Chapter 43: Millaray's Reinforcements

Rayén

My mother has never raised her voice in her life. She never needed to.

"Rayén," she said again through the wood, so gently that my body answered before my mind could stop it. My shoulders loosened. My hand started toward the latch. Thirty years of being her daughter does that teaches your hands to obey before you've decided anything.

Lautaro caught my wrist.

"Don't," he breathed.

"I know."

"Then take your hand off the door."

I looked down. I was an inch from the handle. I pulled back like it was burning and pressed my fist against my mouth. The room tilted. Has he told you what your father whispered? She knew. Of course she knew. She had probably been standing beside the bed when he died, holding his hand, saying something kind.

"I know you're in there, mija," she said. "You always did hold your breath when you were afraid. Do you remember? At the lake house. You'd go quiet and turn red and Beltrán would laugh and say, there she goes, our little statue."

Lautaro's grip tightened. I hadn't realized I was shaking until I felt his thumb press into the inside of my wrist, steady, a small point of weight.

"She's trying to open you up," he said, barely a whisper. "Don't let her in."

"She's my mother."

"I know."

"You don't know. You don't have any idea what that..." My voice broke. I stopped.

The room went quiet. The rain thinned out. Even the river seemed to hold still.

Then footsteps. Slow ones, going away across the gravel. A car door. An engine turning over, almost lazy, fading down the road toward the river.

I didn't move. Neither did he. I stood with my back against his chest and the pistol cold between us, and I could feel his heart going hard against my shoulder blade. For a long moment I couldn't tell whether I wanted to run after that engine or throw up.

"She left," I said.

"No," Lautaro said. "She wanted us to think so."

The door exploded inward.

Not slowly. Not politely. It hit the wall with a crack that shook dust from the ceiling, and three men in black came through it with their weapons already up and their faces already set, big men, all shoulders, the kind my father used to call furniture. I didn't think. I got in front of Lautaro and brought my arms up and my own pistol with them, and I put the barrel against the nearest forehead.

"Move and I fire."

Nobody moved.

Then a woman's voice cut across the room, high and furious and cracking at the edges: "Everybody stop."

Millaray stepped over the splintered frame. Her sharp bob was soaked flat against her cheeks. There was mud up to her knees and a long smear of someone's blood across her jaw, and she had a gun in her hand that she wasn't pointing at anything. She stopped dead.

I watched her take it in. Her brother on the edge of the bed with his side bandaged in my torn shirt. The needle and thread and the red towel. The blood on my hands, on my blouse, on the floor. And me, standing between her family's most dangerous men and the Don, with a gun aimed at one of them.

"What..." Millaray started. Nothing came after it.

"He's hurt," I said. "He's stitched. If your men come one step closer, the stitches tear. So tell them to stand down."

"You're protecting him." She said it like it was a language she was learning. "You."

"Millaray," Lautaro said from behind me, tired and rough. "Lower the guns."

"You told me to burn her down if she touched you. You said it at the altar."

"I know what I said."

"Rayén Altiplano put a knife in her dress and walked up to marry you!"

"And now she's standing in front of me with a gun, so I'd say we've had a development." His voice cracked on the last word, and that did it. I saw it land. Millaray flinched, then waved her hand at the men, short and sharp. Three barrels dropped. The one I was holding at gunpoint let out a long breath through his nose.

I lowered the pistol. My arm shook all the way down.

Millaray crossed the room in four steps. She didn't look at me. She knelt in front of her brother, put both palms on either side of his face, and looked at him the way you look at something you've been told is gone.

"I thought you were dead," she said. "They said the winery was burning and nobody came out, and I..." Her breath hitched. "I called you eleven times, you bastard."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't. Don't be sorry. Be alive." She pressed her forehead to his and shut her eyes. For a second she was just a twenty-two-year-old girl on a cold floor. When she opened them again, they landed on me over his shoulder, wet and hard and full of questions she didn't know how to ask.

"You stitched him," she said.

"Someone had to."

"Why?"

I thought about lying. About saying it was strategy, that a dead Don was no use to me, that I only needed him alive until I had what I wanted. It would have been a good lie. I'd been telling it for weeks.

"Because I couldn't watch him bleed," I said.

Nobody spoke. Lautaro's eyes were on me. I didn't look at him. If I did, I would say something worse.

Millaray swallowed, then stood slowly. "Okay," she said. "Okay. We'll talk about that later. We have to move now. Beltrán's men are two kilometers out and I..." She stopped. Her eyes went to the doorway, to the door lying crooked off one hinge. A strange look crossed her face. "Wait."

"What?"

"How did you know we were coming?"

"We didn't."

"Then why was it open?" She turned toward the splintered wood. "Carlos kicked it, and it barely held. I felt it give. But the deadbolt wasn't even thrown." She looked at me. "Somebody unlocked it before we got here."

My stomach dropped.

I had heard that lock turn. I had stood in this lamplight and listened to Conco's key go round, and he had said, don't open for anyone but me. There were two keys to this cottage. I'd watched him pocket one.

"Millaray," I said slowly, "how did you find this place?"

"Conco sent me the location." She frowned, and pulled out her phone, and her face emptied. "An hour ago. He said you were here. He said to come alone, and I didn't, obviously, but..."

She turned the screen toward me.

The message was there, with the address and a single line beneath it.

Come quickly. He's bleeding out. Don't tell Rayén you're coming.

And under the text, small and gray, a timestamp from twelve minutes ago. Conco had walked out the door more than an hour before that.