Page 71 of Deathless
"The children?"
"Safe. Your mother has them."
I nodded and kept pressure on the wound. Jasper had closed his eyes again with his jaw clenched against the pain, but he kept his fingers laced through mine, sticky with his own blood, holding on.
We'd held the line. The Kalderash had bled for people they barely knew because I'd asked them to, because I'd stood in my grandmother's root cellar and told them it mattered, and they'd believed me. Six of them had paid for that belief, and Mateo's daughter would grow up without him because her father had trusted the kid who'd left the valley at seventeen and come back with a war in his pocket.
Jasper's blood ran warm between my fingers. The tunnel went quiet. Somewhere above us Achilles dragged Hades into thedark, and I held on tighter because Jasper was the one thing I could keep, and I was not letting go.
The blood dried slowly.
My shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat. I pressed my back harder against the stone because the cold helped, or because I needed something solid behind me, or because Diego was three meters away and the wall was the only thing in this tunnel that would hold still.
Diego crouched beside Valentina, talking in low Spanish. He gestured as he spoke, laying out sectors and casualty counts. He had blood on his knuckles and dust in his hair. He kept his eyes on Valentina, on the map she held, on the corridor behind her.
Rhadamanthys came down the corridor like a man walking into church.
He'd been in a different sector during the fight. Luka's section, wherever Rafael and the resistance fighters had held their ground. His coat had fresh tears in it and someone else's blood on the sleeve, but he moved steadily, purpose in every step. The Stetson sat low on his head, shadowing his eyes.
He stopped at the junction.
A long dark smear ran across the stone where Achilles had dragged Hades, the chain links gouging shallow grooves into the floor beside it. The marks led around the corner and disappeared into the dark. Rhadamanthys followed them with his eyes, slowly, all the way to where they curved out of sight. He already knew what waited at the other end of that trail. Nothing.
I'd been where he stood. Different corridor, different decade, same moment. The exact second when a man understands that the person he came for is already gone and the distance between them has become the kind you can't close by running.
Rhadamanthys took the Stetson off. He held it against his chest with both hands, breathed once, and then the hat went back on. "Where is he taking him?" Rhadamanthys asked me.
"Zeus."
He nodded once, settled his hand on the revolver at his hip, then he turned and walked toward the command center.
Diego came back witha medical kit he'd stolen from someone and the expression of a man who'd been holding a grenade with the pin out for too long.
"Shirt off."
"You could buy me dinner first."
He knelt beside me without laughing, opened the kit on the stone floor and laid out the supplies with steady hands. I pulled my shirt over my head, and my shoulder lit up so hard that my vision narrowed. The field dressing had been doing more work than I'd given it credit for.
Diego peeled the old bandage away. He clenched his jaw when he got a clear look at the wound, but he threaded the needle without hesitation. He cleaned it with antiseptic, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
"Achilles' sword?" he asked.
"No, I cut myself shaving."
"Jasper." He spoke low, the kind of quiet that carried more weight than shouting. "Shut up and let me fix you."
I shut up. His fingers were warm on my skin, and I focused on the pull of the suture needle through the wound's edge, breathing through each one the way I used to count exits in unfamiliar rooms. The old habits always find new uses.
"Mateo's daughter turns six next week," Diego said. He kept his eyes on the suture.
He tied off the stitch and cut the thread, then started the next one.
"Alonzo broke their formation at the north approach. Under three minutes. Valentina held the east tunnels with half the fighters she needed." He pulled the needle through, and his voice stayed level, almost conversational, like he were reading from a grocery list instead of a casualty report. "Beni kept the children quiet in the lower chambers for two hours. Two hours, Jasper. Some of those kids are three years old."
He kept stitching. He kept naming them.
I put my hand on his wrist. He stopped. His pulse hammered under my thumb, too fast for a man whose hands looked that steady.
