Page 47 of Deathless
"Clean up," he said. His voice was flat and emptied out.
I cleaned myself off and pulled my jeans up. My belt lay on the floor in two pieces where he'd torn it open.
I needed a cigarette. The craving sat in my chest like a second heartbeat. Diego stood by the window with his back to me. He'd buttoned his shirt wrong, and bruises already marked his neck where I'd held him during the kiss. The welts on my back and stomach throbbed under my shirt, and I pressed my arm against my ribs to feel them sting.
"We need to get her back," I said.
"I know." He didn't turn around. "I made her a promise."
"I left her mother to die." I stared at his back. "I'm not leaving her."
"There's an airstrip half a mile from here," he said to the window. "I can get us in the air. Rhadamanthys says he knows where the resistance is gathering."
"When?"
"Tonight. Soon as it's dark."
Koschei buried his soul on an island because love was the thing that could kill him. I'd spent ten years proving that right. The soul wasn't buried anymore, though. It walked around in a nine-year-old body with Zeus's men, and we were going after it anyway.
"Then we go tonight," I said.
"There are three cells,"Rhadamanthys said, spreading a map over the kitchen table. "Here, here, and here."
I leaned in, tracking where his finger landed. São Paulo, Manila, somewhere in the Balkans that might've been Serbia or Croatia. The borders on this map were older than I was. Someone had creased the map down the middle and covered it with notes in at least three different hands. Red circles, blue X's, numbers that probably meant something to someone who wasn't me.
Jasper stood across from me on the other side of the table. My fist curled. I could grab him by the jacket, shake him until he explained how he'd kept this from me for a year. Or I could press my face into his shoulder and just fucking break. Eight was gone. I'd let her go. He knew what that cost. He'd done the same thing, and it dragged us both under. I kept my hands flat on the wood instead.
"More here," Rhadamanthys said, tapping the map. He traced across continents to Lagos, then Prague, then Buenos Aires."Small operations. Five, maybe ten people each. Survivors of Zeus's purges. Some walked away before he could burn them. Others just got lucky."
Lorenzo stood at the end of the table with his arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn't sat down since we'd started this. He couldn't sit down, probably, not with Rafael's name sitting in the air between us and wherever the hell he actually was.
"The main hub is here." Rhadamanthys tapped the Moroccan coast, and my pulse spiked before my brain caught up to why. Casablanca.
I leaned in closer. The city sat right there on the Atlantic, maybe two hundred kilometers from where I stood, practically our backyard. My family ran people and cargo across the Strait of Gibraltar the same way my grandfather had before I was born. He used to say smuggling was romantic. My mother said it was profitable and occasionally fatal. She was the one still running the operation.
"You're coordinating everything out of Casablanca," I said.
"We are." Rhadamanthys looked up. "You have a problem with that?"
"No." I traced the coastline with my thumb. "I have routes."
Jasper looked up and met my gaze for half a second before dropping it back to the map. That was all we gave each other right now. Half a second at a time, tactical exchanges, everything else locked down until after we got Eight back.
"How many people can you move?" Rhadamanthys asked.
"Forty's nothing. We've done twice that in a single night." I straightened up. "The family knows what they're doing. My mother's been running operations since before I could walk. She won't have a problem."
"Just bodies?" Rhadamanthys asked.
"Bodies, routes, and everything that comes with them. We have communication lines across the western Mediterraneanthat nobody's tapped because nobody knows they exist. We have contacts in every port from Tangier to Marseille who move cargo without paperwork and don't ask questions. My cousins run counter-surveillance in three countries." I tapped the strait on the map. "You need a forward operating base. The Kalderash are it."
Rhadamanthys studied me, trying to decide whether I was bullshitting or telling the truth. "We need everyone in Casablanca within three days."
"They'll be there in two."
Lorenzo coughed. When I looked over, he had both hands pressed flat on the table and he shook. He wasn't laughing. He was holding still when every muscle in his body wanted to move.
"Rafael's there," he said to the map.
