"Nothing about us has been easy."
"True. We started with a wrong number text and accidentally fell in love while being enemies."
"Best accident ever," Zane says, bringing Santiago back to me.
I take our son, settle him for another feeding. Zane sits next to us, and we exist in this bubble of peace. Tomorrow will bring new complications—Miguel facing his President's wrath, Ghost plotting revenge, two clubs balanced on the knife's edge of war.
But tonight, in this hospital room with the Phoenix sunset painting everything gold, we're just a family.
Impossible and beautiful and worth every complicated thing that came before.
Miguel came back.
Zane kept his Presidency.
Santiago is loved by both sides.
Worth everything.
Worth it all.
Tomorrow we go home—to the house Zane rented, to the life we're building, to the impossible future we're creating one day at a time.
But tonight?
Tonight we're just this.
This family.
This love.
This perfect, complicated, absolutely impossible miracle.
Chapter forty-seven
Building Home
Zane
Three months into fatherhood and I've learned several universal truths:
One: Sleep is a myth propagated by people without children.
Two: Babies have the worst fucking timing in human history.
Three: Santiago inherited his mother's stubborn streak and my ability to be loud at the most inappropriate moments.
Four: I'd die for this kid without hesitation.
It's 5 AM. Santiago is crying. Again. Third time tonight. I'm moving before Lena even stirs—she handled the 1 AM and 3 AM wake-ups, this one's mine.
"I got him," I mutter into the darkness.
Lena makes a sound that might be gratitude or might be unconsciousness. Hard to tell anymore. We communicate mostly in grunts and half-sentences now, our entire vocabulary reduced to baby-related emergencies and the eternal question: "Whose turn is it?"
I pad down the hallway of our rental house—small, two bedrooms, neutral territory that belongs to neither Iron Talons nor Coyote Fangs. Just ours. The nursery door is cracked open, nightlight casting soft shadows across walls painted a blue that Izzy insisted was "calming for infant cognitive development."
Santiago's cry escalates from "mildly annoyed" to "the world is ending and only you can fix it, Dad."
