CHAPTER 41: FIELD TRIAGE

Rayén

I knew that voice the way I knew my own handwriting.

Beltrán had taught me to ride. He had slipped me sugared almonds under the table during my father's long dinners, and he had held my hand at my brother's empty funeral and told me grief was just love with nowhere to go. And now he stood outside a broken wall in the dark, calling my husband my son.

"Millaray," Lautaro said. It came out of him like a breath he'd been holding for years. He tried to straighten, and his face went white.

"Not yet," Conco said, already hauling the rusted grate off the floor behind a stack of pallets. "He wants you to run out there. Tunnel. Now."

"My sister."

"Your sister is a problem for the next hour," Conco said. "Bleeding to death in this building is a problem for the next five minutes."

I put my shoulder under Lautaro's arm. He was heavier than he looked, all hard muscle gone slack with pain, and he let me take his weight. That scared me more than the blood. A man like him did not let anyone carry him.

We went down into the dark.

The cottage sat above the river, a squat stone place with a tin roof and one window facing the water. Conco had driven us there in silence, both hands tight on the wheel, and when we carried Lautaro in he only said, "Medical kit under the bed. I'm going to find out what's happening to Millaray. Don't open the door for anyone but me."

Then he looked at me, really looked, the way he used to when I was small and he was deciding whether to tell me something.

"We'll talk when I'm back," he said. "I owe you that."

The door shut. The lock turned. I stood in the lamplight with my husband's blood drying on my palms and nothing left to do but the one thing I knew.

"Sit," I said.

Lautaro lowered himself onto the edge of the narrow bed. I knelt and dragged the kit out, a battered steel box with a faded red cross, and set out what I needed on a folded towel: gauze, a bottle of clear alcohol, a curved needle, black thread.

"You know how to do this," he said.

"My brother taught me. I was fourteen. I did it badly."

"Did he live?"

"He's standing outside." I almost laughed. It came out cracked. "Apparently."

I cut his shirt away with the little scissors. The graze ran along his lower ribs, a furrow nearly four inches long, deeper at one end than he had admitted. Around it the skin was a map of older damage: a ridged scar under his collarbone, a puckered circle on his shoulder, thin white lines I didn't want to count.

"You said it was shallow."

"I said it was a little shallow."

"Lautaro."

"Rayén."

He was smiling again, that small tired smile, and I hated how my chest answered it. I poured the alcohol over the wound before I could think about it. He hissed through his teeth, his fist closing on the blanket, and his other hand shot out and caught my wrist.

We both froze.

His palm was hot and rough. His thumb sat over my pulse, and I knew he could feel exactly how fast it was going.

"Sorry," he said, and let go.

"Don't apologize for flinching." My voice wasn't steady. "I'd have screamed."

"No. You'd have bitten someone."

I bent over the wound so he wouldn't see my face. Threaded the needle. Pinched the skin together with two fingers and pushed the point through.

For a while neither of us spoke. The lamp hummed. Rain began on the tin roof, soft, then harder. Every stitch pulled a tiny sound from his throat that he tried to hide, and every time I felt it in my own stomach.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I said, finally, to the thread. "About Conco."

His ribs rose and fell under my hand. "Because if I had, and your mother had found out, you'd both be dead. I wasn't going to gamble with that."

"That wasn't your choice."

"No." He was quiet. "It wasn't. I made it anyway."

I tied off a knot. Cut the thread. Started the next one.

"I hated you for three years," I said. "Not you. The idea of you. The man who ordered my brother shot. I built you in my head, every night, down to the way you'd look when I killed you." The needle slipped, and I steadied it. "And now I'm sitting here trying not to hurt you."

"You're not hurting me."

"I'm putting a needle through your side."

"You're gentle." He said it so low I almost missed it. "Nobody has been gentle with me since I was seventeen."

My eyes burned. I pulled the last stitch tight and laid my palm flat over the gauze, and for a moment I couldn't make myself take it away.

When I looked up, he was watching me. No mask. No Don. Just a tired man with amber eyes and a hole in him, who looked at me as if I were the only light in a very dark house.

He lifted his hand. Slowly, giving me time to stop him. His thumb brushed under my eye and came away wet.

"You're crying."

"It's the alcohol."

"Rayén."

I leaned in. I didn't decide to. His breath touched my mouth, warm and uneven, and I could see the exact moment he stopped breathing at all.

Then I remembered my father's name, and my brother's grave with nothing in it, and I pulled back so fast my knee hit the floor.

"Don't," I whispered. "Not yet. I can't."

"I know." He didn't sound angry. He sounded like a man who had been willing to wait a long time. "Take the jacket. Hang it by the fire. It's soaked."

I needed something to do with my hands. I took his bloodstained jacket from the chair and shook it out. The inner pocket swung heavy against my wrist.

I reached in.

Something cold and round lay in my palm. Gold, worn smooth, with a raised crest I could have drawn in my sleep. A condor, wings spread over a crown of silk.

My father's seal.

The one my mother had hunted across two cities. The one the hired men had named in the dark, your mother wants the seal.

I looked up. All the warmth had left the room.

"Where did you get this?"

Lautaro closed his eyes.

"Tell me."

"I took it from your father's hand the night he died." He opened them. They were steady and awful. "I didn't kill him, Rayén. But I was in the room. And before he died, he told me something about you that I swore I would never say out loud."