The Santiago Sisters

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

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Prologue (#ulink_693a85aa-e607-58b2-be57-3f6fe6feb7d3)

Winter, 2014

NYchronicle.com/News/US-News/Tess-Geddes-disappearance

Live Feed, 10.31AM:

Concerns are mounting over the disappearance two nights ago of Hollywood superstar Tess Geddes. Ms Geddes was last seen leaving her New York home at 21:00 on Friday 19 December and no contact has been made with her since. The vanishing is described as ‘out of character’, despite the actress’s turbulent history. Friend and co-star Natalie Portis released this short statement yesterday: ‘Tess is a fighter. We knew she’d suffered the year from hell—but she knows better than that. She wouldn’t do anything stupid.’

It emerged this morning that Ms Geddes was accompanied by an unidentified female companion on the night of her disappearance. Police are now engaged in a hunt for this person, and witnesses are urged to come forward.

Her scent was deep: familiar and strange both at once. It filled the stairwell; savagery and glamour—one a relic from her old life, the other an emblem of her new.

Fear in her eyes, a pleading fear, begging for understanding. But it was too late for that. It was too late for sorry and too late for tears. She had arrived at her worst nightmare, and when that was over it would all be over: their history, their love, their hate; the cord that bound them unravelled at last. How to kill her? What method could rival her treachery, her greed, her betrayal; what could recompense her evil?

They should have stayed as one. They couldn’t survive apart. It was fate, forever destined to come to this: from birth, to death; two halves of the same whole.

PART ONE (#ulink_04038419-f9d7-5454-b9b3-fcc208178475)

1994—2000

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Argentina

She wondered, sometimes, if they had started off as one person. All things combined, until a silver blade entered their mother’s womb and curled them apart. She pictured it dividing their heads, their shoulders, their hearts, their hands, and whether or not it had hurt. The change was immediate. Heat poured into her sister, red like fire. Cool stayed behind, with her, blue and quiet and longing for the warmth.

Calida Santiago dismounted her horse and knelt beside the wheezing guanaco. The animal was like a llama, with cinnamon fur and small, straight ears, and had broken its leg; the damaged limb was splayed behind the soft white pillow of its underbelly. She put her hand out to stroke it, and it flinched, fur trembling.

‘Is it going to die?’

Diego, their father, tethered the horses. He secured the guanaco’s neck in the crook of his arm to stop it biting or twisting, while he felt the fracture and then the pumping strain of its heart. ‘We should do what’s right,’ he said, removing the carved knife from his gaucho belt. Diego’s riding trousers were stained with dirt and sweat, his face obscured by dust. The facón blade glinted in the dwindling afternoon sun.

‘Take Teresita away.’

Behind them, Calida’s twin sat sidesaddle on their shared horse. At ten years old, they should both have been children. But Calida, for all of her two-minute head start, would always be the elder. It was what life had decided: she had been built the sensible one, the one who looked out for and looked after. Occasionally she wished to be as carefree as her sister, to dare a little more, to risk, but it wasn’t in her nature.

‘I don’t want to,’ protested Teresita. ‘I want to see.’

Calida took her sister’s dirt-smeared hand, as native to her as her own. Grudgingly, knowing her father couldn’t be defied, Teresita slid from the saddle.

‘Papa will make it better,’ Calida said. ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk.’

Teresita wore a dust-cracked scowl too determined for her years. She was wilful, stubborn, impossible once she set her mind to something, resolute to have her way no matter the cost: she was their mother’s daughter through and through.

The twins picked their way through sun-charred bramble, Teresita trailing behind like a disgruntled wolf cub, and into a ravine that twinkled with water. Calida crouched to rinse her face. The dust got everywhere; it was the taste of home, grit that caught in their teeth and ears and powder that clung to their eyelashes. All around, the dry green Patagonian steppe rolled into the distance; sharp peaks severed the vista and then flattened into grassy plains, like the whipping surface of a vast and angry sea.

‘What’s Papa doing?’ asked Teresita.

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

But Teresita wouldn’t. She always demanded to know, to find out. She was always asking these dumb questions that Calida didn’t know the answers to.

‘I can hear it screaming. Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ said Calida, putting an arm round her. ‘Come here.’

She drew Teresita close. Her sister’s hair smelled of the horses: the rich, solid scent of the saddlebags and the coarse rope of the reins, the leather stirrups, the tangy metal bit they put between Paco’s teeth and heard him crunch on like an apple core.

The guanaco shrieked a final time. Teresita pushed against her; whether with fear or resistance it was hard to say. Calida had felt her twin’s push from the very beginning: when they were born, a strength driving behind her, indignant at having been left behind. Hurry up, come on, get out, it’s my turn … When she had been old enough to identify it, and recognise in Teresita’s mop of black hair and huge jet eyes the sister she would love until the ends of the earth, Calida sensed that push so often in her life. Teresita’s struggle when she was crying and didn’t want to be comforted; her wishful gaze, reaching beyond the perimeter of the farm and into the frightening unknown; her resentment of gravity when all she longed to do was fly. Calida stayed on the ground, arms out, ready to catch her if she fell.

But there was a pull, too; a force of belonging that could never be changed and never be dimmed. It was blood, a mirror heartbeat, a laugh that echoed her own. At night, when they lay in their bunks, giggling in the dark or making hand shadows on the wall, whispering secrets that didn’t need to be told because they already belonged in each other’s hearts, Calida knew that this connection was a rare and precious gem. Faith. Trust. Devotion. Loyalty. No matter what, the sisters were there for each other.

‘What’s going to happen when we’re grown up?’ said Teresita now.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

‘Mama says not to do what she did.’

Calida didn’t reply. Instead, she said: ‘We’ll be together, though, won’t we? So it doesn’t matter. We’ll always be together, you and me. Promise?’

Teresita ran a hand across the brittle earth. She blinked against the sun, and gave Calida a smile that warmed her bones. ‘Promise. Can we go back yet?’

Calida went up the ridge to check. Diego was untying the horses. The guanaco was gone and she saw the slash of blood on her papa’s bombachas and dared herself not to look away, to be the big girl Diego always told her she was.

Paco chewed lazily on a tuft of yellow grass.

‘Come on, then,’ said Calida.