Chapter XX
XX
Alba
Alba sat with her head in her hands on the ground, her knees pulled up to her chest. Elías stood over her; every muscle in his body was tense. As if he were ready to fight.
Or to defend himself.
From her .
From what coursed through her, what spurred her anger and curled cold at the back of her mind, rattling its tail in warning.
He is wrong.
She pressed her hands to her head. If only she could thrust her hands into her skull and sink them into the darkness to untangle these knots. Loosen the snarled threads. Make things make sense .
If Elías was wrong and she was not possessed, then why was she here ? Sleepwalking alone could not explain why she had attacked him with a knife, if what he said was true. Sweat still darkened his sleeping shirt. A wild fear lingered behind his eyes. These did not strike her as rehearsed.
Therefore: Was it true?
“I should go back to my room,” she whispered, curling her fingers against her scalp. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sink into dark oblivion and never wake. If only she could float forever on the silver river of sleep, tenderly rocked like a baby in a cradle. If only.
“I don’t think you should,” Elías said.
She peered up at him, taken aback by his refusal.
“It would be very bad if we were discovered like this.” In his room, in the middle of the night.
Carlos would have no choice but to break their engagement to save face, and then not only would she and her parents be forced to leave the hacienda de minas behind but her mother would also arrange for her to be wed to someone else.
Her mind was water circling the belly of an hourglass, spiraling, spiraling, spiraling…
“We won’t be discovered,” he said firmly, as if determination alone could make it true.
He crossed the space between himself and the knife and picked it up. He grasped it gingerly, as if it were a serpent about to strike him.
“I fear,” he began, “that if you return to your room and fall asleep, it will happen again.”
It . Said with the kind of emphasis that she would reserve for a plague, or a nightmare.
A shudder coursed through her. She rested her forehead against her knees, letting her arms fall to the floor.
A helpless gesture, yes, for what else could she do?
She felt like a slaughtered pig drained of blood, her mouth dry, her shoulders weak.
She was aching and exhausted, in a room in the house she had never been to before but that she had found in her sleep.
Alone with the one man—the only man—whose presence made her feel as clumsy-footed as a fawn.
And she was alone with him because she had tried to kill him.
She should rise and leave, disregarding Elías’s fears—for the reality of Mamá discovering her in this room was more tangible than the threat of possession.
But she could not. Even lowering her legs so that her thighs rested on the floor, even leaning back against the bed, sapped her of energy. She sighed and shut her eyes.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Elías warned.
“I won’t,” she mumbled, but she could already feel it slipping into her face like morning mist into a valley: slowly creeping, one tendril at a time, and she welcomed it, she wanted the gray unconsciousness to fall over her with cool comfort and—
Cold against the side of her face.
She opened her eyes to see Elías pulling a hand away from her. He had put the back of his hand against her cheek.
He had placed the knife somewhere she hadn’t seen. Intentionally? Ha. No doubt in case—God forbid—whatever infected her attacked him again.
“It will come back if you fall asleep,” he said.
His intonation moved through her swift and cold, like a bolt of lightning in the dark, lifting the hairs on her arms and leaving gooseflesh in its wake.
It .
“You must stay awake,” he said. A shuffle of clothing and the scuff of feet on the floor; he sat on the ground next to her with a thump, his back leaning against the bed.
He had that book from the workshop in his lap.
“What is that?” she asked, reaching for it.
He snatched it away and rested his palm on the cover protectively.
“Constantinople,” he murmured. “There is a book bazaar, a famous one, where you can find anything you have ever dreamed of. I barely remember picking it up, but it was a curiosity. So I did.” He ran a thumb down its spine—a gesture that was almost sensual in nature.
“I wasn’t familiar with its contents, not even as I packed for the Indies.
What luck,” he said, darkly, for luck had nothing to do with the situation they found themselves in, sitting on the floor in a strange place, isolated, alone, danger humming at their backs.
Or, in Alba’s case, in her back—a heavy sensation, a pressure, almost like the tenderness of her belly during her cycle—weighed at the top of her spine and in the base of her skull. A headache, she had told herself.
It had never occurred to her that it might be something foreign .
“If you hate your family so much, why did you come here?” she asked.
