spared me.
Diego took his daughter by the shoulders. “Sweetheart. Go inside, okay?”
Tabitha ducked behind him and into the house. Given his reaction, I half-expected Diego to shut the door in my face at that point, but instead, he came out and closed it behind him.
“How bad?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“How much danger are we in?” The question almost had a deadness to it, resignation despite his intensity. “How much danger is my daughter in right now?”
“I—” The truth was, I hadn’t been thinking about it from that angle at all. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“But you know not-exactly?”
At least one person was already dead, and his daughter had almost been turned into the scrapings on the bottom of a barbecue tonight. One of the prime suspects in all that was a guy from Checker’s past who seemed intent on blowing up anyone with a connection to Arthur. And then there was the man on the lawn and whoever had been targeting Teplova, who sparked just enough familiarity for me to extrapolate that they were all very bad news … the lurking threat of Pithica and conspiracies could very well pivot to fall right on Tabitha and her family, without me being able to do a damned thing to prevent it.
Diego was probably right to be worried.
Apparently I’d taken too long to respond, because Diego scoffed and muttered something disgusted-sounding in Spanish that I was quite sure I was not supposed to understand.
“I can get you somewhere safe,” I offered. I cringed at the thought of burying their whole family in one of my tiny, dirty apartments, but safe trumped comfortable. “It’s a good idea, just in case—”
“Run from our lives? Again?” Diego wasn’t looking at me. “I have a job. The children have school, and work.”
“So miss a few days. Call it a vacation.”
“A vacation,” Diego echoed. His voice was shot through with bitterness. “I’ve come to dread when the next of these calls will come from Arthur, you know. Always the same—he’s angered someone by fighting for some higher good, and so we must pay the price, we must run, hide, check into a hotel, miss important appointments, huddle in fear. No. There must be a limit.”
I thought of the various bad guys Arthur and I had fought over the last couple of years. How many of them had he worried might be a danger to his family?
Shit. It wasn’t like I could drag Diego out of his house by force.
“All right,” I said. “In that case, I can send someone to stay with you. Protect you. If you want.” Oh, Christ, there was really only one person I could assign to that. Arthur was going to murder me. Not to mention it was terrible resource management—but what choice did I have? “I’ll send someone,” I repeated. “And I can base here too, to have an extra gun around.”
He winced but seemed to accept that. “We have a guest room. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
He squinted back at me. “What did you say your name was?”
I told him.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re the gal Charles mentioned, aren’t you? The math genius.”
“I—wait, who?”
The slightest wry smile touched Diego’s mouth, and for the first time, he seemed to relax a bit and take in my presence properly, like I was a human he was talking with on his doorstep instead of a disease come to threaten his family. “Eh. I know he doesn’t go by Charles anymore, but forgive me; I’m an old dog.”
“You mean Checker? You call him Charles?” I had vaguely been aware Checker was an Internet-handle-turned-nickname, but I hadn’t even known his real name. I wondered what he had told Diego about me. “I, uh. Yeah. Math genius is probably me.”
“It’s good to meet you. Thank you again for bringing Tabitha back.” He sounded more sincere this time. “I’ll get you my card so you can call.”
Diego stepped back into the house, leaving me on the porch, and he returned a moment later with a business card from a gym. He handed it to me with a civil nod and then moved to go back inside.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned.
“You didn’t ask how the search is going.”
I wasn’t sure why I said it. I wasn’t trying to attack him, and Christ knew I had a hell of a lot better things to do than stand here on a porch guilt-tripping Arthur’s ex-husband. But dammit, this felt wrong.
Diego stood still for a few seconds. Then he said, “How is it going?”
“We’re making headway.