Next Year in Havana(84)

Ice fills my veins as I look at her, as her face falls before me, as her body simply crumples to the ground.

Isabel reaches her first, grasping her arms, holding her up. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

A low, keening sound erupts from Magda, and my world simply shatters.

Not Beatriz. I can’t lose my sister, too.

“Where’s Beatriz?” I ask, my voice calm compared to the terror racking my limbs. Perhaps some part of me has simply become inured to the violence. Did Beatriz return to La Caba?a? Is she in prison now, too?

Magda takes a deep breath, her body quaking. “She’s outside. She . . . she found him.” A sob escapes her lips.

Now Isabel is the calm one. “Who?”

I don’t wait for her answer, my legs carrying me out the door, running to the front gates. I kick up gravel beneath my shoes once I reach the path in the front entrance. A crowd is beginning to form in front of the house—gardeners, staff—someone calls my name behind me, but all I can think of is Beatriz—

My steps slow.

She’s sitting on the gravel floor, her gown—one we bought together not too long ago when our world was a simpler place—pooling around her. If not for the incongruous setting, she’d look like a debutante posing for a society photo; if not for the blood splattering her dress, staining her palms, or the body cradled in her lap.

I know the moment she looks at me. How could I not?

I sink to the ground beside her, my legs rubber. I know I’m crying because my cheeks are wet, but I feel removed from my body, as though I’ve left it and floated up to the sky, looking down on all of us, praying for our souls.

“They dumped him,” Beatriz babbles. I reach out and grasp her free hand. “In front of the gate. A car—it sped by and then it stopped.” Tears stream down her face. “The door opened and I saw him—he’s so skinny, isn’t he? Like he hasn’t been eating for a while.” Her fingers shake as she strokes the face that looks so very much like hers. “He was already dead when he hit the ground. I tried—”

I focus on her, because I can’t look down, can’t look at him.

The crowd around us grows, the servants shrieking, Isabel and Magda crying. Our parents should not see this. Maria cannot see this.

Beatriz’s gaze meets mine, the wet sheen there covering steel. “One day they will pay,” she vows.

“Yes, they will.”

I look down into my dead brother’s eyes.





chapter twenty-six


Marisol


When they remove the hood from my head, I’m in a room—gray, nondescript, vaguely residential in nature—there are two armchairs, a table in the corner with a lamp, the light casting a yellow glow around the room, a lumpy couch shoved into another corner. A frayed rug covers a dirty ground.

My hands are unbound.

The man who grabbed me off the street stands before me, and I open my mouth to plead for my safety, to ask about Luis, a million words and protestations pushing to escape, but before I can cobble together my jumbled thoughts, before I can make myself move, he is gone, shutting the door behind him with a firm thud, and I am alone.

Are they going to question me? Rape me? Kill me? How long are they planning to hold me here? Will anyone realize what happened to me?

A tear trickles down my face. Then another.

The door opens.

Another man walks into the room, this one much older, his steps slow, an elegant cane in one hand, wearing a neatly pressed guayabera and crisp trousers. His black leather shoes gleam. Whereas the first man screamed “danger,” this man screams “power.”

The door shuts behind him with an ominous thud.

For a moment we stare at each other, sizing each other up. He’s tall and lean. Distinguished, his hair a steely gray, his face defined by thin lines and wrinkles, his eyes dark, his gaze hooded.

He takes a step forward. “We’re not going to hurt you,” he says in Spanish after a moment, his tone surprisingly gentle for someone who exudes such influence, as though he is the sort of man positioned to send another to his death with the stroke of a pen.

I almost believe him and then I catch myself. Is that part of their game—lulling their enemies into complacency and then attacking?

“And the man I was with? Are you going to hurt him?”

Are they hiding Luis somewhere here, too? In another room?

“I’m not. But I’m afraid I cannot speak to Mr. Rodriguez’s whereabouts.”

My stomach sinks as Luis’s last name falls from his lips. This was the threat Luis warned me about from the beginning. Was roughing him up on the street the other night a precursor to this? Will I leave this room alive?

“Can’t? Or won’t?” I ask, a tremor in my voice.

“Can’t.”

He speaks with the care of a man who parses each and every word, and for some reason his gentle tone strikes a chord of terror deep within me, the kindness in his voice incongruous with the evening’s events. What is his role in all of this?

I struggle for calm, reaching for the courage I hope lies somewhere inside me. “Then why am I here? What do you want with me?”

He doesn’t answer, but instead walks toward an empty chair in the corner, dragging it in front of me. He takes a seat, crossing his ankle over his opposite knee, in a pose that tugs at my memory. He looks down at my hand, his gaze settling on the ring there.