Chapter XXVIII #2
He complied. The bottle struck her palms like ice. She uncorked it. Dabbed some on her fingers, hissing in pain as she did so—it stung, by God it stung, as if she had caught her flesh on the spikes of a cactus and yanked . She inhaled deeply and made the sign of the cross.
The water in the pot still boiled, but she had capped it with a heavy lid.
“Why can’t I—” Elías began.
“Because it wants to hurt you, and I won’t let it,” she burst out.
“I won’t come near you. I won’t touch you.
” A pause. Perhaps it was because her heart was racing, because control was a laughable myth, a folly, or perhaps because her sanity spun wildly in a wind, clinging only by a single, fraying thread, but she said: “Even though I want to.”
His eyes widened; his cheeks flushed dark.
“Don’t say that,” he breathed. “You would only regret it.”
“Don’t tell me how to feel,” she snapped. He flinched at her tone. “Everyone assumes how I feel and makes decisions based on that and no one ever asks me.”
He said nothing. Perhaps he was waiting for the demon to seize her, to leap at him with hands outstretched. Perhaps he believed the demon already had her.
No. Let him know that this was all her , all Alba, and nothing else. No one else.
“I proposed to Carlos and manipulated my parents into coming here because it was the only way I could have control over my life,” she said, her voice quavering.
“And what have I gained from it? The opposite.” She fought to keep her voice low—Mamá’s room was next door, and she did not sleep deeply.
“Something steals my body. Something wants me to lay waste to this place and is using me to do it. It attacked you . Without my knowledge, without my desire, without my choice.”
Her voice cracked at last. Elías’s face was transformed by pity; she wanted to swat the expression away. She did not want to be pitied. She did not want his sympathy.
“So don’t tell me how to feel,” she said. “My feelings are the only thing I have left.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “I…I have hurt people in the past. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Alba clutched the holy water. “I want you to,” she said. “Hurt me. Give me something that is mine .”
He inhaled sharply. Apart from that, neither of them spoke or moved, and yet—it was as if the air between them had tightened. It had grown more difficult to breathe.
Between Bartolomé and Elías, and the tools at their disposal, a shy tendril of hope had begun to take shape in her heart. It was still weak, but it reached for words that would have been unimaginable to her even days ago. When I am free , she found herself thinking. When my body is my own .
When . Not if. Not speechless despair.
It went to her head like Champagne on an empty stomach: fizzing and fierce and glittering in her veins, powerful enough to lift her off her feet.
She would be free of the roiling darkness beneath her skin.
And in the meantime: She reached for the rope that Padre Bartolomé had left behind. She set herself down in the chair with purpose and began tying rope around her ankles. It was rough against her palms and difficult to pull tight; she swore at it softly.
“Do you need help?” he asked.
She nodded. “But be careful,” she said. “Stand back if I tell you to.”
He dropped to one knee before her and retied the knots she had made around her ankles. She tried to ignore the roughness of the rope fibers, focusing instead on the brush of his fingertips against her skin.
Heat rushed up her neck. It made her reckless.
Everything about the last few days had made her reckless.
The despair of losing her body; the promise of fighting and winning it back.
But it was proximity to this person, this man, most of all, that filled her with an awareness—so bright, so keen it was painful—of how much more was possible.
She inhaled deeply.
“Bartolomé told me I lacked focus,” she said. “I am to think about what I might gain when I am free of this.”
Elías brought the rope to where her wrist rested on the arm of the chair and waited for her nod of assent before he began tying it down.
“When I am able to govern myself once again, I want your help,” she said. “I want to leave this place. Forever.”
“Done,” he said. “I never want to see this mine again.” He drew breath, as if to speak again, but she interrupted.
“I mean that I want to buy passage on the Acapulco fleet,” she said. She bit her lip to keep from hissing at the burn of rope against her wrists. It would leave marks atop the scratches that already marred her skin. “I want to see the world. The places you spoke of. Will you help me?”
He paused and opened his mouth as if to speak, then resumed working on her wrist. Moved to the next.
When at last he spoke, his voice was low and hoarse.
“I can promise you that,” he said, “but I won’t promise to hurt you.
I am doing everything in my power to prevent that.
I care , Alba.” The words cracked as he lifted his face to her.
There was a desperate glint in his eye, something akin to fear.
For her? “I care so much it is like a physical pain, right here”—he tapped his chest with two fingers, hard—“and I don’t know how to stop it.
I don’t think I want to stop it.” His fingers curled around the rope, gripping it tighter. “But I have never felt so helpless.”
Even as he tied her right wrist tight to the chair, it was a profession of ardent devotion. She had been right to trust him. Back in Zacatecas and every moment since then.
Her cheeks prickled with welcome warmth before the words even left her lips. “Then when this is over, and we leave, and we are alone—promise to touch me.”
His eyes had not left hers; in them, she read the same sin she desired. A flush of longing raced up her throat.
Reckless. She should be chastising herself for being so bold.
She had never once wanted to be forward with a man; she had never been so forthright.
But when her body was her own to govern, that was what she wanted: palm to palm, the taste of their breath mingling.
That weightless, blazing heat and the crush of his chest against hers.
She wanted him . She wanted to look at him as they stood on the prow of a ship bound far from here, sailing toward a new life. A world where she was not possessed, nor the ugly daughter of a wealthy, well-connected family, but her own .
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
“I can do that,” he breathed.
“Promise.”
“I swear it.”
He would, then and there, if she had asked him to. She could taste it on the air between them—it was woven thick with the profane knowledge that each wanted what the other craved, each would give and take and give from the moment she whispered her assent.
But not yet. Not here, not now.
“Stand back,” she said.
He rose with thick reluctance, as if moving through heavy mercury.
“I fear it will be a long night,” she said.