At 3am, my phone rings.
The sound cuts through sleep like a blade. I'm awake instantly. Hand reaching for the phone, body rigid, the tactical brain back online before my eyes fully open. Beside me, she stirs.
I answer. Listen. The voice on the other end is Lex's, and Lex's voice never shakes, but it's shaking now.
"They hit one of our safe houses. Four men dead." A pause. "Including the man guarding your mother."
The phone is in my hand and the bedroom is dark and the woman beside me is warm and alive and the war just arrived at my mother's door.
"Is she —"
"Moved in time. Secondary team got her out. She's safe. Nico, she's safe."
I hang up. I sit on the edge of the bed. Siobhan's hand finds my back.
"What happened?"
"Viktor hit a safe house. Four of my men." My voice is a stranger's. "The one guarding my mother."
Her hand goes still on my back. Then presses harder. Holding me in place. Keeping me in my body when everything in me wants to leave it.
"Is she alive?"
"She's alive. They moved her."
"Then we deal with it. Together."
Together. The word she gave me in the kitchen. The word I'm only beginning to understand.
I get dressed in the dark. She watches from the bed, the sheet pulled to her waist, her eyes tracking me with the fierce attention she brings to everything.
"I'm coming with you."
"Siobhan —"
"Together. You said together."
I look at her. This woman. This impossible woman who let me pin her against a wall and pour four days of rage into her body and is now sitting in my bed telling me she's not staying behind.
"Together," I say.
Chapter 21
Siobhan
The Fallout
* * *
Nico's mother has gold eyes.
That's the first thing I notice when we arrive at the safe location. A brownstone in Cambridge that Lex secured in the hours between the call and dawn. She's sitting in a wingback chair with a wool blanket around her shoulders and a cup of tea that someone made her and she hasn't touched, and when she looks up at her son, I see where his eyes come from. Liquid gold. Except hers are softer. Worn smooth by decades of grief and vespers and the particular endurance of a woman who loved a man who was killed for what he was.
Thalia Konstantinos is small. Elegant in the way Greek women of her generation are elegant. Bone structure doing the work that makeup does for the rest of us, hair silver-streaked and pulled back, hands folded in her lap with a stillness that doesn't read as calm. It reads as practice. She's been sitting in rooms like this for fifteen years, waiting for news about the people she loves, and the stillness is muscle memory.
Nico crosses the room and kneels beside her chair. Takes her hand. "Mamá."
She touches his face. Speaks to him in Greek. Soft, rounded consonants, the language stripped of the hard edges it carries when Nico uses it in business. He answers in Greek. I don't understand the words, but I understand the voice: the son. Not the boss. Not the weapon. The boy who lost his father at seventeen and has spent half his life making sure he doesn't lose his mother too.