Chapter 5 Chapter 5 — The One Who Was Trembling
—Good evening, beautiful lady.
I said it to her back, on purpose, because I’d been watching her for half an hour from across the room and wanted to see what her body would do before her mouth spoke.
And her body did exactly what I expected.
It stiffened. Her shoulders locked up, her back tensed, and she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t turn around. She stayed there, staring straight ahead, still as an animal that knows that if it moves, it dies.
That’s why I’d spotted her. Because of how she was hiding.
All the women in this port had been fighting for two hours just to get me to look at them. They’d stand where I’d walk by, laugh louder, adjust their necklines, make themselves visible. All but one. One slipped behind a group of women and didn’t move again, her hands clasped so no one would see them trembling, searching for the darkest corner of my house as if her life depended on remaining invisible.
On a night when everyone wanted to be seen, the only one who wanted to disappear was the one I was looking for.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” I said.
Nothing. Not a single muscle.
One of the ladies in the group turned around, only too happy to step in, with that smile of someone who sees an opportunity to do the boss a favor.
“Oh, Don Maximiliano, please excuse the girl—she’s just shy,” she said, lowering her voice as if confessing something embarrassing. “She’s the Rincóns’ girl—the one they’ve taken in.”
“What’s her name?”
The woman hesitated.
“Well…”—and the little bitch laughed—“To be honest, I don’t know if she has a name, boss.”
That’s when she turned around.
Slowly, her face pale, looking at the floor and not at me. And she opened her mouth.
“I… I-Isadora.”
And my heart stopped.
That stutter. That broken voice, stuck in her throat, coming out in bits and pieces because fear wouldn’t let her form the whole word.
They want to kill him. They want to k-kill him—they’re going to kill the heir.
The same one. It was the same one. I’d held her pressed against my chest in the darkness of the pier, trembling exactly like that, and that voice had been stuck in my head all these days.
She was standing right in front of me.
The stranger from the pier. The one who knew where Ferreira was. The one who screwed me over and ran off with the only lead I’d ever had in my life.
Her name was Isadora. And she was scared to death, standing right in front of me, not daring to look up.
I looked at her face for the first time. And then I knew something else—something just as important as the other thing.
She knew it was me, too. You could tell by the way she was breathing, by the pulse throbbing in her neck, by the way she clenched her hands until they turned white. She wasn’t scared the way a poor girl is scared when faced with the most dangerous man in the port. She was scared the way someone is scared when they recognize someone.
All right.
Let her know. Let her stew on it all night.
“Isadora,” I repeated. “Good night, then.”
And I left.
I sensed that she didn’t breathe until I was ten steps away. I also sensed, without turning around, that she hadn’t taken her eyes off me for a single second since I’d turned my back on her.
I climbed the first few steps of the main staircase—just enough for the entire room to see me and fall silent, nothing more. The music stopped on its own. The conversations died down one after another until all that remained was the clinking of glasses.
All those faces turned toward me. Dozens of women, all dressed up and perfumed, with their mothers behind them, urging them forward with their eyes.
“Good evening,” I said. “For those of you who don’t know me—and that’s almost everyone—I’m Maximiliano Arteaga. The son of the man they buried a few days ago. The owner of this port.”
A murmur rippled through the room.
I know that murmur. I’ve heard it since I was a boy. It’s the sound women make when the man in charge isn’t ugly, either. I saw the fans moving faster. I saw their gazes shift, from curiosity to something else. I saw more than one of them adjust her dress, step forward, search for the right angle.
I didn’t care. Seriously. I could choose any of those women, and they’d all say yes, even if I’d scared them by killing a man on top of a table. Or precisely because of that.
But I already knew which one I was taking.
“The Circle wants me to get married,” I said. “And they’re right. A man alone can’t rule, even if he’s the owner. So I had them all come here, with all their wives, to choose a wife.”
A hungry silence fell. One of them laughed nervously.
“I’ve already chosen.”
The entire room tensed. I caught a glimpse of the mothers squeezing their daughters’ arms.
“Isadora. The one from the Rincón household.”
Nothing.
Not a single glass clinked. Not a single fan rustled. Nothing.
It was the most complete silence I’d ever heard in my life. All those faces froze mid-smile, looking at one another, confused. Someone let out a little giggle, thinking it was a joke, and fell silent on her own when no one else laughed.
And at the back of the room, a man froze with his glass halfway to his mouth.
The accountant. Tobías Rincón, my tablemate. White. With the look of someone who thinks he must have heard wrong.
