Vasile was on the brink of taking me in his arms to plead with me, but I knew that if he touched me, my resolve would weaken. I could not let that happen, and so I turned on my heel, and fled alone from the cathedral, chasing my father and mother without another word.
Gathering up my dress in my hand, I joined my waiting family in what was intended to be my wedding carriage, and we set off as fast as the four horses could carry us, rushing against time to try to save my father’s life.
Chapter 22
Vasile
Valeria’s friend, Natasha, tried to go after her, but Daniel stepped in. Anyone could see from the look in Natasha’s eyes that she wasn’t herself, and I had no doubt that the culprit was none other than my own brother.
“Let her go,” Daniel said, his deep voice calming her. “Let’s get you to somewhere safe, away from here. Vasile?”
I nodded. “Go. Take her to my father’s estate. Get her any help she needs.”
Petre lay unconscious on the cathedral floor. With the drama seemingly over, the chaos calmed as the remaining guests were now filing out the main doors, and the priest had long since darted for the side chapel, so that now my brother and I were alone by the altar.
I was aware of the power of the place, and the irony of Petre’s blood trickling into the sacred stones. Religion had never had any power over me; I found no comfort in prayer, no strength in worship. But I knew that my brother and I were like something out of the Bible itself: good and evil, locked in an endless fucking battle.
For all our lives, he and I had dealt in the currency of vengeance. Of hatred and anger.
But now, standing there, looking down at him, I thought about something bigger—mercy, for him and for the rest of us.
What a mercy it would be to kill him, and put him out of his misery like the rabid fucking animal that he was.
Taking a step toward him, I cracked my neck, side to side, aware—but only barely—of the pain from the gunshot wound inflicted by one of his hounds just before Daniel had arrived. It had grazed my upper shoulder. I slid my hand into my pocket, grabbing hold of my switchblade. The sound of it flicking open echoed around the church.
Looking down at him, I damn near felt sorry for him. For as long as I could remember, he’d been driven by his own darkness. What a shitty existence that must be.
Slit his throat; do the world a fucking favor.
Murder in a church was one hell of a sin, but I didn’t give a shit. He had it coming. Because of him, I’d lost the one good thing I’d ever had. And he was going to pay the motherfucking penance.
But no sooner had I taken a firm hold of my blade than a hand grabbed my shoulder. I swung around, ready to kill whoever it was, because this was fucking important: the world would be a far better place without my brother in it. If I swung from the gallows for it, then so fucking be it.
It was my father.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice hard but sympathetic, looking at me, then the blade, then back at me again.
It took me a second to see through the crystalline murderous rage that stood between me and everything else. But once I did, I saw my dad’s kind eyes there, pleading with me.
There was no plea that could make any of this right. I shook my head slowly.
“He had you prisoner in your own home, Dad. He tried to have me killed. I don’t have a fucking choice.”
“You do,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like it now, but you do have a choice.” With one hand, he took hold of the blade, sharp edge away from his palm. With the other hand, he slowly pried my fingers from the hilt. Once he’d disarmed me, my father sighed heavily, sitting down slowly on the nearby pew. He looked older and more tired than I’d ever seen him. Carefully, he closed the switchblade, palming it and looking up at me once again. “I will not let whatever poison is inside him also end up killing you.”
It was too fucking late for that. I knelt down and picked up the ring I’d given her, which was now smudged with her father’s blood.
“Losing her is what’s going to kill me. She’s the only thing that matters.”
My father nodded sadly, then contemplated the switchblade in his palm.
“Go, my boy. Now. And get away from this place. Please.”
Closing my eyes, I ground my teeth, seething with overpowering rage. And then stormed from the cathedral without another word.
I rode recklessly fast back to the manor house, half-blind with whipping snow squalls. I didn’t slow down, not even on the cliff-side paths, slippery with ice.
If I die now, then let death come, I thought to myself as Vela careened wildly, nearly losing her footing on the slick, loose shards of shale on the cliff’s edge.
If I couldn’t have Valeria, I didn’t care what happened to me. Live, die. I don’t give a fuck. None of it mattered. She was heaven itself. Imagining a life without her was pure hell.
