Silence from the men.
“Give me what you found,” Fausto said, his voice dropping into something that was no longer performing warmth. “Give it to me now and we figure this out inside the family. That’s still an option.”
“Family,” Aitana said.
The word sat between them on the dark hillside like something neither of them quite wanted to touch.
“I don’t have a family,” she said. “I had a grandfather who loved me and died trying to get me out. Everything else I had was taken.”
Fausto’s jaw tightened.
“You don’t know what you’re starting,” he said. “Benjamin has people. Real people. You hand that over to whoever you think is going to help you, and this becomes something a lot bigger than a property dispute.”
“It was always bigger than a property dispute,” she said. “You just counted on me not surviving long enough to figure that out.”
Something broke in his expression — not remorse, nothing that clean. Just the specific fracture that appears in a calculated person’s face when they recognize that the calculation has failed.
“Take it,” he said quietly, and the men behind him moved.
Behind Aitana, Jacinto stepped out of the cellar entrance.
He was carrying an oil lamp in one hand.
In the other he had his grandfather’s old hunting rifle, which he held with the ease of a man who had been using one for forty years and was not confused about its purpose.
“Everybody stays where they are,” he said.
His voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be.
The men stopped.
Fausto looked at Jacinto with the cold contempt of a man who had spent his whole life looking at people he considered beneath him.
“Old man,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Jacinto said. “It’s what I should’ve done eleven years ago.”
The wind came off the high ground again, stronger than before, moving through the brush with a sound that filled the space between them.
Aitana held the USB drive in her closed fist.
She looked at her brother.
She thought about all the things she could say — about their mother, about their grandfather’s funeral, about what eleven years in a women’s correctional facility does to a person’s understanding of what the word family means. She had had eleven years to compose those sentences. She had worked through every version of them.
She chose three.
