Page 78 of Deathless
He came saying it. He came with his forehead against mine, his torn-up hand on my face, the word still breaking out of him. He shook through it and made sounds I wanted to keep somewhere no one could touch them.
We stood there. He kept his hand on my face, and I kept mine wrapped around him, and neither of us moved.
"I love you too," I said. Every word cost me something. "I love you and I'm terrified."
Diego pulled me in. I pressed my face against his neck and held on.
We stayed like that until my legs gave out, until the adrenaline wore off and exhaustion hit.
"We should clean up," Diego said. "Get some sleep before we leave."
I nodded against his shoulder.
"We're going to get her back," he said. "You and me."
I pulled back. "Mila," I said.
Diego looked at me. "What?"
"Her name. It isn't Eight. That's the number they gave her." I swallowed hard. "I always thought if I had a daughter, her name would be Mila."
Diego stared at me. Then he pulled me back against him and pressed his face into my hair, and his whole body shuddered once, hard, like something had broken loose in his chest.
"Mila," he said into my hair. "We're going to bring Mila home."
"Yeah," I said. "We are."
The snow hit myface the second I stepped off the plane in Kiev.
Of course it was fucking snowing.
I zipped my jacket and scanned the tarmac. The private airstrip sat north of the city center, the kind of place that existed on Soviet-era maps and nowhere else. Diego moved up beside me with his duffel over one shoulder, breath clouding white in the freezing air. Rhadamanthys came down the steps behind us, the Stetson pulled low against the wind. He carried a duffel, his revolvers, whatever lived behind his face when he thought about Hades.
"Cold enough for you, guapo?" Diego's voice had that rough edge it got when he ran on spite and no sleep.
"It's March in Ukraine. This is warm."
He snorted and kept walking toward the jeep Luka had left for us. The engine ran, exhaust billowing gray against the pre-dawn sky. Someone had left the heat on.
I threw my gear in back and the stitches in my shoulder pulled, a hot line from Achilles's sword. I climbed into the passenger seat. Warmth hit my face. My fingers burned as blood returned to them. Diego slid behind the wheel and pulled up the nav system Vihaan had loaded. Rhadamanthys took the backseat without a word, his duffel between his boots.
"Twenty minutes to the compound," Diego said, studying the screen. "Straight shot, no checkpoints."
"Zeus owns the checkpoints."
"Yeah, I figured." He put the jeep in gear, and we rolled forward. "Vihaan, you reading us?"
The comm crackled. "Loud and clear. You're green across the board. No movement on satellite, no chatter on local frequencies."
"Good," I said. "Keep monitoring."
Diego drove. Snow-covered fields stretched in every direction, broken by skeletal trees and the occasional farmhouse with no lights on. Everyone with sense stayed inside when it was this cold.
The jeep hit a pothole and my bad shoulder slammed into the door. I grabbed the handle. Diego muttered something in Spanish.
"You good?" he asked.
"Fine."
