Breathing a prayer I don’t quite feel in my heart, I reach for the sheet. Bile rises in my throat as my fingertips brush against his cool skin.

It’s not him. It’s not Alejandro. It’s just a body.

The thought isn’t as comforting as I want it to be.

I squeeze my eyes shut as his—as the corpse is revealed. But I have to open them eventually. Otherwise, this whole trip was a monumental waste of both time and money.

He looks smaller, lying there. Lifeless. Still.

There is no tension, no strength, in those corded muscles lying beneath his mottled skin. There is no pumping blood to warm the pale skin of his cheeks. No air in his lungs to make his chest rise and fall. There is nothing. Just … nothing.

I drag my eyes across his body, looking for something. I don’t know what. I’ll know it when I see it, I suppose.

My gaze stutters and stops when it hits his neck. Bile rises, sharp and acidic, in my throat. I want to look away but I can’t.

His skin is still indented slightly where the rope dug in. The flesh is mottled purple and black. It’s a bruise that will never heal.

Warmth floods my body, but it isn’t the pleasant kind. It’s hot and vicious and angry. It is rage, pure and undiluted.

“Who did this to you?” I ask softly, knowing I will never receive an answer.

I force my eyes to wander further south, down the curve of his shoulder and his arm. My brow furrows as my gaze reaches his wrist.

There is a mark carved on the back of his hand. That was what I saw the night in the garden. At the viceroy’s ball. There had been too much happening around me to notice the finer details but I see them now. The blood’s been cleared away and the mark stands out bright and lurid against the pale skin of his hand.

It looks a bit like a P, but the loop is too large, and something resembling a tail wraps around the stem of the symbol like a snake coiled around the trunk of a tree. A circle surrounds the—I don’t know, sigil, perhaps—containing it. Marking it as deliberate.

This is no accidental scar.

My eyes follow its swooping lines, committing its shape to memory. There might be something in Kiki’s library that can give it meaning. It’s one of the more extensive collections in all of Potosí. Perhaps even in all of New Spain. It’s somewhere to start at the very least.

I’m about to pull the sheet back up when an overwhelming urge stills my hand.

Don’t touch him.

But I cannot help myself.