Chapter XIV
XIV
Alba
Two nights had passed since Alba heard the weeping in the mine. Nights could no longer be counted by the hours she slept but instead the number of times she woke. And where .
She woke standing by the bolted window.
She woke halfway down the hall.
She woke with her sheets drenched in blood. No—she woke again , and it was sweat, just sweat, clammy and clinging.
She fought sleep. She burned a candle long into the night, swearing she would not waver until dawn broke.
She failed.
She prayed at her bedside to San Miguel Arcángel, the woven rug cutting roughly into her knees. Mamá had seen this and had approved. She never once asked what might cause this sudden religiosity, this desperate fervor; Mamá only thought of herself, after all, didn’t she?
The harder she avoided sleep, the worse the dreams became.
She never remembered her eyes fluttering shut. But when she opened them and she was in the cold, in the dark, her feet stiff and aching—
Elías was there. Speaking, saying something; his voice came as if from a distant room. Far behind him was the smudge of Casa Calavera against the black. Then, there were mountains. Black peaks watching, curling over her, breathing down her neck in biting gusts.
Cold stone fell away beneath her. She had not been carried since she was a child and did not at first realize what was happening—perhaps she was still dreaming.
Then she was in a small room, perched in a hard, creaking chair. Its discomfort was enough to confirm that no, she was not dreaming. She looked around: whitewashed adobe walls, dark corners. Stacks of books and metal tools that glinted dully in the red light of burning embers.
Elías crouched before her, focused on stoking the fire. It jumped and curled upward at his command; shadows licked his face and the strands of hair that fell into it.
There was no sound but the crackle of the fire, the dull howl of the wind beyond the walls.
“I’m sorry I don’t have any blankets,” he muttered, half to himself. “Or sarapes. Or anything. I’m so sorry.”
He turned to her. Did not look up to meet her eyes. He put the back of one hand to her foot, as if to test its temperature.
His hand was hot.
She shuddered.
“That is like ice,” he declared.
Without further ceremony, he took her foot and rubbed it roughly between his hands.
It stiffened with a flush of blood and heat, needles pricking over her skin.
Her toes were red and swollen, her heels blackened with gravel.
But his hands were large and warm, their movements firm and rough; what if he were to rub her calf as well? She was cold, so cold—
Shame was a slap to the face, ice water against blazing cheeks.
She was in her nightdress. She was barely dressed.
She was alone in a room with a man she scarcely knew, and he was rubbing her feet, and there was nothing on earth, no explanation from anyone’s mouth that could make this scene appropriate in Mamá’s eyes.
Or in Carlos’s, for that matter. They were not marrying for love, but they were marrying, and that meant that her behavior reflected on his reputation.
After a childhood of being ridiculed for belonging to a struggling immigrant family, he obsessed over his family’s reputation in Zacatecas.
And he hated Elías so much .
She drew her foot back.
He released it immediately.
Both her feet were dirty, their bottoms sore from walking on rocks. The hemline of her nightgown was gray with dirt and shredded from dragging on the ground.
She folded her arms over her chest, as if that could conceal her state of undress.
“Why am I out here?” she asked, flattening her voice to build a defensive wall around herself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was here. I saw a figure, and when I went outside, it was you. You…” Here he trailed off; a distant expression drew his gaze somewhere over her shoulder. “You did not seem like yourself.”
He did not speak in anger, or in fear, yet something in his tone struck a dissonant note behind her sternum.
She felt ill. She had since she first stepped out of the carriage. Her face prickled and flushed; to her shame, tears wet her cheeks before she was even fully aware she was weeping, before she could stop herself.
A warm weight on her knee—his hand was there, then taken back again, as if he had realized the impropriety of such a gesture.
A wet laugh muscled its way through her tears. There was nothing appropriate about this situation. Carlos would be apoplectic if he saw this, if he knew. He was going to find out, he was going to snarl at Elías and transform into someone she did not know.
Or would the snarls turn on her?
Lips curling back, exposing white teeth through the gore and gristle.
