The Paper Swan(16)

I stole a quick look at Damian. He had gone still—deathly still—like he knew exactly what was going through my head. I knew his body stance now. He’d been the same way, all his muscles pulled in, alert and tight and tense, right before he’d had his slice of vengeance. I’d felt it then, and I could feel it now.

The bastard. He wasn’t going to let me do it. He’d be on me before I could step a foot off the boat. He owned me. He owned my fate—my life, my death. He didn’t need to say a word; it was there in his eyes. He compelled me off the edge. And I obeyed. I couldn’t stop the sobs so I cried and I cried.

I cried the same way I’d cried when Gideon Benedict St. John had broken the clasp on my necklace and left chain marks on my neck.



Esteban had found me and was ready to go kick Gidiot’s ass.

“Don’t you dare.” I made him promise. “You know what happens if you get in trouble one more time.”

“I don’t care.” He swiped the hair off his forehead. He meant business when he did that.

“Please, Esteban. MaMaLu will send you away and I’ll never see you again.”

“MaMaLu’s just bluffing.”

Esteban called his mother MaMaLu. He’d always called her MaMaLu. She was his mama, but her name was Maria Luisa, so somewhere along the way, he’d started babbling MaMaLu, and it had stuck. Now everyone called her MaMaLu, except for Victor Madera, who worked for my father. He called her by her full name and MaMaLu didn’t seem to like it. Or him.

“MaMaLu said next time you misbehave, she’ll send you to your uncle.”

“Ha!” Esteban laughed. “She can’t even go a day without me.”

It was true. MaMaLu and Esteban were inseparable, a hard-loving, quick-fighting part of my life. I couldn’t imagine one without the other. They slept in a separate part of the estate, removed from the big house, a small wing that accommodated the help, but I could still hear them some nights—like the time Esteban was gone all day and didn’t get back until past midnight.

That was the first year the cinema had opened in the village. They showed The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Esteban stayed for all four screenings. MaMaLu had a right fit.

“Estebandido!” She’d gone after him with a broom when he finally showed up.

Esteban knew he was in big trouble when she called him that. I heard his howl all the way up in my room. The next day he showed up for his chores, looking like Blondie, Clint Eastwood’s character from the movie, wearing MaMaLu’s shawl—all squinty-eyed and chewing on a whittled down tree stub.

The following year Esteban watched Enter The Dragon and thought he was Bruce Lee.

“What do you do, Skye?” he asked.

“I fight back and I fight hard.” I repeated the line he had coached me to use, over and over again, because that was a line from one of the movies he’d seen.

“Ready?” he said. “On five.”

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . .

I attempted to free myself from his chokehold. I grabbed his arm using both my hands and followed through with the move he’d taught me, trapping his leg with mine and making a sharp 180-degree turn before pulling him across and away from my body.

We ended up on the grass, a pile of limbs and sharp elbows. I laughed. Esteban did not think I made a good martial arts apprentice.

“You need practice. And discipline. How do you expect to take on Gidiot if you can’t even handle me?”

And so we practiced. Every day, Esteban turned into Estebandido, although he never liked playing the bad guy.

“Just for practice,” he said. “Just for you, güerita. Do it like this. Whoee-ahhhhh! Ready? On five.”

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . .

“No, no, no.” He shook his head. “You have to make the sound.”

“Whooo-ah!”

“No, Skye. Like a cat. Whoee-ahhh!”

The couple of times I managed to land Esteban on his back, his eyes shone with adoration.

“You’re not so bad for a girl,” he said.

We were lying in the shade of a tree, looking up at the sky. The branches were covered with clusters of delicate flowers, like yellow lace dripping down from brown limbs.

“I’ll bring you cake tomorrow,” I said.

He nodded and blew the hair out of his face. “Kick his butt if he tries anything, okay?”

I clasped his fingers and smiled.