Page 45 of Deathless
"Tell me where she is, Diego."
"They took her."
I grabbed the doorframe. The room tilted, and I held on until the stone stopped moving under my hand.
"We came out of the tunnel into the gully," Diego said to the wall. "Patroklos was waiting on the ridge with at least a dozen men. They had us pinned. We lost three people in the first thirty seconds."
He spoke flat and mechanically, reciting facts that belonged to someone else.
"The shooting stopped. Eight walked out into the open." He stopped. Pulled in a breath. "She spoke, Jasper. First time I've ever heard her voice. She told them to stop."
I tightened my grip on the doorframe. The wood bit into my palm.
Eight hadn’t spoken a single word since the day I'd found her in that facility with blood on her hands and a number tattooed on her arm. I'd started to think maybe she couldn't, that whatever they'd done to her had taken that too.
Her first word had been stop, spoken in a gully with guns pointed at her from every direction. She'd spent a year hoarding silence like ammunition and used her first round to buy forty strangers their lives.
"She walked straight up to Patroklos and asked if he'd let everyone go if she went with him."
I pressed my hands flat against the doorframe.
"He nodded. One nod. That was the deal."
Diego turned around. "I had forty people behind me. Kids, elderly, wounded. Patroklos had the high ground and the guns and all the time in the world." His voice went flat. "I had to choose."
"You let her go."
"I had to, Jasper."
My fingers curled into claws, digging into the doorframe. "She's my daughter."
Diego went still.
"Eight." I tried to get the rest out. The words jammed in my throat the same way they'd jammed at the olive tree, calcified by a year of silence into something too big to pass. "She's mine. My daughter."
Diego stared at me. Everything hit his face at once.
"What? How? Who…”
"Nadia was pregnant when I left her." I stopped. Started again. "In Kiev. I didn't know."
I stopped again. The next part was worse, and my throat had closed around it.
"Zeus kept her alive." Each word scraped out like I was pulling shrapnel from my own chest. "Long enough to cut the baby out. Eight is mine."
Diego took a step toward me and balled his fists.
"I left her mother to die in a field." I stared at the stone between my boots because looking at him while I said the rest was beyond what I could do. "Zeus raised her. Turned her into a weapon. I didn't even know she existed until I found her in that facility."
"You knew." Diego's voice dropped to something quiet that made the hair on my neck stand up. "You knew she was yours and you never fucking told me."
"Diego..."
"Don't." He closed the distance and shoved me hard against the wall. "I had her for a year. A whole fucking year. You pulled a gun on her in that facility, and the whole time she was your daughter?"
He twisted his fists in my jacket and pinned me there.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
