CHAPTER 40: FIRE IN THE DARK

Rayén

Two minutes.

I had spent three years learning how to live without my brother, and now I had two minutes to decide whether the man in front of me was Aconcagua or a ghost someone had built to hurt me.

"Don't," Lautaro said quietly. His pistol hadn't moved from Conco's chest. "Don't go to him yet."

"He's my brother."

"He's a man who walked in here after your mother's people did. Think, Rayén."

I hated that he was right. I hated it more that my body didn't care. My feet were already on the first step down, my hand sliding along the cold rail, my eyes fixed on that scar. I had stitched that scar. I was fourteen, and Conco had cut himself climbing the wall behind our house to bring me a stolen mango, and I had held the needle with shaking fingers while he laughed at my frown.

"Say something only he would know," I called down.

Conco's mouth twitched. "You still can't eat mango without getting it on your elbows."

My throat closed.

"That's not proof," Lautaro muttered.

"It is for me."

I reached the floor. Wine was still running between the broken casks, dark as old blood, soaking the hem of my ruined gown. Conco stood ten steps away with his hands open at his sides, thinner than I remembered, a beard shadowing his jaw. His eyes were wet.

I slapped him.

The sound cracked through the warehouse. His head turned with it, and he didn't flinch, didn't raise a hand.

"Three years," I said. My voice shook so badly I barely recognized it.

 "I buried an empty box. I stood beside Mother while she cried over it. Do you know what that did to me?"

"Yes." He swallowed. "I know exactly what it did."

"Then why?"

"Because if you'd known, you'd have looked for me. And she'd have watched you look."

Something cold slid down my spine.

Behind me, Lautaro's boots moved over the concrete. I felt him before I saw him, that steady heat at my back. He had taken up a position between me and the door without saying a word, the way he had on the bridge, as though standing there was nothing, as though it didn't cost him.

"Ninety seconds," Conco said. "There's a service tunnel under the east wall. It comes out near the river. I left a truck."

"Why should we trust you?" Lautaro asked.

"You shouldn't." Conco finally looked at him. "But you did once."

The air changed between them. Neither of them looked at me, and that was how I knew there was something there I wasn't being told.

I opened my mouth.

The skylight shattered.

Glass rained down in glittering sheets, and a figure dropped from the rafters onto the lower pallets, landing in a crouch with a rifle already rising. I saw the muzzle swing, not toward Lautaro, not toward Conco.

Toward me.

I didn't think. I couldn't have told you later whether I had moved or he had. One moment I was standing there with my brother's name caught in my mouth, and the next Lautaro's whole body slammed into mine, a wall of muscle and wet cotton, driving me sideways into the stone pillar.

The shot was deafening.

He grunted. Just once, low in his chest, the sound of a man swallowing pain so no one would hear it.

"Lautaro."

"Stay down."

His arm was still locked around my waist. Warm wetness spread across my hand where it pressed against his side, and when I looked, the dark stain on his shirt was growing fast.

The shooter was already racking another round.

My eyes went to the catwalk stairs, to the mercenary I had shot earlier, still sprawled where he fell with his pistol a foot from his open hand. I didn't remember crossing the distance. I remember the weight of the grip, rougher than the one Lautaro had given me. I remember turning, and the man on the pallets lifting his face, young, maybe twenty-five, a scar through one eyebrow, his finger tightening.

I fired first.

The bullet went through his throat. He made a wet, surprised sound, took one step, and folded off the pallets onto the concrete.

He was dead before the echo finished.

My arm stayed raised. I couldn't make it come down. I had killed before, once, in a car, a man who had grabbed me while I was still half a girl, and I had thrown up afterward and told no one. This was different. This was fast and clean and I felt nothing at all, which frightened me more than any scream would have.

A warm hand closed over mine and lowered it, slowly.

"Rayén. Look at me."

Lautaro. Gray in the face, his jaw tight, one palm pressed to his ribs. Blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto the floor.

"You're hit."

"It grazed me."

"You're lying."

"A little." The corner of his mouth lifted, and it nearly undid me. "It's shallow. Breathe."

"Don't tell me to breathe. You stepped in front of a bullet."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He didn't answer right away. His thumb moved against my knuckles, rough and unsteady, and I realized we were standing closer than we ever had when there was no knife between us and no one watching. Smoke curled around us. Somewhere above, a loose sheet of tin banged in the wind. I could feel his pulse in his wrist where it touched mine, fast, fast.

"Because I'd already decided," he said, very low, "that I wasn't going to watch you die in front of me. Not you."

The words sat between us like something that could not be taken back.

I should have said something cutting. I had a hundred of them ready, built over weeks. Instead I pressed my palm over his wound, and neither of us moved.

"Touching," Conco said behind us, and his voice was strange. "But we're out of time."

I turned.

He had crouched beside the dead man and rolled him over, and he was holding something small and silver between two fingers, studying it with a stillness that made my stomach drop.

A signet ring.

The crest on it was a lion's head circled by thorns.

I knew that crest. I had seen it a hundred times on cufflinks, on letterheads, on the iron gate of Lautaro's estate.

"That's Errázuriz," I whispered.

Lautaro went still beside me. All the color left his face that blood hadn't already taken.

"That's impossible," he said. "Those rings are only given to my inner circle."

"Someone gave this one away," Conco said. He looked up at me, and I had never seen my brother so afraid. "Rayén, the person who sent these men didn't only get inside our house."

His gaze slid, slowly, to Lautaro.

"They got inside his."

Outside, an engine roared closer. Doors slammed. And through the broken wall, a voice I knew called, calm as a prayer, "Lautaro, my son, come out. We need to talk about your sister."