Page 54 of Deathless
I loved Diego. I loved Eight. And Koschei's whole survival strategy was that nobody knew where the needle was. I'd spent a decade keeping the needle buried, and now I was sitting on a cot in Casablanca with beet juice on my lips and the needle in plain sight, beating in my chest where anyone could reach it.
I pressed my hands flat against my thighs and held them there.
Diego was still holding my face, looking at me like he could see everything I wasn't saying.
"Okay," he said, barely above a breath. "Okay, guapo."
He let go and picked up his bread. We went back to eating, our fingers pink and our jeans oil-stained.
After a minute, Diego spoke again, lower. "I've been thinking about after."
"After what?"
"After we get Eight back. After Zeus and all of it." He picked at the bread. "My parents have a house. Outside Sevilla. There's a vineyard. My father wanted me to learn it. I told him to go fuck himself and left when I was seventeen."
He tore the bread into pieces he wasn't eating.
"I want to take Eight there," he said. "Teach her about grapes instead of killing. Let her be a kid." He looked at me. "Fill the house with noise. Normal family chaos."
"You'd be good at that," I said. "The chaos."
He grinned. "Weed on the front porch. Our own bed. Waking up together without wondering if today's the day." The grin faded, and what replaced it was something unguarded, something he didn't usually let me see. His voice dropped. "Just peace. As long as you're there with me."
Diego sat on a cot in Casablanca with beet juice on his fingers, asking me to learn how to grow grapes.
"I know nothing about grapes," I said.
He smiled. "I'll teach you."
"I want that," I said. "The vineyard. The kids. All of it."
Relief broke across his face. He reached over and took my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and held on.
I woke up tomusic.
Jasper had draped himself across me at some point during the night, arm heavy over my chest, chin against my shoulder, dead to the world. The man slept like he'd staked a claim. His breath came slow against my neck, each exhale warm enough to make my skin prickle, and I lay there with my hand on his forearm and listened. The sound came from down the hall, not from inside my head. Strings, and something low underneath them, a voice maybe, all of it threaded through the stone walls and into the room where Jasper's heartbeat knocked against my ribs through the thin space between us.
I should have moved. Luka's people had brought us in hooded the night before, and the compound was still unmapped in my head, which meant every hallway was a liability. But Jasper's arm pinned me to the mattress, and his breathing hadn't been this even in weeks. In Spain he'd slept in shifts, one hand near the katana, waking at every creak. Now he pressed his face into my shoulder, and the music pulled at something down the hall.I let myself have one more minute of this. His stubble scraped my collarbone when he shifted. I turned my mouth against his hair and breathed him in: smoke, sweat, the cheap soap from the communal bathroom.
I gave myself one more minute. Then I eased out from under him without waking him, pulled on my jeans, and went to find it.
A man I'd never seen before sat cross-legged on the floor of the common area, drawing a bow across the strings of a horsehair fiddle. He was older, built wide, with scars running down from the corner of each eye like silver tear tracks, eyes closed, bow moving slow.
I thought he might be asleep until he opened his mouth. Two sounds came out at once: a low drone underneath a high, clean note. I'd been around throat singing once before, at a cousin's wedding in Turkey, but it sounded nothing like this. This sounded almost sad.
I stopped in the doorway.
"You're blocking the door," Lorenzo said behind me.
"I know."
He squeezed in beside me with his coffee, shoulder against the doorframe, and we stood there listening.
"What is that instrument?" Lorenzo said.
"No idea."
"What is he doing with his voice?"
