A Bride for the Wrong Brother

(Alondra's POV)The sound of my mother's voice cut through the kitchen walls like a blade."Alberto, please. She is still a child."I froze with the knife mid-air, the half-sliced onion staring back at me from the cutting board. My father's reply came low, broken, the kind of voice a man used when he had already lost the fight."There is nothing left to give them, Remedios. Nothing but her."Then a door slammed somewhere down the hall and the whole house seemed to flinch with it.I kept slicing. I did not know why. Maybe because if I stopped, I would scream. The onion was no longer the reason my eyes burned, but the tears still slid down my cheeks and fell onto the wooden board, mixing with the juice. One drop. Two. A small puddle forming around the blade.I was twenty-one years old.Twenty-one and my whole life had just been sold across a kitchen table.Soft footsteps came up behind me. I did not have to look to know it was my mother. She always walked the same way, like she was afra

(Alondra's POV)The maid's words sat on my chest like a stone."None of them ever walked out alive."I tried to speak, to ask her more, to beg her for any small piece of information that could keep me alive, but she was already moving. Her hand slid under the edge of the blanket on my lap. Quick. Practiced. Something cold and small pressed into my palm and her fingers closed mine around it before I could even look down.A key.She did not say what it was for. The shape of it told me everything. Old brass, heavy at the head, the kind of key that opened the kind of door no one was supposed to use."East wing. The second corridor. The narrow door behind the green curtain," she whispered against my ear. "Wait until the house sleeps."She straightened up too fast then, smoothing her apron, fixing her face into something blank. She did not look at me again. She picked up the empty water jug from the bedside table and walked toward the hidden panel in the wall as if she had only ever come to

(Alondra's POV)They laced me into the dress so tightly I could barely breathe.Three women circled me like birds, tugging at ribbons, pinning lace, smoothing the long white skirt over my hips. The corset cinched my waist until my ribs pressed against each other and a small dizzy feeling settled behind my eyes. They did not let me eat. The only thing they allowed me was a small cup of warm milk, and even that was rationed in tiny sips so the dress would stay snatched.I let them.I let them do all of it.I had accepted my fate by the time they slid the veil over my face.If I was going to die in this house like the brides before me, then at least my parents would be free of the debt. That was something. That was enough. It had to be enough, because there was nothing else left.My father walked me down the aisle.He could not look at me.His arm was stiff under my hand and his eyes stayed fixed on the floor the whole way down, like a man being marched to his own execution instead of mi

(Alondra's POV)My mother's eyes were still open.That was the part I could not stop looking at.Her head was tilted toward me, the way it had tilted toward me a thousand times across our kitchen table, except now there was no breath behind it. Her cheek rested against the cold marble. Her hair had come loose from its pin and fallen across her forehead in the soft brown waves I used to braid when I was small. A thin red line had begun to crawl out from underneath her, slow and patient, finding the cracks in the floor.She was looking at me.Maybe not.I could not tell which was worse.My father had landed harder. He had fallen sideways and ended up half on his stomach, one arm flung out toward me, his fingers still curled the way they had been when he was holding my hand.His mouth was slightly open.He had been trying to say something when the second shot came.The hall had gone strange around me. The voices kept moving, but they sounded like they were coming through a thick wall of

(Alondra's POV)"Mamita."My mother's voice was warm against my ear.I was nine years old again, curled into her lap on the small couch in our apartment, the smell of bread dough still clinging to her apron. Her fingers were combing through my hair the way they always did when I had cried myself out and there was nothing left in me to give. She was humming something low. A lullaby. I pressed my cheek harder against the soft warmth of her chest and I let her hum carry me somewhere safe."Mamita, no te vayas."I do not know if I said it out loud.I think I did."Stay, Mamita. Please stay. Just a little longer."The humming faded.The warmth faded with it.My mother's hand slipped out of my hair and the small couch dissolved underneath me, and the soft smell of bread dough turned into the cold smell of a damp room, and the lullaby became silence.I came awake with a jolt.For one second I did not know where I was. My head was hanging forward against my chest. My shoulders ached. My wrist