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The truth hurt, but I knew it was right, deep in my bones. The choice was hers to make and she’d fucking made it. No matter how it hurt me, no matter how much it pissed me off, it was her right to do what she wanted. It was her fucking right to push me away.
As much as I wanted to own her, possess her, control her, that was all war games in the end. She had the real power. Always had. Always would. And it was my fucking duty to respect that.
But as I lined the stitches up, three, five, seven, nine, I knew with every pass of the needle through my flesh that I’d never be able to let her go. Never. She had ripped me open, leaving me with a wound in my heart that I’d never be able to close.
She might want nothing to do with me. But that didn’t mean I had to have nothing to do with her. There were things I could do for her, even from here. There were people I could send to help her, to help her father.
I could accept her not wanting me. Fine. If loving her meant I’d never have her, then so fucking be it. But as I knotted the last stitch, I swore a silent promise to her.
I will protect you. No matter what.
CHAPTER 29
Valeria
On the ride to the surgeon, I was sure that we had lost my father. He’d turned terrifyingly pale in my arms and I couldn’t even see him breathing.
I burst into panicked sobs, trying everything to wake him up as the carriage rolled to a stop in front of the surgeon’s house. Before I knew it, my family and I had been pulled from the carriage and the surgeon knelt beside my father on the bloody carriage floor. He slipped the stethoscope into his ears and listened for a pulse.
I didn’t breathe, none of us did. For a long moment that seemed like an eternity, we waited. Suddenly the surgeon sprang up from my father’s body.
“There’s a pulse! Get him inside!” he called. And my cousins scooped him up to carry him indoors.
Minutes ticked by into an hour. Behind the closed door, I heard hurried footsteps, and the ominous clattering of instruments being dropped into metallic trays. Finally, the surgeon emerged, blood-soaked and grave-faced.
By some miracle, he had revived my father and staunched the bleeding, but he told us that there was no guarantee he would recover. There had been much blood lost, he said, and he worried about sepsis as well as my father’s lung. The knife, he said, had slipped between two of my father’s ribs, and nicked both his liver and his lung.
“The weapon was thin, long, and freshly sharpened, chosen to do maximum damage,” the surgeon said.
A wave of rage blurred my thinking, but I forced myself to be still and deliberate. This was no time for hysterics, this was no time to lose my head with grief and anger. All that could come later, once I knew my father was safe.
“What do we do?” I asked the surgeon, with my arms wrapped around my mother.
“Pray,” he answered softly, and sadly, staring down at his fingers, every nail bed rimmed with blood.
Now my father lay in his own bed, looking ancient and weak. His breathing was shallow and he only came into consciousness occasionally, and then only long enough to have a sip of water. I had left his side only long enough to change out of my blood-soaked wedding dress.
Since then, I hadn’t moved. It felt like an eternity had passed, but also hardly a minute. The light had begun to change from day to dusk, and wind whistled through the loose windowpanes. Without letting go of my father’s cold hand, I leaned back and yanked the velvet curtain shut to keep out the drafts. Taking my father’s hand in both of mine, I slid to my knees with my forehead pressed to the edge of the mattress.
Closing my eyes, my mind replayed the events of the day in strange dream-like flashes, disconnected and mismatched. Bells ringing, snow falling, those strange silent women who dressed me. Vasile, Petre, my mother. And my father. So many flashes of my father.
Once and again, I kept returning to the look on my father’s face when he stepped forward at the cathedral to try to stop the ceremony. My tears spilled down my cheeks as I tried to calm my breathing with a long out breath. It helped, a little, and I wiped my cheek on the shoulder of my sweater as I raised my face. My father looked even worse than he had when I closed my eyes, a mere moment ago. We were losing him. I just knew it. And it was all my fault.
