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My father slumped to the ground at my feet and I fell to my knees beside him, seeing but not understanding the bloodstain that now marred the front of my gown. The wound from Petre’s knife had penetrated my father’s flank, and the blood flowed out in rhythmic pumps, turning his starched white shirt so red it turned nearly black.
Confusion erupted on all sides of me. The priest began eerie chants and benedictions, warding off evil from the cathedral. My mother shrieked and joined me on the floor beside my father. My father’s words were raspy and soft.
“I couldn’t do it to you, my girl. I couldn’t lose you like this,” he gasped.
And then I felt the cold but now familiar grip of Petre’s hand, horse-biting the back of my neck.
He spat commands toward the priest. “Finish it. Marry us, now!”
The priest looked scared but he returned to the Latin, then the vows. As my father lay dying on the floor, our marriage was being sealed.
From my right, a door flew open. Petre released his grip on me and I glanced behind me, expecting to see guests fleeing the nave. But instead, there stood Vasile.
CHAPTER 26
Valeria
Vasile stood with his father at his side, a look of thunder on his face, and Daniel from the mansion just a step behind them both. There was blood on Vasile’s clothes, but I couldn’t tell if it was his own or someone else’s.
Before I knew what was happening, he was at a dead run toward his brother, the priest once again stunned into silence.
“Finish it!” Petre screamed toward the clergyman, but Vasile stopped him cold with a knockout-punch straight to the front of Petre’s face. In the strange slowness of the moment, I watched one of Petre’s front teeth skitter across the cathedral floor, and then he went down, laying unconscious on the tombs of the ancient kings of Praque below.
Vasile reached me just as my father was losing consciousness.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” Vasile said, his voice hoarse and breathless.
In the first instant I saw him, my heart melted. But now, I felt it turn to solid stone. Clutching my father close to my chest as my mother called out for a doctor, for help, for anyone, anyone at all, I shook my head at Vasile.
It was all too much. I just wanted a simple life. Life with Petre, Vasile or any of these Greengallows would always lie on a precipice of evil. None of this was right. The price was too high.
“It’s your fault as much as anybody’s that he’s here, like this,” I said, cradling my dad close.
A crowd gathered, getting too close in their efforts to see what was going on. I felt boots shove me, hands grab me and then the pinch of something sharp on the back of my neck.
A handful of my cousins stepped in to move everyone aside, most of whom I remembered as hardly more than scrawny young boys, but who had now grown into strapping, strong young men. With the crowd cleared, they scooped up my father between them, carrying him out in their arms, rushing him down the aisle. They looked like his pallbearers more than his rescuers as they hurried out the door.
I heard my aunt’s voice, speaking to my mother about a surgeon, one town over. And hurry. We must hurry. Hurry, Valeria. Hurry.
Vasile and I stood there at the altar, him holding me by my shoulders.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” he said to me, gripping me tight. “I’m not the enemy. I love you. I would never let anything happen to you.”
You’re not thinking clearly. Lies. All lies.
This was the first time, since the first second I’d laid eyes on him, that I wasn’t looking at the world through the bleary mist of passion. My thinking was crystal clear and I knew exactly what I had to do. I shook off his grip and pushed him away, throwing my bouquet at Petre’s limp body on the floor. I shook my head and raised my hand to stop him from saying anything else.
“You’re wrong! For the first time since this all began I am thinking clearly. I wish my family had never had the misfortune of meeting any of you. I wish the damned Greengallows had never existed! And you, Vasile, you’re the worst of the whole God-damned lot, because somehow you made me care about you, and I’ll never forgive you for that.”
The look in his eyes—the rejection, the surprise, the sadness—made me feel sick to my stomach with grief. But I kept my head high and my resolve firm. I pulled his ring out from its hiding place and tossed it aside. It tinkled and clattered on the stone, coming to a stop right below a gruesome portrait of Saint John the Baptist, with his ghoulish decapitated head on a platter.
