Chapter 84 Chapter Eighty Four

Chapter 84 Chapter Eighty Four
"You love your sisters, don't you?"

He looked at her. Considered the question with the same unsentimental attention he gave most things — and answered honestly, the way he'd taught himself to do with her, even when honesty required navigating around the parts of himself he preferred not to examine.

"I love you and our kids." A pause. "And Danie." He added it as an afterthought, almost reluctant, as though the admission had slipped out before the more guarded part of him could intercept it. "Nobody else."

Ellie seemed to accept this with the ease of someone who had long since learned to read what lived between his words.

"I called Evie today and told her the good news," she said, shifting against the cushion. "She also had something interesting to tell me."

Cesar turned to look at her with the careful, preemptive expression of a man who has learned that interesting in Ellie's vocabulary covers an enormous range of territory.

"Please tell me she's going to have another child so I can finally have Danie all to myself?" He sent her a look of such unguarded pleading that it was almost comical on his face. "Please."

Ellie burst out laughing. "Yeah."

"Hallelujah."

The word came out with a feeling that genuinely startled him — a bright, uncomplicated happiness that he had no intention of dismantling by examining it too closely. Danie. Small, fierce, entirely herself. His. He'd decided that long ago.

"I hope we have a boy this time," he said, already thinking forward the way he always did — past the present moment and into the architecture of what could be built. "He must marry her."

Ellie stared at him. "The baby's not even fully developed yet and you're already planning his wedding?"

"I like to think ahead."

"She'll be older than he is."

"Age is just a number, my love." He said it simply, without performance. "It's love that really matters."

The silence that followed had a specific texture to it. Ellie was looking at him the way she sometimes did — openly, unguarded, with something almost like bewilderment in her eyes. 

As if she was holding the man in front of her up against some earlier version and finding the distance between them remarkable.

Who are you? He could see her thinking. And not unkindly.

I've been wondering the same thing, Cesar thought. Not with distress — more with the quiet curiosity of a man watching himself change from a slight distance, noting the alterations the way you notice that a familiar room has been rearranged. 

The Cesar Sandoval of eighteen months ago would sooner have swallowed glass than said something like it's love that really matters in a living room at midnight. 

That man had been efficient and heavily armored and privately convinced that sentiment was a liability.

And yet here I am.

"There's a fly coming straight for your mouth," he drawled.

Ellie's expression snapped from wonder into a scowl with impressive speed. "There are no flies in the house, Cesar."

"You never know."

She yawned — enormous, involuntary, and immediately followed by a giggle when she caught the expression on his face. The I told you so needed no translation.

"I'm sleeping." She groaned it like a verdict and marched to the bed with the dignified determination of someone who had made a decision and intended to honor it.

Cesar watched her go.

Good, he thought. She needs rest. She needs to not be up at midnight worrying about things I should be handling for her.

She'd barely settled under the covers before she spoke again, her voice already carrying the slightly unfocused quality of someone with one foot already in sleep.

"Hey... so I heard that Antoinette Montalvo went missing for a few days, but she's been found. She's in a coma."

"Really?" He kept his voice level. Mild. The careful neutrality of a man performing surprise he did not feel.

"Her mother was devastated," Ellie continued, eyes drifting closed. "She promised to have whoever hurt her daughter arrested."

Good luck with that, Monica, Cesar thought, and felt the smirk arrive before he could decide whether to let it. Good luck finding anything I don't want found.

He was aware, distantly, that it was not a generous thought. He filed it away without apology.

Ellie's eyes were drooping. She'd caught the expression on his face — he'd seen the flicker of her noticing — but sleep claimed her before she could form the question, and within moments her breathing had evened out into something deep and untroubled.

He watched her sleep for a moment.

Rest, he thought. Just rest.

He showered. Moved through the familiar ritual of it in the quiet of the bathroom, the hot water doing the methodical work of washing the day off. 

By the time he got into bed — slipping in beside her, pressing a kiss to her temple in the darkness, feeling her shift slightly toward him even in sleep — his mind had already turned, as he'd known it would, back to the sketch pad.
Back to the face.

He lay in the dark and thought about it with the same cool, systematic attention he brought to threats he took seriously — which this was. Tristan's track record was not ambiguous. 

He thought about the eyes in the drawing. The particular species of damage they represented. Someone wronged, Tristan had said. Someone wanting their pound of flesh and uninterested in the collateral cost.

Who are you? he thought at the drawn face in the darkness. And who did we wrong badly enough that you'd come all this way?

He would find out. He had people for finding things out and he would set them to work in the morning.

As for Arya...

He felt the thought settle into place with a coldness that surprised even him, though not unpleasantly.

He would let the man have her. 

Whatever was coming her way, he had no intention of standing between her and it. He wasn't going to breathe a word to Patricio about the danger hovering over his wife's head. He wasn't going to warn anyone. 

She would deserve whatever arrived — he believed that with a clarity that required no justification — and he found, lying there in the dark beside the woman he loved, that he could not summon even the shadow of guilt about it.

He didn't owe that family anything.

He didn't owe her anything.

He closed his eyes. Outside, the night was still.

Come then, he thought — to the scarred face, to whatever was making its way toward Meredor. Come. Just stay away from what's mine.

And on that thought, finally, Cesar Sandoval slept.