Chapter 42: Touch of Steel

Rayén

The seal was still warm from his jacket, and I wanted to throw it into the river.

"You were in the room," I said. "When my father died. You were there, and you let me spend three years planning your funeral."

"Yes."

"You let me walk down that aisle with a knife sewn into my dress."

"Yes."

 He didn't look away. He sat on the edge of the bed with his shirt in ribbons and his side held together by my stitches, and he didn't reach for a single excuse. I hated him for that. It would have been easier if he had lied.

"Tell me what he said."

"Rayén, you need to sit down first."

"Don't tell me what I need."

I don't know what I meant to do. Throw the seal at him, maybe. I stepped forward, and he moved at the same moment, rising to meet me because he couldn't stand to be talked down to from a bed, even half dead. I saw the stitches pull before I heard him breathe in.

"Lautaro."

"It's nothing."

"You're bleeding through the gauze."

"I've had worse."

"You've had worse from other people!" My voice cracked and I hated that too.

 "This one is mine. I put it there. Sit. Sit, or I swear I'll finish what I came to your house to do."

For a second I thought he would laugh. The corner of his mouth moved. Then he lowered himself back onto the bed, slowly, one hand pressed to his ribs, and I knelt in front of him with the needle in my fingers and my father's seal still biting into my palm. I put the seal on the floor. I didn't want it near him. I didn't want it near me.

Two stitches had torn at the deep end. Fresh blood ran down his skin, dark in the lamplight. I wiped it away with the towel and my hands were shaking, which made no sense. I had done this once already tonight.

"Hold still."

"I am still."

"You're breathing."

"I'm told it's necessary."

"Don't be funny." I threaded the needle again. "I'm angry at you."

"I know." His voice dropped. "You can be angry and sew at the same time. I've seen you do it."

I pushed the needle in harder than I needed to. He took it without a sound, only his stomach tightening under my knuckles. Rain beat on the roof. Neither of us spoke. I pulled the thread through, and again, and my breath came out uneven. Every time I looked at the wound I could see the man in the winery turning his body between me and a bullet, as if it were nothing. As if I was worth it.

That was the part I couldn't forgive. Not the seal. Not the secret. That I had spent three years building a monster so I could kill him without guilt, and he wouldn't stay a monster.

"Why did you step in front of me?" I asked the wound, because it was easier than asking his face.

"You were in the line."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I'm going to give you tonight."

"Coward."

His hand closed around my waist.

I stopped. The needle hung in the air, a thread of black pulled taut between us. His fingers spread over my side, hot through my torn blouse, not gripping hard, just there, holding me where I was. As if I might leave. As if he needed to be sure I hadn't.

"Don't call me that," he said quietly, "unless you want me to prove you wrong."

I should have pulled away. I knew exactly how. I'd been taught by men who could break a wrist in two seconds, and my body remembered every lesson.

I didn't move.

I looked up, and he was already looking at me. His eyes were the color of whisky held up to a fire, and there was nothing cold in them now, nothing of the Don who signed away men's lives. I could see his pulse jumping under his jaw. I could feel mine answer it.

"You're trembling," he said.

"I'm cold."

"You're not."

"Lautaro."

"Say my name again."

The wire inside me, the one I had pulled tight every day since my brother's empty coffin, gave a little. Just a little. It frightened me more than the bullets had.

"I came to your house to kill you," I whispered.

"I know."

"I would have done it."

"I know that too." His thumb moved once against my ribs, a slow stroke through the cloth, so small I might have imagined it. "And I'd have let you, if you'd needed it badly enough."

My throat closed. I looked down at the needle and made my fingers work, three more stitches, tiny and careful, because if I stopped I would do something I couldn't take back. His hand never left my waist. At the last knot I leaned in to bite the thread, and my mouth was a breath from his skin, and I felt him go completely still.

I cut it with the scissors instead.

When I sat back, we were both breathing like we'd run up the mountain. My eyes had gone hot. I pressed the heel of my hand against them.

"Don't," I said. "Don't look at me like that. You're the reason my family is in the ground."

"No." He said it gently. "But I'm not going to argue that tonight."

"Then what did he say?" I dragged the seal off the floor and held it up between us. "My father. What did he tell you about me that was so terrible you'd carry it for three years?"

Lautaro's hand slid from my waist. The warmth went with it, and I felt the loss like a door closing. He took a long breath.

"He said you were the only one of them who ever loved him honestly," he began. "And that he had done something unforgivable because of it. Something to you. Not to Conco. To you." His jaw worked. "Rayén, the night they dressed you for the wedding, your mother..."

Three knocks hit the cottage door.

Slow. Even. Nothing like Conco's rhythm.

Lautaro was on his feet before I could breathe, the pistol in his hand, his face gone to stone. He reached for me and pulled me behind him, ignoring the blood spreading again beneath my careful stitches.

"Don't answer," he said, barely audible.

Silence. Then the latch rattled, once, gently, and a voice I'd known since before I could speak slid through the wood, soft as velvet and warm as milk.

"Rayén, mija. Open the door." A pause, a smile in every syllable. "Has he told you what your father whispered yet? Or should I?"