Chapter 140 -
The attack came at three in the morning.
Two vehicles without lights burst through the east perimeter where the wall met the drainage channel. Six men. They had good intelligence on the guard rotation, which meant Santiago had sold them the schedule before his capture, one more piece of the contingency he had built into his exit.
The alarm brought Nia out of bed and to the window before she was fully awake. Outside, the grounds were lit, the floodlights on their emergency triggers flooding the lawns with flat white light, and she could see figures moving fast across the grass below: not toward the house but away from it, the guards converging on the east wall.
She did not go downstairs. She stood at the window and watched and breathed and kept her hands flat against the cold glass, because Leo had told her once, in the debrief after the warehouse, that the hardest thing in this world was knowing when to stay out of something and trusting the people who were built for it.
She had asked him if he found it hard. He had said always. She had said good, because the day it stopped being hard was the day it stopped being a choice.
She was making the choice now, both hands on the glass.
Christian's voice in the corridor, clipped and fast, coordinating. Micheal's heavier footsteps going toward the east wing. Doors. Radio crackle.
She did not hear Leo. Eighteen minutes past before the ethe radio chatter shifted, the specific change in cadence that meant the immediate crisis had resolved and the work of accounting had begun.
She heard someone say four in custody, two fled, east wall holding. She heard Christian confirm the number. She heard Rosa's voice unexpectedly, calm and firm, asking about injuries.
She moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed.
The door opened twelve minutes later. Leo came in with his jacket off and a cut along the outside of his forearm, not deep, already clotting, the sleeve pushed back. His face had the flat controlled expression he used when something had been resolved at cost and he was still doing the internal accounting of the cost.
"Four men are being kept in custody," he said. "Two retreated, but nobody on our side seriously hurt."
"Your arm," she said.
"It was cut by glass, the one of the guardhouse window." He looked at it the way he looked at minor inconveniences. "It's nothing."
"Let me see it."
"Nia—"
"I said let me see it, god damn it!"
He crossed to her and she took his arm and turned it toward the light and looked at the cut, three inches along the muscle, clean edges, still seeping at the center.
She went to the bathroom, came back with the first aid kit Rosa kept in every room like a standing policy, and sat beside him and cleaned it without asking his permission.
He let her, sitting still while she worked and looked at the side of her face in the low lamp light.
"You stayed upstairs," he said.
"You told me to."
"Yeah, I did, but I wasn't sure you would."
"I was sure." She pressed a gauze pad against the cut and held it. "I know what my job is in this. It's not to get in the way of yours. I can be afraid for you and also trust that you know what you're doing."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Are you afraid?"
She looked up at him. "Yes," she said. "Both times. The warehouse and tonight. My hands were shaking the whole time." She looked back at the cut. "I'm not afraid of this world. I'm afraid of losing you in it. Those are different things."
Leo said nothing. He put his free hand over hers where it held the gauze against his arm.
"The Vasquez men will be questioned tonight," he said. "By morning I'll know whether Eduardo sanctioned this or whether Hector moved without him."
"Which do you think?"
"Hector," he said. "Eduardo agreed to come to the table. A man who agrees to negotiate doesn't simultaneously order an assault. Hector saw an opening and took it before the conversation could close it."
"And if you're right?"
"Then Eduardo has a problem with his son that he'll need to manage visibly. Which makes our meeting next week considerably more productive."
She secured the gauze with tape. She smoothed it down along the edges. Then she sat back and looked at him, at the tiredness in his face, the controlled steadiness of a man who had been running on necessity for four days and was starting to show the seams of it. He had not slept more than three hours at a stretch since the warehouse. She could see it in the set of his jaw and the way he was holding still with a little too much effort.
"Sleep," she said.
"I have to debrief the team."
"Christian can do it, Leo. You said so yourself once, delegation is what the structure is for. You're allowed to take care of yourself, aren't you? At least, that's what you told me. So, take your advice."
He looked at her. "You were paying attention."
"I told you I was."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached over and turned off the lamp and lay back against the headboard without ceremony, still in his clothes, the bandaged arm resting across his chest. She sat beside him in the dark.
"I told the Don yes," he said. "About the council meeting next week, about formally taking the chair."
She turned to look at him in the dark.
"When did you decide?" she said.
"Tonight," he said. "When I came back in and the first thing I needed to do was come upstairs and make sure you were here." He paused. "This is what I'm protecting. This is what the chair is for. I decided."
She looked at him.
"Leo," she said.
"Yes."
"Something is going to go wrong before the council meeting. It's too quiet now."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said. "Probably."
She lay back beside him in the dark. Outside, the estate was still lit, the guards doing their sweep, the ordinary machinery of consequence running its course.
"Then sleep while you can," she said.
"Nia."
"Yes."
"Isadora called me a hard man with goodness underneath it."
She went still. "When was that?"
"Three days ago in the study." A pause. "I thought you should know she said it."
Nia stared at the ceiling. "She told me she wasn't going to say anything to you."
"She lied," he said.
"She always does when she thinks it'll help." Nia closed her eyes. "Did it?”
"Yes," he said.
Lo and behold, just before the sky began to lighten at its edges, a message from a unknown number came through on Leo's phone that made him sit up and stare at the screen in the dark for a long time without waking Nia.
He is still here.