Page 5 of Deathless
Lorenzo stared at the ceiling. He closed his eye. "Try it again."
"Lorenzo..."
"I said try it again."
Jasper tried. I put my hand on Lorenzo's shoulder because the expression on his face belonged to a man deciding whether to stay present or just check out entirely, and I needed him to pick option one.
"Hey." I squeezed once. "We're gonna find him."
He didn't respond. He gripped the table edge hard enough to turn his knuckles white and clenched his jaw.
Jasper shook his head.
Lorenzo let go. He turned his face toward the wall.
"Lorenzo." I leaned in close. "Listen. Rafael's the most stubborn son of a bitch we've ever known. He survived a goddamn plane crash and a cardinal trying to kill him and you.He's not dead. The network's down; that's why he's dark. That's it."
His words scraped out of him, rough and wrecked. "Don't make promises you can't fucking keep."
I squeezed his shoulder one more time and backed off. The kitchen went quiet.
Eight had wedged herself into the narrow space between the fridge and the wall, knees pulled up, back pressed into the corner. She found the tightest spot whenever things went sideways, whatever crack gave her the most wall coverage and the clearest view of the door. She'd been doing it since week one.
He pulled something up on the laptop. A woman's face filled the screen: dark hair, sharp jawline. The kind of permanent scowl that came from bone structure, not mood.
I knew that scowl.
“Jasper, who is that woman?”
He slammed the laptop shut.
"Jasper..."
He looked at me, and whatever was on his face saidback offin a language I'd learned to read in Brussels. "It doesn’t matter," he said. “What matters is that we’re fucked, Diego.”
He stood up and paced to the sink, putting the whole kitchen between us. He braced both hands on the edge and dropped his head. The line of his shoulders pulled tight under his shirt. I stayed where I was. Jasper needed the distance to think, and I'd learned that the hard way.
"Okay," I said after a few minutes. "So what's the play?"
"I don't know."
That stopped me cold. Jasper always knew. Jasper had backup plans for his backup plans. Jasper had once rerouted us through four countries because one safe house smelled off, and he'd been right, because Jasper was always right. Now he stood inmy kitchen with blood still on his sword and absolutely nothing behind his eyes.
"Then we go to my people," I said. "Zeus can torch every account and every fake name you've ever used, and it Won't matter if we’re using the Kalderash network."
The Pantheon had spent decades trying to map us and never got close. When I was nineteen, I'd moved a family of six from Thessaloniki to Cádiz through routes that crossed four borders without touching a single checkpoint. We slept in safe houses that existed only as a name passed from one cousin to the next. The Kalderash left no paper trail, no digital footprint. They ran on phone calls in Romani and doors that opened when you knocked the right way. Zeus built his empire on servers and aliases. The Kalderash built theirs on blood and memory and handshakes that held for generations. They didn't need his infrastructure because they'd been running their own since before his grandfather was born.
Jasper shot me a doubtful look. "You can't just walk back in."
"No. But I can ask."
“Diego…”
I stood. "Start packing," I said. "Everything we can carry. I need to make a phone call."
He moved closer and grabbed my arm, sending a shudder up my spine that I fought to suppress. “Diego, don’t burn any bridges for me. I’m not worth it.”
Oh, Jasper, I thought. Didn’t he realize I’d have done anything for him? I’d burn a thousand bridges, entire towns, torch the whole goddamn world for this man, and he didn’t even know it.
