Chapter 44: The Captured Gunman

Rayén 

Nobody said anything in the car.

Millaray drove. Lautaro sat beside her with his jaw locked and his hand pressed to his side, and I sat in the back between two men I didn't know, with my brother's message still burning on the inside of my eyelids. Don't tell Rayén you're coming. Conco had never kept a secret from me in his life. Except the biggest one.

They had caught the man at the treeline, thirty meters from the cottage, trying to melt into the dark. Millaray's men dragged him out by the collar. In his jacket pocket was a brass key, and when Carlos tried it in the cottage lock it turned like it had been oiled for the purpose.

So that was the deadbolt. Someone had stood in the rain and unlocked a door while my husband bled on the other side of it.

The man was in the trunk now. I could hear him thumping every time we hit a pothole.

"He's mine," I said, when the gates of the Las Condes estate closed behind us.

Lautaro turned in his seat. In the dashboard light he looked ten years older. "Rayén."

"He had my brother's phone. Or Conco's number, or something. He used it to bring your sister to a house I was standing in. So he's mine."

"You're not going down there."

"You can't stop me."

"I can," he said quietly, "and I'd rather not."

Millaray off  the engine. Nobody moved. She was staring at the steering wheel like she'd rather be anywhere else, and I understood her completely.

"I'll take it from here," she said. "Both of you, shut up, get inside, and let Dr. Ibáñez look at those stitches before you pass out on my marble."

"Millaray..."

"Lautaro." She finally turned around. Her eyes were red-rimmed. "You nearly died tonight. Let someone else carry it for an hour."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then something went out of his shoulders, and he nodded. Just once. It undid me a little. I had never seen him let anyone tell him what to do.

The doctor took forty minutes. I sat on a stool in the corner of the infirmary and watched him tut over my work, then reluctantly admit it was clean. "Whoever sewed this has done it before," he said, and Lautaro looked at me across the room and didn't say anything at all.

When we were alone, he sat up carefully on the edge of the table. His shirt was gone. I kept my eyes on the wall.

"You're angry at me," he said.

"Yes."

"For the seal?"

"For all of it." I picked at a loose thread on my sleeve. 

"For being the one who knows. My father said something to you, and my mother knows, and I'm the only person in my own life who doesn't." 

My voice thinned out. "Do you understand what that's like? Everyone around me has been handed a piece of me and I'm standing here with empty hands."

"I understand more than you think."

"Then tell me."

"After the basement."

"That's what you said in the cottage."

"I know." He slid off the table slowly, wincing, and came to stand in front of me. Close. Close enough that I had to tilt my head up. 

"I want to say it when no one's going to knock on the door. I want you to have time to hate me properly, if that's where it goes. I won't be rushed out of it by a gunman and my sister's schedule."

"You're afraid."

"Terrified."

It was such a plain answer that I laughed, a short, startled sound, and he smiled at that. Barely. Then his hand lifted toward my face and stopped in the air, the way it had in the cottage, asking.

I didn't say no. I didn't say yes either. His knuckles grazed my cheekbone, rough and careful, and I closed my eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to let myself feel what it was like to be touched by someone who wasn't afraid of me or using me.

"Come on," I said, stepping back before I did something stupid. "Let's go down."

The basement smelled like cold stone and old wine. A single bulb hung over a metal chair, and in the chair sat the man from the trees, wrists strapped, his lip split, his hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. He wasn't young. Mid-thirties, maybe. A plain face. The kind you pass on the street and never remember.

Millaray stood against the far wall with her arms crossed. Two of the heavy men flanked the door. Nobody was touching him. I noticed that, and realized it was Lautaro's rule, and was surprised by how much it mattered to me.

He looked up as we came in. His eyes went to Lautaro first, flat and uninterested. Then to me.

Something changed in his face.

"There she is," he said softly. "The famous daughter."

"Who sent you?" Lautaro asked.

"No one."

"Try again."

"No one sent me, Don Errázuriz. I'm just a man who needed work." He rolled his shoulders against the straps. 

"You'll have to forgive me if I don't believe the gentle approach is going to last. They told me you were hard. I expected someone worse."

"You'll find I get harder," Lautaro said. "Not louder."

I stepped forward before I could think about it. The man's eyes followed me, and he smiled, slow and pleased, like I'd walked into the middle of a joke only he knew.

"How did you get the key to the cottage?"

"Found it."

"Where?"

"On a man who didn't need it anymore."

The room went quiet. My fingers curled. "What does that mean?"

"Rayén," Lautaro warned.

"What does that mean?"

He tilted his head. He was enjoying it. I wanted to hit him, and I wanted to hear every word he had, and I hated that he could see both.

"The message to Miss Errázuriz," he said. "From your brother's phone. You were wondering how it was sent."

"Yes."

"I sent it." He said it with a little shrug, polite as a waiter. "Forty minutes after he stopped being able to."

Millaray made a small, strangled sound. The floor seemed to drop.

"Where is he?" My voice came from somewhere very far away. "Where is my brother?"

"Safe," the man said. "For now. Your mother is looking after him. She's always been so good with her children."

"You're lying."

"I'm not, mija." He leaned forward against the straps, and his smile spread slowly across his split lip, and when he spoke again he used my mother's softest voice, the one from the other side of the door. 

"She asked me to tell you one thing. Sunrise. Alone. Bring the seal, and what your husband took from your father's hand. Or she'll let Aconcagua finish what your father started."