She's asking about the men. I can tell from his face. The tightening around his eyes, the slight drop of his chin. He tells her. She closes her eyes. Crosses herself. Opens them.
Then she looks at me.
The assessment is thorough and unhurried. She takes me in from the doorway. Nico's shirt under my jacket, my hair still tangled from bed, the particular look of a woman who got dressed in the dark because her husband's phone rang at 3am. I don't flinch under the examination. I've been assessed by men with guns, by Cormac's silent judgment, by Elena's careful warmth. This is different. This is a mother looking at the woman her son chose, and the weight of that gaze carries decades of understanding about what this life costs.
She speaks to Nico. He translates, and his voice catches on the words.
"She says you have kind hands."
I cross the room. Take the chair beside hers. Take her hand. Small. Cool., the skin paper-thin over bones that have held this family together since her husband's blood was still wet on the floor.
"She's safe now," I say. Nico translates.
His mother looks at me again. Squeezes my hand. Says one more thing.
Nico doesn't translate immediately. His jaw works. I wait.
"She says... be patient with me. That I'm difficult to love but worth the trouble."
Thalia's eyes meet mine. She smiles. The first smile, fragile and real, and I see the woman she was before grief became her primary language. She's beautiful. She was devastating. And she's telling me, in the way mothers do, that she knows her son and she knows what I'm in for.
"Tell her I already know," I say. "Both parts."
Nico translates. His mother laughs. It's a quiet sound, rusty from disuse, and Nico's face shifts into an expression I've never seen. Softens into an expression so unguarded that it feels like I'm intruding on a private moment. The son and the mother and the laugh that means we're still alive. We made it through another night.
They speak for another hour. I sit beside Thalia and hold her hand while Nico makes calls, coordinates with Stavros and the new security detail, rebuilds the wall that Viktor punched through. When his mother's eyes start to droop, I help her to the bedroom Lex prepared. She grips my arm on the stairs, leaning into me, and she weighs nothing. A woman made of grief and prayer and a stubbornness that she passed to her sons.
At the bedroom door, she touches my face. The same gesture Nico uses — palm on jaw, thumb on cheekbone. The genetic template.
She says one word. Greek. I don't need a translation. The tone is enough.
Thank you.
I close her door. Stand in the hallway. Breathe.
Four men are dead tonight. A mother is sleeping in a safe house because her home was compromised. And somewhere Viktor Reznikov is congratulating himself on a message delivered.
I find Nico in the living room.
He's alone. The lights are off. City glow filters through the curtains, painting the room in blue and gray. He's on the couch,elbows on knees, head in his hands. The operational maps are on the floor. Scattered, not stacked. I've never seen him treat paperwork carelessly. The Beretta is on the coffee table. Not being cleaned. Not being held. Just sitting there, like he set it down and forgot how to pick things up again.
I sit beside him. Don't touch. Don't speak. Just present. The way I sat in the kitchen after the warehouse. Offering proximity without demand. Some things can't be fixed with words or action. Some things just need a witness.
The silence is long. City sounds through the walls. A siren somewhere distant. The old house settling around us.
"I was supposed to protect them." His voice comes from somewhere deep and fractured. "That's the only reason any of this matters. The empire, the alliance, the war. All of it exists to protect the people I love. And I failed."
"She's alive, Nico. You didn't fail."
"Four men died. Because of me. Because I wasn't fast enough. Wasn't smart enough. Didn't see Viktor's move before he made it."
"Because Viktor Reznikov is a monster. That's not on you."
"Everything is on me." He looks up. His eyes are dry but ravaged. The gold dulled, tarnished, the control stripped to bare metal. "That's what being the boss means. Every death. Every failure. Every person who trusted me and went home in a box. All of it. On me."
I take his hand. He lets me. His fingers are ice.
"Then let me help carry it."