Chapter XX #2
“Thank you for nothing, Victoriano,” he said at the ceiling. “You’ve done it again.”
A glimmer of a question in the back of her mind, all her own. Would he know why Victoriano had told Papá about a foundling infant? Did he know anything about that? Perhaps his father had written about it, perhaps there had been some hint…
But Elías had arrived at Mina San Gabriel at the same time as her. He was as much a stranger to this place and its history as she was.
“If Papá plans to let the axe fall, I’ll let you know. It would be best to get on that ship to the Philippines,” she said.
No reply from Elías.
“When does the fleet leave from Acapulco?” she asked.
“Middle of April,” he said. Another long pause. “I had assumed I would find a place on a ship next year.”
“I am doing all I can to hold them off,” Alba said. “For if they do, I will have to wed someone else. Or go to a convent.” She worried her lip again. It was beginning to throb, the pain dull and persistent. “Perhaps I should give up and be sent to a convent.”
“You don’t have to control them, you know,” Elías said. “If they want to go, let them. Let them ruin Heraclio. Let them return to Zacatecas and bleed out from matlazahuatl. Let them bear the burden of their own mistakes.”
“Easy for a man to say,” she said, sharper than she intended. “I don’t have a choice but to try and control them. It’s my life in the balance.” It was her autonomy. Her happiness. Her body .
“We always have choices,” Elías said, then trailed off, as if he had wandered into a thought and gotten lost there. “It’s hard to make the right ones, though.”
When Alba sighed, it loosened something in her shoulders; they sagged.
“No sleeping,” Elías said. “Please,” he added, with a gentleness so tender it made her teeth ache pleasantly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, letting the back of her skull rest on the mattress. It was heavy, so heavy.
Sleep , it whispered. Sleeeeeep .
She lifted her head.
The words walked up the back of her skull like fingertips across a waxed tabletop, coaxing and smooth—yet undeniably foreign.
Something was wrong. She knew this. Every time she put her feet to the ground in the morning and felt the unmistakable sensation of gravel pushing into her bare feet, she felt wrongness ring metallic and cold in her bones. Denial had not helped at all.
And now that Elías had put it into words, she could not avoid it.
“Perhaps I should speak to Padre Bartolomé,” she said.
“No.”
The fervor in his voice surprised her. “Excuse me?” fell from her mouth before she could stop it.
“He is a direct line to the Inquisition,” Elías said. “He threatened Heraclio with them, when he told him to destroy the shrine.”
“Calling them would ruin this family as badly as my father could. He wouldn’t hurt Carlos like that,” she dismissed. “All I need is a confession and blessing, perhaps some holy water…”
“He will call the Inquisition.”
“But I am innocent,” Alba said. “If I have an affliction, it was not my fault—”
“Alba,” Elías said, softly this time. “A man is dead.”
She stopped speaking.
“That…that wasn’t me,” she said. Her throat felt thick. “I didn’t do it.”
Or had she?
“Just as you didn’t come in here?” he said. “With a knife, and attack me?”
“It wasn’t me ,” Alba said, a panic rising in her voice. Wetness—from frustration, from fear, from how powerless she felt—stung her eyes. “I would never hurt you.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know you well, but I do know that.”
He loosed a sigh of his own—exhausted, at a loss.
“Everyone here is a stranger to me, even my own kin, but somehow, not you. Ever since that night we met. God help me,” he added, a soft, sad ha punctuating the thought.
Warmth rushed up her cheeks. “I don’t believe in fate or destiny.
But I have learned the hard way that I must listen to my gut.
And in my gut, I fear…I don’t want you to be harmed, and I fear going to the priest will harm you. ”
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. It was still full night, but she could see marks around his neck. Long, scored marks, as if someone had scratched him. Discoloration that in the light might be redness, might already be bruising.
It was easy to be bold in the dark. She reached and ran her fingertips over the marks, feeling how his skin rose into low welts over his neck and down his collarbone, to the hollow of his throat.
There thrummed his pulse; it picked up pace, beginning to race hers. Or perhaps that was her imagination.
She dropped her hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“It wasn’t you. Not exactly,” he said, low and rough. Again, she thought of woodsmoke. Of bite and spice. Of what that voice might taste like against her mouth. “Don’t be sorry.”
Had any man ever spoken to her with such gentleness? Another brush of softness and her composure would shatter. She had never met anyone like him before. Apart from Carlos, he was the one man whose presence did not inspire fear for her own well-being. Fear for her freedom.
No, in fact. He wanted to preserve that freedom. He wanted to safeguard it from a force far more threatening than another man.
She shuddered.
“I want this thing gone,” she said.
“Then we fight it,” he said.
Had anyone stood by her side and fought for her?
“How?”
Elías patted the book in his lap, a single gesture, firm and determined: “We fight dirty, that’s how.”