23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Loose gravel shifted under a careful step somewhere higher up on the slope.
Brush rustled, and a radio crackled softly through the trees.
Isabella and I stopped at the same time. Her fingers tightened around mine as mine closed around hers.
A man spoke quietly in Spanish. I caught our names, the southern fence, and an order to stop us. He answered once, then silenced the radio.
At least he wasn’t stupid enough to keep broadcasting his position.
Isabella leaned closer. “He’s one of Marcela’s men.”
“I gathered that.”
“They know we crossed the fence. She wants us found before dark.”
Of course she did.
I could kill one man without much trouble, but the shot would tell every other searcher exactly where to find us, and I had no way of knowing how many were close enough to hear it.
I searched the slope for somewhere to hide. In the near darkness, a hollow caught my eye beneath a shelf of black volcanic rock that jutted from the slope about waist-high.
I motioned for Isabella to follow me, and we crept farther along the slope toward the rock face. Years of rain had washed away the earth beneath the overhang, leaving a shallow, cave-like pocket in the side of the mountain. Dense shrubbery and trailing growth concealed most of the opening.
I tugged Isabella toward it.
The entrance was narrower than it had appeared. I ducked beneath the rock first, then reached back and guided Isabella past me into the hollow.
The ground sloped sharply once we were inside. As I stepped toward her, my boot slipped in the loose soil.
I twisted as we went down and took the brunt of the fall on my forearms and shoulder, so my weight wouldn’t crush her. One knee settled beside her hip and the other between her legs.
“Stay still,” I whispered near her ear. “He’s close.”
Isabella nodded beneath me.
Her breath quickened, brushing against my throat. Fear shuddered through her, but she stayed still beneath me.
“Easy,” I murmured. “Slow breath in. Then let it out.”
She matched the next one to mine.
The searcher moved closer.
His boots scraped through dry leaves, moving close enough that I could hear him breathing. A small rock shifted beneath his weight and clicked down the slope past the opening.
Then he stopped.
Isabella’s fingers closed around my upper arm.
I stayed over her, braced on one forearm while I drew Ciro’s pistol with my free hand and kept it tucked close against my side.
The man remained there long enough that I wondered whether he had noticed the hollow.
Then his weight shifted.
One step.
Another.
The brush rustled as he continued downhill.
I stayed still until his footsteps disappeared completely, then eased off Isabella and crawled toward the opening.
The last of the daylight had faded under the trees, leaving the slope in heavy gray shadow.
“We’re staying here for tonight,” I said.
Isabella pushed herself upright and studied the hollow. “Here?”
“Unless you spotted a hotel farther down.”
“I must have missed it while I was running toward the cliff.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle.
The recess was deeper than it had appeared, but not by much. The rock shelf protected us from the wind; the ground inside was mostly dry, and the opening would be difficult to see unless someone came directly across it.
I’d slept in worse places.
More importantly, continuing down an unfamiliar mountain in the dark would give the terrain another chance to finish what the cliff had started.
I moved deeper beneath the rock next to Isabella, pulled Rafael’s pistol from my waistband, then set both within easy reach. She removed the backpack and unzipped it between us.
Inside were two bottles of water, a package of crackers, peanuts, butter cookies, and a cloth she had packed for the escape.
She held out one of the bottles. “You first.”
I drank several swallows and handed it back.
“You need more.”
“So do you.”
“I haven’t been chained in a dungeon for two days.”
“But you ran down a mountain like your hair was on fire.”
Her brows drew together. “That was different.”
“It usually is when you’re the one being unreasonable.”
Isabella gave me a tired version of the expression she used when she thought I was particularly difficult, but she drank.
When she lowered the bottle, I took the cloth from the backpack and poured a little water over one corner.
“What are you doing?”
“Just hold still.”
“We don’t have enough water to waste.”
“I’m not wasting it.”
Blood had dried along one side of her face and in the creases of both hands.
I started with her cheek.
Isabella sat quietly while I wiped the dried blood from her skin. When I reached for her right hand, she placed it in mine and let me clean around her knuckles and up her forearms.
My hands were a little shaky now that we had stopped moving.
She noticed.
“You’re shaking.”
“The adrenaline’s wearing off. It’ll settle.”
Her attention dropped to the electrical burns scattered along my side. Her free hand lifted as though she meant to touch them, but she stopped before her fingers reached my skin.
