Chapter 22
Minerva
My brother cursed softly. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ll get caught.”
But his eyes—eyes that were so wide and hungry and dark in his lean face—swept over me with a look that was so like Armando that it made my ribs splinter.
Even at a moment like this, with Cosme waking Octaviana to ask if the spy should be shot now or at the Viceroy’s feet, Arnulfo wanted to make sure that I was unharmed.
The cage was too low for him to stand upright, but sitting would mean touching wet hay, bloodstains, and hog shit, and so he crouched like a monkey, his back curved.
I lowered myself to his level and curled my fingers around the cold metal bars that separated us.
I tested the cage with a tentative shake.
A thick padlock rattled against the door.
“Arnulfo.” What else was there to say? He knew as well as I that I couldn’t break him out of this cage. He had a belt and scabbard, but no knife; a bandolier, but no bullets.
“The whole reason I took this job was to make sure you were okay,” he whispered. “Get out of here before someone sees you.”
What of the instruments of slaughter attached to the walls—could those break the cage open? Was I strong enough?
“I wouldn’t let the other Valbuenistas know that my sister was here, not even the ones already inside,” he said. “They’d want to use you. And I needed to know—”
“I’m fine,” I said, voice quavering. “I’m safe.”
“You won’t be unless you run,” he said. “Scram, Mini.”
It was the closest thing to I love you that I’d heard in months.
I couldn’t control the shake that seized my shoulders, nor the hot wetness that flushed my vision, blurring his face.
The universe was spinning; now it resettled around me, cold and metal and as real as the knives on the wall.
He was the last thing I had. The only thing that mattered.
“I’m getting you out of here.” It sounded stupid, blubbered like a child on the verge of a tantrum. It was stupid: what can I do, what can I do whirled around my mind like a panicked chicken, screaming and screaming and doing nothing but chasing itself.
Voices rose from the direction of the house. We both startled, heads whipping to the open door.
“Run,” Arnulfo said. “Go.”
I retraced my steps out of the slaughterhouse at a run. I had to avoid the kitchen—it was full of people. I wasn’t sure if anyone had seen me leave, but they would certainly see me stumble back in, chest heaving and face smeared with tears and panic.
I couldn’t be caught.
Not just for my own neck, but Arnulfo’s.
I couldn’t save him, no.
But I knew someone who could.
I sprinted behind the house, searching for another back door. I knew there was one by the servants’ quarters.
I slipped in and found myself by the back stairwell, a way for more lowly servants to get to the second and third floors unseen by the family of the house. It was where Sara and I carried laundry down during the day, when we shouldn’t be seen by Octaviana.
I didn’t have the luxury of time to wander around the gardens, waiting for Ygnacio to appear, to haunt me. I couldn’t stomp around the house shouting for him to make himself known.
But I could follow the path of my nightmares.
I took the stairs two at a time, clutching the banister and hauling myself upward.
I nearly slammed into Sara as I came abreast of the second floor.
She cried out, staggering to keep from dropping an armful of sheets. “Minerva! Where are you going?”
“Forgot a broom,” I slipped between gasps. I made sure my face was turned to the wall as I continued upward. “Last night. See you at breakfast.”
I was gone before she could ask anything more. On the second floor, I froze, an ear cocked toward Octaviana’s quarters at the far end of the house.
It was quiet.
I still had time.
I hurled myself up to the third floor. No echo followed my footsteps—he wasn’t there.
Once on the third floor, I raced down the hall to the door that was sometimes there and sometimes not. I wrenched it open and—as I did in dreams—climbed up the hidden staircase to the fourth floor.
Unlike in my dreams, I felt no dread as my head crested the hole in the floor, as I beheld the slants of gray light and the dust motes and low ceilings. As I stepped onto the dust-covered floor and turned toward the sarcophagi.
No fear paralyzed me.
I picked the biggest, and I kicked it.
“Ygnacio,” I hissed. “I know you’re here.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The voice was behind me. I whirled to face it.
There he was, as corporeal as any living boy, the low ceilings making him look taller than he was when I’d held a knife to his throat.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Fuck the del Valles,” I said between sharp breaths. “Make me your weapon.”
His reptilian eyes gleamed as if lit by their own chispa.
“The havoc we will wreak.” He crooned it like a love poem. “Oh, Minerva—”
“One condition,” I said holding up a hand. It shook from exertion and adrenaline. “Free my brother. He’s in the slaughterhouse. Get him out before the guards shoot him.”
Confusion crossed Ygnacio’s face, but only briefly. It was obvious what crimes would cause someone to be shot or sent to the Viceroy.
“Do it now.” My voice rose with panic. “Make sure he gets back to the Valbuenistas alive. Then I’ll help you do whatever you want.” It wasn’t the full truth. But it was truth enough, and I would say anything to make him help me.
“As if I would ever help an insurgent,” Ygnacio scoffed. “They’ll never win.”
My heart lurched to my throat.
“I want to ruin a family, not a system,” he went on. “There will be always be a new tyrant, someone in whom the ignorant masses place their trust only to—”
I had no time for a politics lecture.
“Help me now or I will never help you,” I cut him off.
“But—”
“Now,” I cried. Please, let no one be on the third floor. Let no one hear me shouting. “Now, or I will thwart your every move against the del Valles.”
His shoulders straightened defensively; his weight shifted back as he retreated a step. Perhaps he never expected such force from me.
I certainly never did.
“Fine,” he said.
He vanished.
The pounding of my heart was the only sound on the fourth floor. It was loud enough that it should have echoed, tumbling down the stairs like Ygnacio’s ghostly footsteps.
Did that fine mean agreement? Or was it resignation that I would torment him?
I scrambled to the windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. I lurched from one to the next, down the length of the house, until I could see the slaughterhouse from above.
Arnulfo stumbled from the slaughterhouse into the mist, his limbs spiderlike in their leanness. He sprinted away from the house, toward the walls. He flung himself at them like a monkey and scaled them. When he dropped to the other side, he vanished into the fog, as invisible as Ygnacio.
He was gone.
The sense that someone was watching me drew my attention down to the courtyard below the house.
I drew back instinctively from the window.
On days like this, the windows looked as if they were drenched in mercury, or curtained with solid silver.
It was difficult to see through them, but not impossible.
To have been at such a vantage point and not alerted the rest of the house to a runaway would damn me.
But it was just Ygnacio, still and dark in his old-fashioned clothes. He met my eyes.
He saluted me, as a soldier would a superior.
Then he melted away into the mist.
Guards emerged from the fog, shouting at one another, scattering across the courtyard like ants whose set path was disrupted by water droplets. They were too late. Arnulfo was gone.
I lowered myself to the floor and sat in the dust. Distantly, I was aware that my limbs were shaking violently. I curled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them tightly.
Arnulfo was gone. Arnulfo was safe.
Arnulfo was still alive.
My throat and lungs ached to weep, but I wouldn’t let myself. I needed to appear downstairs soon, and without a blotchy, tear-streaked face.
Long moments passed as my heartbeat exhausted itself. As it and my breath finally began to stumble and slow.
Though nothing around me had changed—though my place in this house was as it had been since Senora Encarnación died—I had never been in more danger.
I knew this like I knew the feeling of the floorboards beneath my shoes. Solidly, plainly. And yet, for once…
I did not feel afraid.