Zacarias turns the car smoothly through the castillo gates and draws up beside the water fountain that dominates the front entrance. The taxi driver who collected me from Madrid Airport will have already dropped off my luggage. Everything I own is now within the castillo, and it owns every inch of me.
I look up at the ornate stone carvings that decorate the sheer walls. Over the years as I’ve grown and Mama’s become stricter, I learned to hate this place. A beautiful prison. Maybe if I was allowed to be happy here then I could have grown to love it, but to me, it’s no more enticing than a jail cell.
Mama and Zacarias are talking and don’t notice as I head up the marble staircase to my room. I push open my bedroom door and step onto the cream carpet, taking in the four-poster bed and the gleaming en suite through the door. The balcony doors are open and I walk out onto the terrace, which is the only thing I like about this room that my mother decorated for me. I take deep breaths of the country air and gaze around at the hills, the olive groves, the winding streets of the medieval village below. The clouds spotting the azure sky. Everything about this place is heavenly, but it’s the devils who make hell, not the flames.
I play with my necklace, remembering Zacarias’ face as he spoke such vulgar things about the Black Fox. There’s another devil for me to contend with now—until Mama grows bored with him, at least. She grew bored with my father and cast him out when I was eleven. He never tried to see me again, and then he died when I was fourteen. I can barely remember him.
With a sigh, I go inside and collapse onto my bed. It can’t be true that the Black Fox has disappeared. He’s been protecting this area of the country almost as long as I’ve been alive. This countryside used to be filled with corrupt officials, murderers and rapists, and the Black Fox took them all down, one by one. He didn’t kill anyone or hurt them if he didn’t have to. He didn’t even dispense punishment. He just brought criminals into the light of day and handed them over to police whom he trusted, often in creative ways. A man who defrauded a charity was found tied to the statue he’d erected to himself with a list of stolen transactions pinned to his clothing. A mayor who groped his staff and blackmailed them into silence was handcuffed naked in the town square with I AM A PERVERT written over and over on his body in red paint. I think I love his sense of irony the best.
Did love.
My eyes fill with tears. Please, Señor, don’t be gone. We need you. I need you. I need to believe there’s at least a flicker of goodness in this corrupt and greedy world.
I listen to the clock down in the town strike two, and my eyes drift closed.
I wake several hours later, get myself out of bed and go downstairs. I might not be allowed to go to university, but there are some distance education courses on environmental law and human rights that I’ve enrolled in. I need to tell my mother, because if my textbooks arrive without notice then she’ll throw them in the trash and tell me I’m a sneak for going behind her back.
As I walk along the corridor to the living room, I hear voices.
“…don’t know what I’m going to do about her.”
It’s Mama’s voice. She must be talking about me. I don’t like eavesdropping, but I have to know what she’s telling Zacarias about me, and how much of a foe she’s turning him into.
“If we don’t have her married quickly, she’ll spend her days whoring around the town. I used to catch her with the village boys, and they were trying to get their hands under her dress. Disgusting.”
My face floods with color. I never whored, and I didn’t let boys put their hands up my dresses, either. I was kissed, once, and of course Mama saw and assumed the worst, calling me a slut and that I was no better than filth if I let the poor local boys touch me. I tried telling her that it was just a kiss and to stop being so obsessed with class like it’s four hundred years ago, but she wouldn’t listen to me.
I peer around the door in time to see Zacarias’ eyes narrow. “She’s not a virgin?”
Mama has a glass of white wine in her hand and she’s changed into a flowing dress. There are heavy gold bangles on her wrists. “I can’t be sure. I wish I knew.”
My mouth falls open in shock. You can mind your own business!