Chapter 54: The Warmth of Whiskey

Rayén

My body moved before my mind did. I took two steps toward the door, and Lautaro's arm caught me around the waist and pulled me back against his chest.

"Don't," he breathed into my hair.

"That's his knock."

"I know it is."

"Only Conco and I..."

"I know, Rayén." His arm tightened, careful of my ribs, not careful at all of his own wound. "Which is exactly what I'd use if I wanted you to open a door."

The knock came again. Three, pause, two. My brother's rhythm, the one we'd tapped on each other's bedroom walls when our father's voice carried up the stairs.

"Little bird," the voice said, closer now, right against the wood. "Please. I'm hurt."

Every muscle in me wanted to answer it. I pressed my palm over my own mouth, tasting the blue ink from my skin, and made myself think the way Beltrán had taught me. Don't ask what they want. Ask what they can't know.

"What did you carve under the stable roof?" I said, loud enough to carry.

A pause. Then, gently, without a hitch: "Two crooked letters and a bird that looked like a potato. You cried because I said it was ugly. I told you it was the best potato bird in Chile."

My knees went soft. Lautaro held me up.

It was Conco's voice. It was Conco's joke. And I still couldn't tell if I was listening to my brother or to a man who had spent a very long time learning him.

"Open the door," the voice said. "Lautaro's guard is bleeding in the hall. I can't carry him alone."

Lautaro didn't answer. He lowered me onto the rug, put a finger to his lips, and took his gun to the desk. He knelt behind it with the barrel on the edge, aimed at the door's center, and stayed there. After a long, terrible minute, the footsteps outside walked away. Unhurried. Like a man with all night.

I stopped breathing only when I couldn't hear them anymore.

"We wait," Lautaro said quietly. "Four men are on this floor. If he got past them, we need to know why before we go out there."

So we waited.

He reached up to the shelf behind the desk without looking and pulled down a dusty decanter and two short glasses. His hand wasn't steady, and I watched him notice it and hate it.

"My father's," he said. "Never touched it. He thought drinking was for men who couldn't stand their own company." He poured two fingers into each glass. "I think tonight we're allowed to be weak."

I took the glass and sat beside him on the floor, my back against the desk, close enough that our shoulders pressed. The whiskey burned all the way down and settled somewhere under my ribs like a small, honest fire. For a while we said nothing. His thigh was warm against mine. I could feel his pulse through two layers of cloth, steadier now.

"You're thinking too loud," he murmured.

"My brother is on the other side of that door."

"Or a man who stole his face."

"Or both." I stared into the glass. "What if I can't tell, Lautaro? What if I'm so desperate for him to be alive that I'd let anyone in?"

"Then I'll tell you," he said. "I'll stand in front of you and I'll tell you."

It was the simplest sentence anyone had ever said to me. It nearly undid me.

I turned my head. He was already looking at me, and the lamplight made his eyes the color of the whiskey. His gaze dropped, slow and unguarded, to the open collar of my blouse, to the thin pale line that crossed my left collarbone.

"That's new," he said. "You hid it at the wedding."

"It's twelve years old." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "Conco fell off the stable roof when he was fourteen and I tried to catch him. A broken tile opened me from here to here." I touched my shoulder. "He cried harder than I did. He sat with me in the hay for two hours holding a rag against it, because he was more afraid of our father than of the blood."

"May I?"

Nobody had ever asked. People looked, or didn't, or flinched.

I nodded.

His fingertips found the scar so lightly I felt it more in my stomach than my skin. He traced it from the hollow of my throat out toward my shoulder, a slow, careful line, like he was learning a word in a language he was afraid to mispronounce. His breath wasn't quite even. Neither was mine.

"It doesn't look like damage," he said, very low. "It looks like proof you tried."

I forgot the war. I forgot the door, the gun, the ink on my palm. I forgot that three weeks ago I had wanted this man's blood on my hands, and that a small, stubborn part of me still wondered whether it was supposed to be this other thing instead. His thumb rested at the base of my throat, right where my pulse was. He had to feel it. He had to know exactly what it was doing.

He leaned in. I did not lean away.

His forehead touched mine. His breath smelled of smoke and whiskey and something that was only him. Our lips were close enough that I could have closed the last inch without moving more than a thought.

"Tell me to stop," he whispered.

"I can't."

"Rayén..."

The radio on his belt hissed.

We both froze. It wasn't the main channel. It was the small black unit he kept clipped inside his jacket, the one he'd told me, the night we married, that only three living people had the frequency to.

Static. Then a man's voice, ragged, breathless, so familiar my whole body went to ice.

"Lautaro. Listen to me. Don't let her open that door. I'm at the north wall. I'm hurt. Tell my sister it's me, tell her I never called her little bird." A cough. "Mama did. Mama always did. That's how he found her name."

Lautaro's hand closed hard around mine.

On the other side of the library door, soft and amused and so close it lifted the hair on my neck, my brother's voice laughed.

"He's lying to you, Rayén," it said. "Ask him who taught him that frequency."