Flee this place. Put the mine behind you. Flee, begone, be rid of them all—
But she couldn’t. People were choking to death on their own blood in Zacatecas. Matlazahuatl was still thick on the air. She wouldn’t : Carlos was her great gamble, and she could not back down now, not when she had everything she wanted in her grasp.
Everything, it seemed, but her sanity.
Her breath hitched at the thought.
“Tranquila.” It was firm more than comforting, the kind of voice that would be used to soothe a panicking horse. That weight was on her knee again. It was steadying. It was good.
He knelt before her, his chin tilted up to her.
Firelight caught the golden ring in his earlobe.
Much of his hair had pulled free of its horsetail at the nape of his neck and hung around his face, casting shadows.
He was much more disheveled than at dinner, when she caught herself musing that he resembled what she imagined a pirate might look like.
He looked younger than he had then. Softer.
“Are you all right?”
Shyness bloomed in her chest.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.”
As if those words could possibly encapsulate this: dirty-hemmed night wandering, dreams of Carlos slick with blood clots caught in his golden hair, dreams of falling, falling, falling…
“Sometimes, I wake on my feet. In the hall. I—” She caught her sob in her throat. She would not weep again, even if her voice dragged its heels wet and husky over every word, begging to collapse.
“It happens,” he said, calm and even, as if she were a child blubbering over a bellyache in the middle of the night. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“It is!” she burst out. She gestured widely at the workshop. “Am I not here?” So far from her bed, wandering through the night. She could have fallen, she could have encountered one of the sharp ravines near the mine, she could have—
No, she had not been wandering. Moonlight guided her bones. Somehow, in sleep, she had known precisely where she was going.
Dread pooled leaden in her belly.
“Good point,” Elías said slowly. “Perhaps you should lock your door before you go to sleep.”
“I don’t know if my door locks.”
A soft, dry laugh. “If it’s Heraclio’s house, it will have a lock.” He made no effort to hide the derision in his voice.
Greedy , he had said of his family. Rotten to the core .
The silence between her and Elías stretched long. He was watching her carefully, his eyes grazing over her cheeks. It was not an idle look, nor one that was simply concerned after her well-being.
It was more than that.
This knowledge drew up warmth in her; she pushed it back.
She looked down at the man who knelt before her like a supplicant with a hand on her knee, whose weathered face was softened by the innocence of newfound devotion.
Carlos did not know how right he was.
Elías Monterrubio was nothing but trouble.
“I need to go back to the house,” she said.
“I will take you.”
She was a fool to trust him. But when he offered her his hand, she took it.
It was warm.
She slipped into the house through a side door, with Elías at her back. He cast looks over his shoulder with increasing frequency as the door creaked shut behind them. Without the wind shrieking past her, the house seemed to gape its dark mouth wide and swallow the sound whole.
A swell of laughter rose in its wake.
She froze. Elías, too, stopped in his tracks, a step behind her—waiting to be discovered? By Mamá, or Carlos, or worse?
But the laughter came from down the hall, where the parlor was, next to the dining room. Was that Carlos? Other voices joined in: Heraclio, and a less familiar bark of male speech—perhaps from Romero?
It would be best to get to her room and out of sight.
She turned down the hall and walked quickly toward the bend in the house’s spine that led to her bedroom; when she heard no footsteps following her, she cast a questioning look over her shoulder.
Elías gestured in the opposite direction.
“I’ll be going that way.” Then he added, as if to clarify: “My room is with the servants’.”
“Oh.”
A lift of the shoulders. If it was meant to communicate indifference, it failed. “Family, you know.”
“Yes,” she replied, though she did not know, though her mind wandered with him down the hall toward that room.
Watched as he laid his head on the pillow.
When he slept did he look softer and younger, as he had in the firelight, in the workshop?
Now, with his face cast in shadow, he seemed a stranger to that man. He looked more like the trouble he was.
“Thank you,” she added, “for this.”
“It was nothing.”
There would have been silence between them, a dark, solemn eclipse, if it were not for the lift of Romero’s voice from the parlor, bawdy and unwelcome.
Finding nothing else to say, she whispered, “Good night.”
The silence behind her meant that he lingered there. It meant that he waited, watching her, until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight.