“What kind of hole?”
“The kind you don’t climb out of. The kind where you’re looking for a bullet to stop the noise.”
“And the others?”
“Brass is the second. Tactical genius. Scary calm. Fuse is demolitions. He blows things up to avoid dealing with his feelings. Whisper is intel. He sees everything.”
“And you?”
“I’m the eraser. I make problems go away.”
“Is that what I am? A problem?”
He looks at me then. The traffic slows, giving him a second to hold my gaze.
His eyes are dark. Haunted. But burning with something that terrifies me.
“You’re the mission,” he says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that keeps you safe.”
“Why?” I push. “Why does caring about me make me unsafe?”
“Because if I care about you, I get scared. And if I get scared, I hesitate. And if I hesitate…” He looks back at the road. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. “You end up at the bottom of a ravine.”
The air in the van goes still.
He said it.
He admitted it.
He’s terrified. Not of Phoenix. Not of dying.
He’s terrified of failing me.
But it’s more than that. The way he said it—bottom of a ravine—wasn’t hypothetical. It was a memory.
“Diego,” I whisper.
“Don’t.”
“You’re not going to fail.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.” I lean forward, trying to catch his eyes, but he refuses to look at me. “Because you’re not talking about a hypothetical, are you? You’re talking about something that happened.”
His jaw works. A muscle feathering under the stubble.
“Who was she?” I ask.
Silence.
The van hums over the asphalt. The stick-figure family on the back window stares at me in the reflection of the rearview mirror.
“Who did you fail, Diego?”
