just saying, wearing a hole in the carpet isn’t going to bring him back faster."
He lay on the floor between the beds, crayon in hand, exactly where I'd told him not to be. The man had a knife wound in his side and the survival instincts of a suicide bomber. Eight sprawled on her stomach next to him with crayons scattered between them on the carpet and six inches of space between their shoulders, close enough to work together but far enough she could bolt if she needed to.
I glanced at what they were drawing and frowned. I expected horses, castles, the kind of thing kids draw when you hand them crayons and tell them to keep busy.
Instead, they'd mapped the hotel floor, marking kill zones and optimal attack angles. Eight had printed STAIRS in careful block letters at the hall's end and underlined it twice.
I had to look away.
I wanted to scoop her up and drive until we hit the ocean, find some beach town where nobody knew our names, teach her to draw horses and castles and anything that didn't have body counts and choke points. Later, when we weren't running for our lives, when Jasper came back.
If Jasper came back.
She looked up at me, and I sat down hard on the bed's edge before my legs gave out.
"Everything's fine, pequeña," I said to the room, to Eight, to myself. "Nothing's coming. The man we left in the headlights is absolutely okay, and your tío Diego has it all handled."
Every single word tasted like a lie.
Eight held my gaze for one long beat. Then she picked up the red crayon and added another mark to the stairwell.
The door beeped in the next room, and I jumped up. Then I was moving across the room, hand on the connecting door, yanking it open before my brain could catch up. I stood there inthe doorway staring at Jasper's back like an idiot who'd spent two months learning how to talk to this man and suddenly forgot every smooth thing I'd ever said.
He was alive. He was here. He was moving.
The relief hit so hard my knees nearly buckled.
But something was wrong. Jasper was just standing there, his back to me, staring at the katana sitting on the mattress where he’d put it. The building could be on fire, the roof could be caving in, and this man would make sure his weapon stayed within reach and his exits stayed mapped. Something had pulled tight across his shoulders that I would've missed three months ago.
Eight appeared at my elbow with the first aid kit. She was a smart girl, always three steps ahead.
"Not yet, pequeña." I took it from her and kept my voice gentle. "Back to your drawings. Let me handle this one."
She looked past me at Jasper and studied him with that same flat assessment she used for threats and exits and things that might hurt her. Then she looked at me. My face must've told her enough because she went back to the floor plan without a word.
I locked the connecting door behind me, and the click landed too loud in the quiet.
"Jasper."