“There must be a mistake, boss.” His voice cracked, and he pushed his way through the crowd. “You mean Regina. My daughter Regina.”
“I said Isadora.”
“It’s just that…” He laughed, and it came out as a horrible laugh. “It’s just that that girl is a nobody, Don Maximiliano. She’s a foundling. She has no last name, no family, no education. I have a real daughter—look at her—she’s the most…”
“Tobías.” I stepped down a stair. “Do you have a valid reason for refusing?”
The man stood there with his mouth agape.
The entire room was watching us.
“Because if your family has any reason,” I continued calmly, “to deny the owner of this port a wife of his own, in front of all the families of the Circle, I want to hear it. Now. Out loud.”
I saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed.
There he was. If he said yes, if he gave a reason, he’d have to explain in front of the entire port why he was keeping that girl, and that man wasn’t going to explain anything. If he said no, he’d hand her over to me.
“And I’ll tell you one more thing,” I added, before he could open his mouth. “Your house will benefit the most from this port. No other. You give me that woman, and no house at this table will have with me what yours will have.”
And that’s when I saw him.
The fear faded from his eyes. Something else lit up in them. Calculation. Pure calculation—quick, dirty—like when someone weighs two items on a scale and realizes that the one they were going to throw away is worth more than the one they were going to sell.
He’d told him exactly what you had to say to a guy like that.
Tobías lowered his head. And he smiled.
“It’s an honor for my family, Don Maximiliano.”
“I figured as much.”
I scanned the crowd, looking for that dark corner.
She was still there, pressed against the wall, without a trace of color on her face.
We looked at each other. For a second. Nothing more.
“Get her ready,” I said. “The wedding is coming up soon.”
“You’re crazy.”
Emilio kicked the office door shut and poured himself a drink without asking.
“Completely out of your mind, Max. You had every daughter in the Circle in that room. Every single one. You could have tied yourself to any house in the harbor, and today you’d be sleeping soundly for the first time in your life.” He downed half the glass. “And you chose a woman with no last name. A foundling. A maid in a partner’s house.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah!” He slammed the glass down on the table. “Yeah, and that’s it? The whole Circle is laughing at you right now, you know that? They’re saying the kid’s crazy, that he’s lost his mind, that he picked the maid on a whim. You just flushed down the toilet the one thing that made you untouchable.”
I poured myself a drink, too. I sipped it slowly.
“It’s the one from the pier.”
Emilio’s mouth dropped open.
“What?”
“I recognized her by her voice. She stutters just the same when she’s scared.” I set down my glass. “She’s the one who tipped me off about the plan. She’s the one who knows where Ferreira is.”
Emilio slowly sat down on the arm of the chair.
“Shit.”
“And there’s more. She recognized me, too. I saw it. She knows exactly who I am, and she knows exactly what she told me that night.” I ran my hand over my jaw. “That woman is walking around out there knowing two of my secrets—and one of them is worth my entire port.” And what did you want me to do? Leave her at a Circle member’s house, free and unguarded, so someone else could pressure her before I did?
“You could have grabbed her. Locked her in a room and forced everything out of her.”
“Yeah. And whoever’s hiding her would find out within an hour, and that heiress would vanish that very night.” I shook my head. “Not like that. This way is clean.” No one suspects a thing. The boss took a fancy to a pretty, poor girl—what a scandal, what gossip. And while the whole port laughs at me, I have her under my roof, in my bed, eating out of my hand, twenty-four hours a day.
Emilio stared at me for a long time.
“You want to keep her close so you can milk her.”
“I need her.” I walked over to the window. “She’s the thread, Emilio. I pull on her, and I reach the only thing that can take all this away from me. And there’s no safer way to keep an eye on someone than to marry them.”
“And then?”
“What then?”
“Once he’s told you everything he knows. Once you find Ferreira and finish what your father left unfinished.” Emilio tilted his head. “What do you do with the wife?”
I shrugged.
“I’ll get a divorce. Or I’ll become a widow.”
Emilio let out a snort of laughter, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“That’s cold, even for you.”
“There are plenty of women.” I looked out the window at the harbor, black, with the lights shimmering on the water. “But there’s only one harbor.”
And there I stood, with the empty glass in my hand, thinking about the pale face of that girl pressed against the living room wall.
Three days until the wedding.
Three days to have her under my roof, with no way out, with everything she knew crammed into her head. And I had my whole life to get it out of her.
