Chapter 64: First Kiss

Rayén's POV

I took the keys.

Carlos had already turned half away, shoulders braced like he expected me to take the gun and use it on him. Instead my fingers closed on cold metal, and he stopped.

"Someone has to drive," I said. "He'll bleed all over the wheel."

"I can drive," Lautaro said from the sand.

"You can barely stand."

Carlos made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. He pressed the pistol into Lautaro's good hand, grip first. "They were told to bring you in alive, señora. Him they were told to leave in the water. Doña Maitén's words, not Beltrán's." He wiped the blood off his cheek with his wrist. "She wants her daughter home."

The ground tilted under me. My mother's voice, soft over a bad radio line, had asked me to come up from the water. I'd let myself think she was only a voice. She wasn't. She was a woman who had chosen which one of us should drown.

"Go," I said, because it was easier than anything else I could have said.

He went up the path loudly, kicking stones loose on purpose. A shout rose above us, then boots running the wrong way. I stood there until I couldn't hear him anymore.

"Rayén." Lautaro had one arm braced against the rock. "The stair."

Carlos had told us. Forty-odd steps cut into the cliff past the point, reachable only at the waterline, and the tide was coming in. We went around the rocks with the sea at our thighs, then our waists. I hooked two fingers through the back of his belt so the current couldn't take him. He kept turning his body into the swells, putting himself between me and the open dark as if I wouldn't notice.

"I can see what you're doing," I said.

"Then you know I won't stop."

The wave came out of nothing. One second I was upright and the next I was under, salt in my nose, black water roaring in my ears, my feet torn off the stones. Something clamped around my wrist and hauled. I came up against his chest, choking, and his arm locked around my back so hard it hurt.

"I have you," he said into my hair. His voice was ragged. "I have you. I have you."

We stood there while the sea slapped at our shoulders. His heart was going like a fist on a door. His hand, spread across my spine, was shaking. This was the man who'd taken a blade out of my fingers on our wedding night without breaking a sweat, and he was shaking.

"You said ask you in the morning," I whispered. "What I'd choose."

"It isn't morning."

"No." I looked up. The water ran off his jaw and his amber eyes had gone nearly black. "It isn't."

I don't know who moved first. I've gone back over it more times than I'd admit, and I still can't tell you. His mouth was cold and tasted like the harbor. Then it wasn't cold. His fingers slid into my wet hair and held on, and I twisted both fists into his collar and pulled him down, furious at how long I'd wanted this, furious that it was him.

It was nothing like what I'd been taught to imagine. It was clumsy, our teeth knocking once, and a little bit angry, and I made a sound in my throat I would've died before owning up to. He kissed me like a man who'd been counting days, and I kissed him back like someone who'd been lying about it for three months.

For one breath, there was no cliff. There were no men on it. There was only the sea, and the weight of him, and a feeling I had no name for.

Then, like a hand closing around my throat, I thought: he signed it.

I tore away so fast I nearly went under. He let go at once, his hands lifting off me as if I were hot, and the loss was so sharp I almost reached back for him.

"Rayén—"

"Don't." I pressed my knuckles against my mouth. My lips were burning. "You don't get to do that and leave the rest of it in the water."

"I know."

"Six years. My father put a pen in your hand and you let me stand in your house for three months without a word." My voice cracked and I hated it. "And I want to believe whatever comes next. That's the part that scares me."

He didn't argue. He didn't explain. He stood there with the tide dragging at his legs, and his silence told me more than a lie would have.

"Not here," he said finally. "Soon. I swear it."

"Don't swear. You've sworn enough to dead men."

It landed. I watched it land, a flinch that passed over his face and vanished, and I wished I could take it back and didn't.

The stair was where Carlos had promised, forty-one slick steps with no railing. Lautaro took them with his jaw clamped tight and his shoulder bleeding freely again. I climbed behind him and counted aloud under my breath so I wouldn't count the other things. At the top there was a dirt road, a wall of cypress, and a gray sedan parked crooked under the trees.

The keys fit. The engine caught on the first turn. I pulled out without headlights and drove with both hands tight on the wheel, and we went a mile without speaking. His breathing was shallow beside me. Every few seconds I glanced across and found his head leaned against the window, eyes shut.

"Don't sleep," I said.

"I'm not."

"Your lips are gray."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

His mouth twitched. Then I saw his hand drift to the glove compartment, an old reflex, a man checking for a weapon. The latch popped open on its own and a small envelope slid out into his lap.

He went completely still.

"What is it?"

He didn't answer. I braked at the edge of the road, put the car in park, and took it from him. His fingers didn't fight me, which frightened me more than if they had.

A photograph, creased soft from handling. A garden I knew, the rose terrace at my father's house. My father stood at the center in a pale suit. A boy of maybe twenty-two, shoulders already broad, stood at his left, unsmiling. And in front of them both, perched on the stone wall with a scraped knee and a gap where a front tooth should be, was a little girl with long black hair.

Me. I couldn't have been more than seven.

Lautaro, I thought, stupidly. He was there. He was in my house.

I turned it over. The date was written in my father's slanting hand, six years back, and under it, in the same ink:

Si yo caigo, ella es tuya. Prométemelo.

If I fall, she is yours. Promise me.

The engine ticked. Somewhere in the cypress an owl called, twice. I looked up and found him already watching me, and he didn't look surprised, and he didn't look angry.

He looked like a man who had just watched his own grave open.