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He was here, like this, because of me.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I said softly, “But thank you for trying to stop the ceremony. Thank you for trying to help.” My voice began to quaver desperately, stopping me from saying any more.
The sound of my mother’s wheelchair wheels on the floor made me turn toward the door. The look on her face as she stared at my father shifted from worry to mortification.
“I know,” I whispered, pressing my palm against my lips to stop myself from sobbing.
Her nurse wheeled her over, and I scooted my chair aside to make room for her. Her own hands looked nearly as frail and translucent as my father’s. She reached out and took his hand in hers. A wave of tears overtook me and I forced myself to look away.
My eyes landed on the things that my father kept beside his bed—a stack of books, a chipped glass, and a silver-framed cameo portrait of me when I was a young girl.
Suppressing my sobs, I let my head rest softly in my mother’s lap, as tears slid down my cheeks onto the blue chenille blanket she always wore in the evenings. Her smell transported me back, as always, to my childhood. To those happy, barely remembered days, when we were all safe. And well. So very, very unlike what life had become.
My mother softly stroked my cheek with one hand, and did the same to my father’s palm. Even a quiet and uneventful day was likely to exhaust my mother, and I knew that a day like this was likely to make her dangerously weak. In my heart, I was desperate to hear her reassuring words, but I didn’t dare ask the dueling questions that were on the tip of my tongue.
What will happen if he dies? What will happen if he lives?
A knock at the door interrupted my body-shaking sobs. I pulled myself together, as best I could, and sat up in my chair, wiping tears from my cheeks and sniffling hard.
“Yes,” I said. “Come in.”
The door opened gently, revealing a man that I didn’t recognize. He had kind eyes and a warm smile, slightly older than my father.
“Forgive me. I let myself inside and your maid told me where to find you.”
“Who are you?” I asked, trying not to sound too rude, but all the same deeply frustrated that this stranger was here, looking so kind and warm when I felt like the world was made of nothing but ice and sadness.
“My name is Dr. Lucian, Dr. Drago Lucian. And I have been sent here to help your father, as well as your mother. It is fortunate that I was in the vicinity. A week ago, I would have been on the other side of the continent.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, in the fleeting and unclear way that famous names sometimes do.
“Who sent you?”
He came inside the room slowly, carrying a doctor’s bag over one arm and his coat over the other. “I’ve been sent…” he said trailing off. “Does that matter, Your Highness?”
This man had no notion of the day I had experienced. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever trust anybody again, and I certainly was in no fit state to be trusting a stranger.
“It certainly does matter,” I said, standing up from my chair. “Someone tried to kill my father today, so you’ll forgive me if I’m unwilling to let you…”
“Mr. Greengallow sent me,” he said, slightly unwillingly, as if it was a secret he’d been warned not to share. “To attend to both your father and your mother.”
I shot up and placed myself between the doctor and my mother and father. “Which Mr. Greengallow?” I asked.
The doctor blinked once, then again. Clearly he’d been told not to disclose that part, but there was no way I was letting him in this room without knowing that.
“Vasile Greengallow,” he said finally.
The nerve of that man. I clenched my teeth and eyed the kindly doctor angrily. My first reaction was to tell him to go, to get the hell out of our house. But just as I was forming the words to do so, I heard my father’s breathing become wheezy and labored behind me. I spun around. My mother looked to me pleadingly, clutching my father’s hand.
Whatever anger I’d mustered dissolved at once. A drop of blood in the ocean. My father needed help and I would accept it from anyone. Even Vasile.
“Alright,” I said, stepping aside to make room for the doctor. “Thank you,” I added softly as he passed by me on his way to my father’s beside.
“Of course, Your Highness.” He bowed politely and then looked me in the eye. But rather than go straight to my father, he looked at me with concern. Looking from one of my eyes to the other, he asked, “Are you feeling well yourself, Princess Valeria?”
