A Bride for the Wrong Brother

Chapter Ten: Crucifix

(Dante's POV)

The wet star she had left on my cheek had finally finished sliding. It had reached the edge of my jaw and disappeared into the collar of my shirt. I lifted my hand to the place it had been and dragged the back of my knuckle across the skin and looked at the small wet smear on my hand as if it belonged to a rat.

She had spit in my face.

What nuisance.

A girl who weighed half of what I weighed, half-naked under a filthy bed sheet, with a slap mark blooming red across her cheek.

had looked me in the eye and spit in my face.

A muscle moved in my jaw.

I did not look at her again.

I turned and pulled the door open in one motion. The two boys outside. Both men dropped their eyes the moment they saw my face.

"Move her."

"Where, jefe."

"My quarters."

A small pause. They both knew what my that meant.

"Yes, jefe."

"Chain her."

"Hands or feet."

"Hands. Above her head. To the post."

A second pause.

I let it sit.

"No food. No water. Not for the rest of the day. Not until I say so. Is that understood."

"Yes, jefe."

"If I find a single drop of water has passed her lips before I give the order, I will take it back out of yours."

"Yes, jefe."

I did not wait for them to move.

I walked.

The corridor outside was already filling with the soft grey gold of full morning. A maid passed me carrying a tray of fresh flowers for the funeral preparations. She lowered her eyes and pressed herself flat against the wall to let me pass. I did not look at her. The polished floor reflected my own boots back at me as I walked, and I kept my eyes on the reflection so I did not have to see the doors I was passing.

My study was on the far side of the estate.

I took every step at the same measured pace.

I did not let my shoulders shift.

I did not let my hands curl.

I had been trained out of letting my body show what was happening inside it before I was old enough to spell my own name. My grandfather had taken care of that. My body knew exactly what to do with the fury that came after. It put the fury in a box.

By the time I reached my study, the box was full to the lid.

I pushed the door open with my shoulder and pushed it shut behind me with the heel of my boot.

The leather chair where my brother used to drape his feet over the armrest whenever he came in to ask me for advice was the first place my eyes went.

I crossed the room to the cabinet.

The decanter was three-quarters full. I lifted it. And poured a glass. The good Spanish brandy my father had given me on the day I turned thirty.

I lifted the glass.

I did not drink.

My hand was steady. My breath was even.

The glass in my hand crossed the room before I knew I had moved.

It hit the side of the cabinet with a sound that was not loud but felt loud, a single sharp c***k of crystal against polished wood, and the glass shattered into a small bright spray across the cabinet top. Brandy spread out across the wood and began to drip down the inside of one drawer. Pieces of crystal caught the morning light and threw it back at me in small wet diamonds.

I stood there breathing.

My hand was still curled around nothing.

I unclenched it slowly.

It was only when I lowered my hand that I felt the warm wet line crawling down the inside of my wrist. A long curve of crystal had opened a thin clean cut across the heel of my palm. It just sat there, weeping, the blood rolling slowly down the inside of my forearm and beginning to spot the cuff of my white shirt.

I watched it for a long time.

I just stood at the cabinet and watched my own blood spread into the brandy, and the brandy spread into the wood, and the wood begin to take both of them in like the floor of this house had taken my brother's blood the night before.

I turned away from the cabinet and crossed the room to the desk. My boots crunched once over a piece of crystal on the rug.

I sat down in the leather chair behind the desk and reached into the inner pocket of my jacket.

The crucifix was warm.

It had been against my body since the moment my mother had pressed it into my hand. I had not looked at it.

I pulled it out.

I laid it on the desk in front of me.

It was older than I had thought. The chain was thin and tarnished at the joins, a kind of cheap silver that no woman in the Vidal-Montenegro family would have ever worn in public. The cross itself was small. Plain. Faintly worn smooth at the edges from years of being rubbed by a thumb.

There was no engraving.

It was the kind of crucifix a poor woman would have owned.

I stared at it.

My blood dripped slowly off the heel of my hand and landed in a small dark circle on the desk beside it.

I did not want to think about why my mother, had reached into the pocket of her ruined red dress and given me a crucifix that did not belong on her body.

Do not let your father see.

The words moved at the back of my mind like a small cold fish.

I picked up the crucifix.

I held it for one second in the center of my palm, the thin chain pooling between my bloodied fingers, the small worn cross resting in the middle.

Then I opened the top drawer of my desk and dropped it inside.

I closed the drawer.

I turned the small brass key in the lock.

I dropped the key into the breast pocket of my shirt, against my ribs, and I sat back in my chair and looked at the closed drawer for a long time.

Outside the window, the morning had finished arriving.

Somewhere inside this house, my brother was being washed for the ground.

That alone was a terror I had never imagined would come.

I closed my eyes.

I did not let it out.