Before I knew it, though, Vela was thundering down the drive to the manor house. I might want to escape my pain, but my mare was having none of it, and she skidded to a stop right in front of the front steps. She damn near threw me off of her, and she backed away from me angrily, wild eyed and scared.
You bastard, she seemed to say, tossing her head and stamping her front feet. How dare you take your shit out on me?
True enough. Inhaling hard, I steadied myself to keep her calm, which worked just long enough for me to get the saddle off of her back and the bit out of her mouth. I settled her in her stall with fresh hay and water.
“None of this is your fault. I’m sorry if I was hard on you. Rest now…”
With that, I left her safe and secure, making my way in a blind rage back to the house.
Once inside, I went straight for the library. The blanket draped over the sofa still showed where Valeria had sat—the impression of her fucking voluptuous hips, the narrow curve of her waist. Angrily, I kicked off my boots and ripped off my jacket, letting them fall in a dirty pile on the expensive rug.
I moved to rip off my bloodstained shirt as well, so that I could get a look at my wounds, but the fabric had stuck firmly to the bloody gash. I kept my head and teased the fabric off the open gunshot wound, a quarter-inch at a time.
Grimacing, I looked down. I’d been really fucking lucky. It was a damned good thing my brother employed such stupid pieces of shit as his hired muscle.
The bullet had grazed my left trapezius, halfway between my neck and my shoulder. A handful of inches lower, and it would’ve been a kill shot, straight through the heart.
Daniel had rode in like a storm. He had a few tricks up his sleeve. Stableboy-thief he may have been, but he was a skilled horseman. He’d trained his horse to buck on command, which he did and laid out two of my brother’s guards before they could get a hold on the situation.
They were so stunned, it gave me a moment to take another by surprise, centering my short blade on the back of one’s neck, dropping him within seconds. Between Daniel, his horse and myself, we finished off the lot of them, then rode hard for the cathedral meeting with my father on the road in his own carriage.
Using my teeth, I yanked the cork out of a bottle of vodka and poured it onto my wound. It hurt like a motherfucker, but as I groaned in pain, I found I was grateful. At least I could do something about this pain, unlike the fucking ache in my heart.
Carrying the vodka with me, I headed for the kitchen, where I cleaned the wound with soap and water and then vodka again. Everywhere around me were reminders of her—the food she’d eaten, the glasses she’d drunk from.
On a champagne glass by the sink, I saw that sweet imprint of her lips on the rim of the glass. Fuck almighty, I could hardly believe it. Just hours ago, she’d been there with me. Just hours ago, we’d been fucking happy. In her arms, in her presence, I had felt real joy, real contentment, for the first fucking time in my life.
Now, she was gone. And the contentedness she brought was gone with her, leaving me empty, angry, and raw.
From a drawer in
one of the cupboards, I found a needle and thread, which I cleaned with the vodka and the flame from a match. Sitting down at the big pine table in the middle of the kitchen, I forced myself to drink as much of the vodka as possible. I hated the shit—the taste, the burn, the smell. But it helped dull my senses just enough to pinch the wound closed and start stitching myself up.
I went slowly, being careful to close the wound tightly and cleanly. The first two stitches were fucking brutal, mind-numbingly painful. But somehow, there in that place of agony, between the vodka and the wound, I was able to think through what had happened that day. And to see a little bit of truth
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. She’d been a pawn in the games of men for too long.
She had her voice, and it was high time someone listened.
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.
As I knotted the last stitch, I swore a silent promise to her.
I will protect you. No matter what.
Chapter 23
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 dress 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.
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 rolling 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 closer, and I scooted my chair aside to make room. 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 wearing a sharp black suit and white shirt. As he entered, he removed his black satin top hat and secured it under the crook of his left arm. In his right hand, hanging low at his side he carried a black leather bag.
“Forgive me. I let myself inside and your maid told me where to find you.”
I bolted to my feet, putting myself between my parents and this stranger.
“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 each step carefully placed, unrushed but with an urgency.
“I’ve been sent…” he sa
id trailing off. “Does that matter, Your Grace?”
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, folding my hands in a firm grip at my waist. “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.”
“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 Grace.” 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, Your Grace?”
Wild Heir (Fated Royals Book 4) Page 16