Chapter 70: A Daughter's Mask

Rayén

Don't trust the Don.

I turned the phone face-down on the table before Lautaro could read it. It was too late, and we both knew it. He had been standing close enough to see the screen, and the quiet that followed had a weight to it, like a held breath in a church.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you're thinking. That I should be afraid of you. That I should be afraid of whoever sent it."

"I'm thinking," he said, very evenly, "that someone wants you looking at me instead of at the door she just walked out of."

"Maybe that's the truth."

"Maybe." His voice dipped. "Do you think it is?"

I looked at him. The lamplight caught the stubble on his jaw, the dark under his eyes, the bandage showing through his open collar. Three months ago I'd have said yes without blinking. Now I opened my mouth and nothing came.

"I don't know," I said. It was the most honest thing I'd said all night, and it frightened me. "But I won't find out in front of her."

His eyes moved past my shoulder to the small black dome in the corner of the ceiling. I followed them. A camera. The estate was full of them, and my mother had walked through every room tonight, smiling, counting.

"Then we perform," he said, barely audible.

It began at breakfast.

I came down in the gray dress, the one the maids had hung in my wardrobe the first week, and sat at the far end of the long table with a cup of coffee I didn't touch. Pilar, the new maid with the careful eyes who'd arrived three days ago on my mother's recommendation, hovered at the sideboard. I let my hands shake when I lifted the cup. I let my eyes go red.

Dutiful. Broken. Grateful.

Lautaro came in at eight, looking thunderous. He didn't look at me. He poured his coffee, read two pages of a ledger, and said, in a voice cold enough to frost the windows, "You'll stay in the house today."

"I wanted to visit the chapel—"

"No."

"Lautaro, please, I only—"

"You nearly died on that ship because you wouldn't listen." He set the cup down hard. A little coffee jumped the rim. "You are my wife. You will not leave these walls without my men. Is that clear?"

I flinched. I hadn't planned to. He had said it so flat, so hard, that something sharp slid under my ribs before I could stop it. Then I remembered the dome in the corner, and Pilar's reflection in the silver coffee pot, and I dropped my gaze to my lap.

"Yes, Don Lautaro," I whispered.

He stood and walked out. The door closed with a bang. In the silence that followed, I heard Pilar's shoes shift, a small, satisfied sound.

Good, I thought. Write that down. Tell her.

He found me an hour later in the old linen closet at the end of the east hallway, the only room in the estate with no camera. I'd been hiding there since breakfast, my forehead against a stack of folded sheets, trying to remember how to breathe.

He shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.

"I didn't mean it," he said.

"I know."

"Rayén."

"I know. It was a performance." I turned around and my voice cracked on the last word. "I know what I'm doing. You said it to protect me."

"Then why are you crying?"

"Because it sounded true." It burst out of me before I could stop it. "Because for one second, in that kitchen, I thought, that's him. That's what he'd say if the mask came off. My wife. You will not leave. Like I'm a thing in your house."

He looked as if I'd hit him.

"That's not what I—"

"I know that's not what you meant. But it's what I heard, Lautaro, and it's what I've heard my whole life, from my father, from Beltrán, from every man who ever decided where I could stand." I pressed the heel of my hand to my eyes. "I'm so tired of being managed."

For a moment he didn't speak. Then, quietly, so quietly I almost missed it, "Then don't let me manage you."

I lowered my hand.

"Tell me when I'm wrong," he said. "To my face. In this closet, if that's the only room we've got. Throw something at me. I'll duck."

A laugh broke out of me, wet and ragged. He took one slow step forward, then another, until I could feel the heat of him against the cool air. His hand came up and stopped an inch from my jaw.

"May I?"

I nodded.

His thumb wiped a tear from my cheekbone. Slowly, so slowly. His eyes dropped to my mouth, and I saw the effort it took him to bring them back up.

"Later," he murmured. "When there's no one counting."

"You said that in the sea."

"I meant it in the sea." His voice was rough. "I mean it more now."

I closed my fingers around his wrist. We stood like that, breathing the smell of lavender and starch, and nobody had to say anything. It was the closest I'd come to him since the water, and it was in a linen closet, and it was perfect.

The rest of the day was a long slow act.

I walked the gardens with two guards at my back, drooping like a cut flower. I took lunch in my room and left half of it untouched, for Pilar to find. I let her catch me staring at the photograph of my father on my dresser, my fingers pressed to my lips. When she asked, with practiced sympathy, whether I wanted anything, I said only, "I miss my brother," and watched her eyes soften and sharpen in the same instant.

At five a courier arrived with a long white box, tied in silver ribbon.

Pilar carried it up herself. "From Doña Maitén," she said, smiling. "She said you'd know what it means."

I waited until she was gone. Then I lifted the lid.

Silk. Ivory silk, folded in tissue, cut to the same pattern as my wedding gown. I knew the weight of it before I touched it. I knew the cold slide against my fingers, the scent of cedar, lily of the valley.

A card lay on top, written in my mother's slanting hand.

Dinner at nine, mija. Come as you were on your wedding day. Bring your husband.

My stomach dropped.

I lifted the dress out of its tissue. Something shifted in the hem, a small hard weight that slid against the fabric, and I knew exactly what I'd find before I turned it over and saw the neat, familiar stitching. I picked at one thread. The seam parted.

A blade slid out into my palm. Thin as a razor. Bright as a promise.

Folded around it, a second note.

Just in case you still need it. And this time, mija, choose the right throat.