Marisol, not looking up from her plate: "It means he's glad you're alive. He has six adjectives in his entire vocabulary and 'good' is the warmest of them."
"Five, little shark," Gunner says from the window.
Marisol looks up. "Five?"
"Dropped one this year."
"Which one? Gunner, which one? Not ‘insane’, I hope, that’s my favorite."
He doesn't answer. He's already returned to watching the parking lot.
Logan's mouth moves, almost nothing. The corner of a smile he doesn't let finish.
A ripple moves through the room a moment later.
Marisol looks up from her food.
"Is Isa—"
"No," Logan says.
The word lands flat. He doesn't look up when he says it. His thumb moves once across my knuckles and then stills.
Marisol's jaw tightens for exactly one second before she reaches for Sera's container and puts more rice on her plate. Adrian and Sera exchange a look across the room. The Siren keeps humming.
No one explains. No one needs to.
The room is still very full.
The room settles into the shape it's going to hold for the night.
Marisol is asleep in her chair — tilted sideways, Nico's jacket over her shoulders, her breathing slow. Nico hasn't moved frombehind her. Gabriel and Sera are on the small couch opposite the window, Sera's head on his shoulder, both of them simply present. Adrian has stopped talking; the Siren's humming faded out at some point in the last hour without anyone marking the moment. Gunner is still at the window, still watching the parking lot with that patient, systematic attention.
Nico speaks at some point — military-crisp, almost incidental.
"My cousins in New York are sending someone," he says. "Help with the Zayas situation. She arrives tomorrow."
Gabriel looks up. “A Rosetti?”
“Close enough,” Nico says.
The room absorbs it. Gabriel looks at Nico across the food containers — a look with history in it — and Nico returns it briefly. Logan's hand tightens once on mine, then releases.
"What should I know about that?" I ask Logan, quietly.
"Later," he says. "When you're not concussed."
"That's not—"
"Later." A beat. The faintest pressure of his fingers. "I'll tell you everything. Later."
I accept this.
Across the room, Adrian reaches for a plantain on Gabriel's plate.
Gabriel, without looking: "Don't."
Adrian takes it. Holds it up briefly, as if admiring it in the light.