“Those are new.”
“Aye. She liked making me smell my skin frying.”
I resumed cleaning the blood from her palm.
“I heard you screaming…until you didn’t anymore.”
My hand went still around hers.
“I passed out.”
“I thought she had killed you,” she whispered. “Everyone in the compound heard you. I was going to set the kitchen on fire using Fa—Ciro’s rum, but Rafael stopped me.”
I stared at her.
“You were going to burn the house down?”
“I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”
“I’m beginning to notice a pattern.” I bumped my shoulder lightly against hers.
Her mouth tightened. “Rafael stopped me before I reached the kitchen. He said the guards might seal the cellar instead of abandoning it, or the fire could spread below while you were still chained.”
“He was right.”
“I know. It was a terrible plan.”
“The plan was terrible,” I agreed. “The instinct was impressive.”
That surprised her.
I turned her hand over and cleaned another dark streak from her wrist.
“I hated standing there doing nothing,” she said. “I’ve spent my entire life listening while people suffered beneath me, and then when it was you—” Her head dipped as she chewed on her lip in the dim light.
“If you had gone into that dungeon while she still had three armed men with her, they would have taken you.”
“I might have distracted them by telling them I had a message from Ciro.”
“She would have used you against me.”
Isabella fell silent.
“I could survive whatever she did while it was only me in that chair,” I continued. “Watching her put her hands on you because you tried to save me would have cut deeper than anything she’d done to me.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “You barely knew me.”
“I knew enough.”
She held my stare for a long moment.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
It wasn’t a question about whether I could keep walking. She wanted to know what Isabeast had left behind when the screaming stopped.
“The shaking is the fight leaving my body,” I said. “It’ll pass. She hurt me, and one day I’ll kill her for it. But she didn’t get what she wanted.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to make me submit.”
I folded the cloth to a clean section and continued over Isabella’s other hand.
“She got pain. She got noise. But she never got me to surrender to her.”
Isabella exhaled slowly, some of the tension leaving with it.
“I hate what she did to you.”
“So do I.”
I finished cleaning the last of the blood from her hand, but I didn’t release it.
“Papá should be here,” she whispered, looking at the blood on the cloth.
“Aye.”
“He was so close.”
Her fingers tightened around mine.
Rafael had finally been able to tell her the truth and hear her call him Papá. That mattered. But there had been twenty-five years before that, and I wanted her to have those memories tonight too.
“Tell me something good about him,” I said.
Isabella blinked. “What?”
“A happy memory of Rafael. Something that belongs only to the two of you.”
“Why?”
“Because his last few minutes gave you the truth, but they weren’t all he was to you.”
For a while, she said nothing.
Then she leaned back against the wall and drew her knees closer.
“After Mother died, I stopped eating.”
I waited.
“Father called it manipulation. He ordered the servants to ignore it and said hunger would eventually cure me of wanting attention.” Her thumb moved slowly against the side of my hand. “Rafael came through the wardrobe after everyone went to sleep.”
“What did he do?”
“The first night, he brought fruit and bread. I refused to touch it, so he sat on the floor and ate everything himself.”
For a moment, she seemed somewhere else, back in that bedroom with him.
“The next night, he came back with two pupusas he had made.”
“Please tell me he was a better cook than I’m imagining.”
“He was terrible.” Her mouth curved faintly. “They were burned around the edges and still nearly raw in the middle. He took one bite and told me they were excellent.”
“And you believed him?”
“I told him he was an appalling liar.”
A quiet laugh escaped me.
“He smiled and said, ‘Good. At least you’re speaking to me again.’ Then he gave me the one that was slightly less burned.”
“Did you eat it?”
“I ate half only because he sat there looking hopeful while pretending not to watch me.” Her voice began to break.
“He came back every night after that. Sometimes with food from the kitchen. Sometimes with another horrible thing he had tried to cook himself. He never ordered me to eat or told me to stop grieving. He simply sat beside me until I was ready.”
“He was making sure you didn’t have to be alone while you figured out how to start again. He was being your father long before you knew what to call him.”
Tears slipped down her cheeks.
“I kept saying Papá after he told me. Again and again, as though I could fit twenty-five years into the few minutes we had left.”
“He heard you, Mouse. Every time you said it.”
“It wasn’t enough though.”