Chapter 58: Hotel Suite Tension

Rayén

She was ten steps away, and I couldn't make my legs work.

The white dress moved through the crowd like it had been cut from moonlight. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, silver at the temples now, and she wore my grandmother's pearls. Every few seconds her left heel caught on the marble, a small drag, and each one landed in my chest like a fist on a door.

Lautaro's hand tightened at my waist. "Rayén," he said, so softly it was barely breath. "Say the word. I'll put you over my shoulder and carry you out through the glass."

"She'd like that."

"What?"

"Us running." I swallowed. My mouth was full of sand. "She built this room for it."

Five steps. Four. I could smell her perfume now, jasmine, and the smell took me apart. I was nine years old with a fever and her cool palm on my forehead, and I was twenty-three at a graveside, and I was here, and they were all the same woman.

She stopped an arm's length away. Her eyes went over my face, my bare back, the ring on my finger. They were wet.

"Look at you," Maitén whispered. "My brave girl."

"Don't." My voice came out raw. "Don't you dare call me that."

"I have called you that since the hour you were born." She lifted her glass, and the champagne didn't tremble. "Not here, my darling. Five hundred witnesses, and half of them are mine. You would be dead before you reached the door, and so would he." She glanced at Lautaro, almost fond. "Go back to your hotel. Sleep. Think about what I said on the radio. And tomorrow, if you still want to hurt me, you'll know where to find me."

She leaned in and kissed my cheek. Cool lips, the old jasmine. Then she walked away, and the crowd closed around her like water, and the quartet played on as if nothing had happened.

I stood there with my hand pressed to my face, and Lautaro had to steer me out by the elbow.

I didn't speak in the elevator. I didn't speak in the corridor. The second the suite door clicked behind us, my knees gave, and Lautaro caught me before I reached the carpet.

"I have you," he said. "Breathe."

"She kissed me." I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked. "She kissed me like I was a child. And I let her."

"You didn't let her do anything. You survived her. It's not the same."

"I should have killed her." It came out in a whisper, and I hated how little conviction it held. "I had a hairpin. I could have..."

"But you didn't." He had me by the shoulders now, steady, forcing me to look at him. "And that's not weakness, Rayén. It's the thing she's counting on you not to have."

I laughed, wild and wet. "Then what am I, if I'm not what she made me?"

He didn't answer right away. His thumbs moved over my collarbones, slow, absent, as if he'd forgotten he was doing it. The room was dim, only the bay lights coming through the glass, silver across the floor.

"You're the woman who sewed my side shut with shaking hands and then told me I was an idiot," he said. "You're the one who gave my sister a reason to get up off her knees."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

I looked at his mouth. I hadn't meant to. It was just there, a breath from mine, and I realized he had gone very still, like a man standing on a frozen river listening for the crack.

"Lautaro," I said.

"I know."

"We shouldn't."

"I know."

"I hate you."

"I know." His forehead came down to rest against mine. His voice broke on the next word. "I know, and I can't remember why."

Every reason I had was in a pile at my feet. My brother's empty grave. My father's blood on his hands, or what I'd been told was his. The vow I'd carried down the aisle wrapped in silk. I reached for each one and found it lighter than I remembered.

His hand slid into my hair. I felt him tremble. A man who had ordered the fall of a syndicate was trembling over one kiss, and that, more than anything, undid me.

I closed my eyes. I tilted my chin up.

His breath touched my lips.

And I thought of the way my mother had said he in the ballroom, almost fond. And so would he. Like she'd known exactly what he was to me before I did.

I pulled back an inch.

He opened his eyes. Pain crossed his face, then understanding, then something gentler that I almost couldn't bear.

"Not like this," I whispered. "Not with her voice still in my ears. If I kiss you tonight, I want it to be mine. Not something she handed me."

He nodded slowly. His hand slid out of my hair, and he brushed one knuckle down my cheek, once, as if memorizing it.

"Then I'll wait," Lautaro said.

"You've waited long enough."

"I've waited for a lot of things." A ghost of a smile. "This one I can afford."

I laughed, and that time it didn't crack.

He took the sofa, over my protests, and I took the bed. I lay in the dark in a hotel robe with my hair still pinned up and listened to him not sleeping. Every few minutes the leather creaked. Once I heard him murmur something low, my name or maybe a prayer.

At some point I got up for water. My evening clutch sat on the dresser where I'd dropped it. I unclasped it to find my lip balm, and my fingers touched paper.

A single square of cream stationery, folded twice. It hadn't been there before. I'd checked the bag in the car. I'd checked it in the elevator.

Which meant she'd put it there when she kissed me.

My hands shook as I unfolded it. The handwriting was her looping, elegant script, the one that had signed my school permission slips and my birthday cards.

Ask him what Papá made him promise the night he died. Ask him why he has kept it for six years while you cried at an empty grave. Then ask yourself who has been lying to you longest.

Not me, my darling. Never me.

I read it three times before the words stopped swimming. Across the room, Lautaro's breathing had changed. He'd gone quiet. Too quiet, the quiet of someone awake and listening.

"Rayén?" His voice came from the dark, careful. "What are you holding?"

I didn't answer. Behind him, in the hallway, I heard a soft electronic chirp, and the little light on the suite door flashed from red to green.

Someone had just opened it from the outside.