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“When you and Mikel go after Kodra, I’m going with you. Swear you’ll tell me when it happens.” Raul touched his left side where his tattoo twined, their old signal of solidarity.
Gabriel shook his head. “You are too valuable to your father and to Caleva.”
“So I sit at home like a coward while you play the hero again. Mierda, I didn’t mean that,” Raul said, squeezing the bottle until it collapsed. “You are a hero. You didn’t play one.”
They’d been around this circle before. Raul couldn’t get past his guilt, and Gabriel didn’t want to relive the terror, so he would shut down the conversation every time it reached this point.
Suddenly, he changed his mind, seizing his cousin’s wrist and giving it a hard shake. “I love you like a brother, but I would have done the same thing even if I hated your guts.”
His cousin’s scowl shifted to surprise. “What the hell?”
“They were looking for el Príncipe de los Lirios. We still don’t know what they really wanted you for, because they got me.” Gabriel smacked his fist into his palm. “Think about it. Capturing you would have given them tremendous leverage over your father. Who knows what they might have demanded? Then he would have had to choose between what was good for Caleva and what was good for his son.”
Raul pointed his water bottle at Gabriel in an accusation. “And you thought about all this in the split second before you claimed to be me? Bullshit!”
“Not all of it, no. That came later.” When he had been lying naked and terrified on the cot in the windowless tent where the kidnappers had imprisoned him. “But you and I have both been raised on what our duty is to Caleva. I wasn’t thinking of you as Raul. I was thinking of you as my prince.”
Raul crossed his arms, his posture tight and withdrawn.
“You knew in the moment that I did the right thing,” Gabriel pushed. Maybe they could finally clear the air between them. “Because you kept your mouth shut. I could see in your face that you wanted to identify yourself, and I prayed that you would be smart enough not to.” He looked at his cousin, seeing the same slashing cheekbones and dent in the chin that he saw in his own mirror. That’s why the kidnappers had been easy to fool.
His cousin muttered a curse. “I heard my father’s voice telling me that Caleva was more important than my feelings. I hated myself for that. I wanted to save you.” His voice shook with remembered anguish.
Gabriel reached out to grasp his cousin’s shoulder. “I know that. I knew it then. We made the right choices.”
“Did we?” Raul asked. “I can be replaced on the throne by some other cousin, but you—you were a genius with your guitar. I destroyed that.”
“You didn’t destroy it, you asshole. The kidnappers did!” Raul’s guilt ran deeper than Gabriel had realized.
“That’s why I need to go to Italy or wherever Mikel needs us,” Raul said. “I need to catch these motherfuckers and punish them for what they did to you. While you were being held in that tent, I sat around the palace and did nothing. When they sent your—” His gaze went to Gabriel’s ear, and Raul swallowed hard, his throat muscles working. “I can’t do nothing again.”
“It’s not my decision,” Gabriel said, even though he understood his cousin’s sense of helplessness. “What if Kodra is some kind of trap? The kidnappers missed you the first time. This might be an attempt to get you away from Caleva to try again.”
“This time, we would be ready for them. In spades.” Raul’s face took on the same hard angles that Gabriel saw on the king’s when he plunged into a particularly difficult situation. People knew to get out of Luis’s way when that happened. “I want to make sure every last one of them is hunted down and made to pay for what they did to you.”
And to you, Gabriel thought.
Raul gripped Gabriel’s forearm. “Swear that you will tell me when you and Mikel are going after Kodra.”
It sounded like a command, but Raul’s gaze held a plea. He hadn’t been taken captive, and he carried the burden of it still. Maybe the only way he could get past the guilt was to be part of the investigation.
Gabriel gave a decisive nod. “I will tell you.”
Raul kept his gaze locked on Gabriel a moment longer before he released his arm and sat back. “Muchas gracias, hermano.” He hesitated a moment before he asked, “Do you ever feel like moving to Antarctica?”
“Every May and December.” Gabriel accepted the change of subject.
Raul choked out a laugh. “Brass-and-grass. Brass-and-mass. Which one do you hate more?”
In their snarky early teens, they had labeled the two times of year when they felt like they lived in their uniforms with all their required “brass”—the shiny medals and gold braid. May’s plethora of ceremonial events tended to be outdoors, so they’d added “grass,” while the winter holidays required attendance at multiple church services, hence the “mass.”
“Nowadays, I hate May the most because it’s fucking hot in that wool uniform,” Gabriel said.
“And you’ve gotten good at sleeping with your eyes half-open at mass,” Raul added.
“You’re not expected to smile and wave in church either.”
Raul snorted and went silent for a few moments before he asked, “Why do you never wear your Medalla de Honor at the brass events?”
