Chapter 53: A Midnight Conversation

Rayén

I stared at the photograph until the screen dimmed itself out of mercy.

My brother's face. My brother's crooked half smile, even the small dent in his chin from the time he fell off the stable roof. But the hand lifted in that wave was pale and scarred, and the eyes above it were too still. Conco never stood still in his life.

"Lock the gate," Lautaro said. He was already moving, already barking into his radio. "Double the east wall. Nobody opens a door without a name and a reason. Nobody."

"Lautaro, that's my brother's face."

"I know." He turned and looked at me, and I saw he knew exactly how bad it was. "Which is why you're not going near that gate."

"He might be hurt. He might be..."

"Rayén." Not loud. Just my name, set down between us like something fragile. "Beltrán wants you running. That's the whole trap. A scar and a face, and you'd walk out into the dark in your socks."

I wanted to hit him, because he was right, and because the last time I had run toward my brother in the dark, he'd turned out to be dead.

Or not dead. I couldn't hold the shape of it in my head anymore.

He took me to the library.

It was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor Lautaro had cleared himself, door by door, gun in hand and his bad side leaking through his shirt. The room smelled of cold leather and old paper. There were no cameras. He checked the shelves, the lamps, the underside of the desk. Then he locked the door, set a chair under the handle, and finally sat down on the rug like his legs had stopped taking orders.

"My father hated cameras," he said, to the ceiling. "He said a man who needs to be watched has already lost."

I sat across from him with my back against a bookcase. My palm was still stained blue where he'd written Colchagua. I rubbed at it with my thumb and it wouldn't come off.

For a long time neither of us said anything. The house creaked around us. Somewhere below, men were running.

"Tell me about him," I said. "Your father."

He let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "You've read the files."

"I've read what people wrote about the Don. I'm asking about the man."

His eyes dropped to his hands. They were big, scarred across the knuckles, and for the first time since I'd known him they weren't steady.

"He taught me to field-strip a pistol when I was seven," he said. "Blindfolded. If I dropped a spring, he made me start over. If I cried, he made me start over twice." A pause. "I learned not to drop the spring. And I learned not to cry in the same afternoon. It was efficient."

"Lautaro."

"He wasn't cruel the way you're picturing. He never raised his voice. He just had this silence he used, like a door closing in a house. If I came second at anything, the silence would last a week." He smiled, but it was the saddest thing I had ever seen on his face. "I once won a school race and ran home to tell him. He asked me who came second. I said some boy named Pablo. He said, 'Then Pablo is the one you should be afraid of.' That was the whole conversation."

My chest hurt. I knew that silence. I knew it so well I could have drawn its floor plan.

"My father used his hands," I said quietly. "When my marks slipped. But it was the same. He didn't hit me because he was angry. He hit me because he thought it was teaching. He'd stand there afterward, completely calm, and say, 'You'll thank me.'" My voice cracked and I let it. "I never did. Not once. And he's dead and I still haven't."

Lautaro looked up.

Something passed between us that had nothing to do with the war or the blade I'd hidden in my wedding gown. It was quieter than that. It was two kids who had grown up in the same cold house, just on opposite sides of the same wall, each convinced they were the only one inside.

"I thought I was the only one," he said, like he'd heard me think it.

"So did I."

He scooted across the rug. Not close enough to touch. Just close enough that the lamplight caught the gray at the edge of his eyes. I could smell blood and smoke on him, and under it, faintly, soap.

"Can I ask you something, and you won't lie?" I said.

"I'll try."

"The thing Beltrán said. About your mother." I made myself look at him. "Did you know?"

His face went very still, the way I'd just described, the old door-closing silence. And then, slowly, it opened.

"She died when I was seven," he said. "Or she left. My father never said which. He took her name off everything. I used to think it was grief." He swallowed. "Now I think it might have been something worse."

"What?"

"Shame."

The word lay there between us.

Without thinking, I reached out and covered his hand with mine. His fingers were cold. For a second he went rigid, like he didn't know what to do with being touched on purpose. Then they turned over, very carefully, and held on.

We stayed like that. I don't know how long. Long enough that my heart stopped racing and started doing something slower and far more dangerous.

"Rayén," he said, barely above a whisper. "If he's right about my mother, if she..." He stopped. Started again. "My father kept one drawer locked his whole life. Nobody opened it. Not me, not the staff. It's in that desk."

I looked at the old oak desk against the wall. A single brass keyhole caught the light.

"I never wanted to know what was in it," he said. "I think I always knew."

He stood, and I stood with him, and he took a thin steel pick from his boot, the kind a Don's son learns to carry long before he learns to love anything. His hands shook only once. Then the lock turned with a soft, final click.

Inside lay a single photograph, face down, gone yellow at the edges.

He turned it over.

A young woman laughed into the sun, her head thrown back, one hand clamped on the sleeve of a lean dark-haired man. The man was looking at her the way no one had ever looked at me.

It was Beltrán. Thirty years younger, no limp, no gray. And pinned beneath the photograph, in a hand I'd have known anywhere, was my father's handwriting.

She chose him. Burn this.

"Rayén," Lautaro said, very slowly, "why does my mother's hand have a white scar on the forearm?"

Outside the door, three quiet knocks rang out. Pause. Two more.

My brother's knock. The one only he and I had ever used.

"Little bird," a voice called softly, in Conco's exact voice, from the other side of the locked door. "Open up. It's me."

And in the corridor beyond it, Lautaro's guard stopped answering his radio.