The tarot consultation between Amaia Salazar and Engrasi turns a search for guidance into a warning that reaches from Amaia’s past into her present investigation: an enemy has appeared, is coming for her family, and wants her bones. The cards repeat a reading Ros made a year earlier, and the encounter ends with one of them burning Amaia’s fingers. Whether treated as divination or an inexplicable physical event, the scene binds memory, family danger, and the investigation in a single object: the deck.

The Deck and the Question

Amaia takes the small parcel of black silk from behind the glass doors of a cabinet. The object has been waiting there, wrapped and knotted; when she opens it and lifts the cards, they feel warm, almost alive. She hesitates, then shuffles them while turning over the evidence, the lines of her investigation, and the hypotheses she has only begun to form. Her question to Engrasi is what she needs to know. The consultation is thus not detached from police work: Amaia brings the unfinished case to the cards, hoping for a direction that the available evidence has not yet supplied.

Engrasi tells her to shuffle and lays the cards in a cross. Amaia accepts a shortened version of the procedure she knew as a child, taking from the top of the deck. The familiar handling awakens memories of the cards sliding through her young fingers, their distinctive smell, and the serious ceremony Engrasi had taught her for turning them over. In those childhood readings, Amaia felt she knew what each card concealed before it was revealed; once the cards were turned, their relations seemed to draw a route in her mind. Here, that old confidence returns alongside unease. As Engrasi reveals the cards, Amaia recognizes them one by one.

A Reading Repeated

The spread is not merely reminiscent of the past. Its images match the Marseille tarot reading Ros gave Amaia a year earlier, as if the intervening year had disappeared. The repetition unsettles Amaia because the likeness extends card by card and carries the same dark message. Engrasi turns another card, and the skeleton depicted on it looks up from its empty sockets. The image makes the warning concrete: what follows is not a general forecast but a threat expressed through bones.

Engrasi tells Amaia that another, much more dangerous element has entered the game. It is her enemy; it is coming for her and her family, has already appeared, and will continue to draw her attention until she agrees to play. Amaia asks what it wants from them. Engrasi’s answer is that it wants Amaia’s bones. The words echo the warning Ros delivered in the earlier reading, making the present consultation a return of that earlier scene as well as a disclosure of immediate danger. Yet the warning gives no name to the enemy and no explanation of its purpose beyond the threat itself. The reading raises the stakes without resolving the mystery.

Anger, the Missing Card, and the Burn

Amaia reacts with fury. Trembling, she gathers the cards into a pack and hurls them over an armchair toward the mantelpiece. They strike it and fall in a loose scatter before the hearth. For a moment she stays still, looking at the few face-up cards whose bright colors attract her even as she feels repulsion and anger. She reproaches herself for falling into the old trap of trying to get ahead of fate. Engrasi watches her; when Amaia looks back, she thinks her aunt appears afraid. Amaia apologizes and begins collecting the cards.

She counts them beside the fire to make sure the deck is complete: fifty-six minor arcana and, she believes, twenty-two major arcana. Her count finds only twenty-one major cards. The missing card is standing on its edge against the inner wall of the fireplace. The fire has died down enough that the card does not seem in danger of burning, so Amaia uses the fireplace tongs to lift it out and places it face down on the floor. When she picks it up to return it to the deck, pain shoots through her arm and across her chest. The sudden pain makes her fear that she is having a heart attack.

The source of the pain proves to be much smaller and stranger than she first fears. Amaia realizes it is concentrated at the tips of her thumb and index finger, where she is still holding the card. She carefully uses her other hand to draw it away; some skin comes off with it and remains on the glossy cover, leaving two distinct marks. The pain stops at once. The card lies face up between her legs, and Amaia does not dare touch it again. She cannot reconcile the severe burn with an ordinary piece of cardboard. After holding her hand under cold water, she finds the skin apparently in good condition, with only a faint tingling in her fingertips.

Aftermath and Significance

Engrasi cries as she leans over Amaia, then gives her a towel and insists on drying and examining her fingers. The consultation’s closing image is therefore not a solution to the investigation but a small act of care after an experience neither woman has explained. The cards have moved from a wrapped object to an instrument of recollection, then to a scattered deck and the apparent source of a burn. Their physical handling makes the threat difficult for Amaia to dismiss, while the repeated spread connects it to Ros’s earlier warning. The encounter leaves the enemy unidentified, but makes the danger intimate: it concerns Amaia herself, her family, and the bones named by the reading.