“If you dislike Carlos so much, why did you?” he countered softly.
“I never said that I disliked him,” she said.
“Your body speaks otherwise,” he said. “Every time I see you together you look like you have a plank of wood shoved up—”
“I beg your pardon!”
If his intention was to keep her awake with sheer force of indignation, he was succeeding.
“—up the back of your dress,” he finished, a note of slyness in his voice.
She sputtered as she fought for words. Settled on some, though as she spoke them, she could hear how stupid they sounded: “I like him.”
His laughter was like mesquite in woodsmoke. A hint of coarseness, an unexpected texture. A sense that she would find any smoke without that bite forever lacking.
“A powerful declaration of love,” he said. “Isn’t the wedding in May?”
“April.” She hoped that the grumble in her voice conveyed the glare she gave him, even if he could not see it in the dark. “If at all.”
“If at all!” he crowed. “Now that’s something to talk about. Getting cold feet now that you’ve seen the state of this place?”
If she was being honest, it was the state of this place that gave her parents cold feet. She would have to fight tooth and nail to get to the altar.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said.
“My apologies, of course. Let us return to the subject of my dead wife,” Elías said dryly. “Let us excavate every wound I have to offer in the interest of keeping you from sleeping and attacking me again . That seems perfectly fair.”
Guilt struck with a sour pang. She pulled her knees back up toward her chest and set her forehead against them. The fabric of her dress pressed against her eyelashes; she shut her eyes. She must resist the heavy invitation of sleep.
“I met him when we were children. He was kind to me.” Her mind flitted back to dusty curtains, her rear growing numb from sitting on the floor for hours. The safety of the dark. The security of knowing that, despite everything, she was not alone.
They were allies then, and they would remain so now. She would not reveal her true reasons for wanting to marry him to anyone, even someone she trusted…not least because Carlos clearly disliked that particular person so much. “He knows me, or knows me well enough, and it’s comfortable.”
“You like him. He’s comfortable ,” Elías repeated. Lifting her head, she caught a glimpse of a gesture in the dark. Was he miming…fanning himself? “I am overcome by the heat of your passion.”
Mockery was a veil, a disguise she wore with skill to conceal other emotions: anger, fear, loathing. She was well acquainted with its use. And here? She could taste jealousy behind the words.
He was jealous of Carlos . Envy was a sin. She should not relish it. She should not rejoice at its presence.
She should not.
She flattened her mouth to a straight line, fighting the pleasure that threatened to lift its corners.
“I challenge you to find someone in Nueva Espana who would both please my parents and not disgust me,” she said. “If not him, Mamá would have me marry some duke three times my age. Someone who has no respect for me and only cares about filling his wife with heirs.”
“And six times as wealthy, no doubt,” Elías said. “Can’t say I don’t see the wisdom in that.”
“You would marry for money?”
“If it got me out of this mess.” Elías gestured expansively into the dark: at Casa Calavera, at the mine beyond its walls. “Marital bliss is not something I am accustomed to anyway. Why not get some financial stability out of the union, if not love?”
“Yet you mock that I find Carlos comfortable,” Alba said.
“I’m not mocking. I simply don’t believe you,” Elías countered. “Do you even like being out here with them?”
Them , he said. As if they were not his own family. She exhaled, long and slow. She wanted to be here. She fought to stay, even when every voice in her head urged her to flee. The reasons why were none of Elías’s business.
“No,” she said. “Though I wonder if our days here are numbered.” Silence, but she could almost hear him saying go on. “I am trying my best to prevent it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Senorita, I must beg you to explain. I want very little else in this world,” Elías said.
She let herself smile this time—but grimly.
“I have been trying to keep my parents in check, but they have been on edge,” she said.
“Heraclio has done little to endear himself to Mamá, and not enough to assuage Papá’s concerns about his finances.
I think Papá…he wants to call in the debt.
Sooner rather than later. No matter what I say to them. ”
“And no wedding,” Elías said, his low whistle expressing how he appreciated the enormity of what Papá might do to his family. “For you will leave us ruined in the mud.”
A shift of blankets to Alba’s left. Elías leaned his head back to rest it on the mattress. As if he were staring up at the ceiling in despair, or resignation.