His breath was on her neck in a second. Vera pressed her hands beneath her and bucked her head and shoulders backward at him. He fell into the statue’s pedestal. Vera heard the wobbling of the great stone and the crash that followed, knowing that the beautiful statue had shattered on the floor.
It did little to stop Thomas. Vera tried to scramble to her feet as he caught her ankle and pulled her back to the ground. This time, he flipped her over onto her back, held her shoulders down with his hands, and quieted her writhing legs by straddling her hips.
Every instinct in Vera’s body told her to fight, and she did—like mad. With all the strength in her, she flailed against his hold. She wriggled and writhed; she snapped her teeth at his hands and even managed to free one hand and jab at his eye before he forced it back down. Thomas released both of her shoulders, and Vera thought she might have a chance. She thought he was giving up or coming to his senses, but he wasn’t. He grabbed her head with both hands, picked it up, and slammed it against the floor.
Vera’s eyes were open, but all she saw in front of her were stars. Her ears rang, and she moaned in pain. The seconds that it dazed her and shunted her movements were precious time when she couldn’t afford to be incapacitated. When her vision cleared, she saw a short-bladed knife in Thomas’s hand, not four inches long. He’d stopped straddling her, pulling both legs to one side, and he slashed a slit in Vera’s dress from the waist down, revealing the top of her leg.
This was her opportunity. He wasn’t on top of her. Vera’s mind told her body to move, and her panic only rose as she found it wouldn’t respond, addled from the blow to her head. Thomas was unrecognizable, his face now the contorted likes of a monster unparalleled to any horror Vera had ever seen close up, pupils consuming the entirety of his eyes. He hungrily brought the knife to her thigh, high on her leg on the outside. He relished in pressing it to her skin, so agonizingly slowly. She screamed out as it pierced her flesh, as he exercised such restraint in pushing it in, millimeter by millimeter, devastatingly slow until the hilt kissed her skin. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.
Tears streamed down Vera’s face. She didn’t know when she’d begun to beg him to stop, but now all she heard were her own frenzied cries of “Please!” over and over.
He pulled the knife out at the same measured pace he’d shoved it in. Vera barely had time to regain her breath before Thomas raised his thumb and pressed it forcefully to the wound, smearing the blood and raising fresh screams from her. They were endless. Vera ceased being able to distinguish the sounds emerging from her mouth between “please” and “stop” and wordless cries of agony. She’d never felt this sort of pain in all her life.
She found new words when he released his thumb from her thigh, slick with her blood.
“Help! Please, help!” She screamed these loudly, praying that anyone might be passing near enough to hear.
Thomas leaned the weight of his body on top of hers. Vera shuddered, remembering that this man had once reminded her of her father. “I locked the door. No one is anywhere near here. Not tonight.” His mouth was so close to Vera’s ear that she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.
“Why are you doing this?” Vera wailed through her sobs.
He didn’t answer. He dragged the knife’s edge up her bodice and across her breast as if spreading butter over bread, pressing hard enough to pick up bits of green fuzz from her dress as he scraped it to her shoulder, where he stopped, a fresh gleam of malice in his eye. Vera forced herself to face him, allowing all her fear to show, hoping against hope that it would help him see a person and not the temptress he’d conjured in his mind.
“Please, don’t,” she cried. It was the only play Vera had at the moment, and it was the wrong one.
Thomas smirked without mercy. He relished her terror. Again, he tipped the knife’s hilt upward and pressed its point against her skin. He stabbed her shoulder to the hilt with the same tormenting pace as before.
Vera wished she would pass out, that the pain would end, but he seemed to be aiming to puncture her body carefully, causing as much agony as he could without rendering her unconscious. When he pulled the knife free and wiped it clean on her dress, she gathered her energy and surged against him. It was to no avail. He had too much of an advantage of size and position.
Thomas threw his leg back over her. He headbutted her against the stone floor to stop her flailing and screaming. The second blow to her head was enough. She wasn’t entirely conscious anymore. Thomas pressed the knife to her throat with one hand and held both her hands pinned to the ground above her head with the other.
“Don’t thrash about, or I might just slip,” he said with startling calm as he slashed a tiny cut under Vera’s chin as if to show her. She groaned and felt a pool forming beneath the back of her head. Some rational part of her mind wondered if it was blood.
She only half realized in her dazed stupor that he’d shifted, that her hands weren’t pinned to the floor. He’d released them, instead groping down her body, grabbing her breast, and then toying at the top of her thigh. The knife was also gone from her throat. With that hand, he fumbled at the fastenings of his pants. He meant to take every morsel of her being.
Vera whimpered. As the sound left her lips, the last of her resolve to fight slipped away with it. She wasn’t a brilliant strategist queen. She was nobody. And she had failed at the one purpose of her existence. She couldn’t even be a vessel for Guinevere’s memory. What did any of it matter? She went still. Her flood of pleas trickled to silence.
Vera was going to die here.
You are more than a vessel.
She heard the words in her shattered mind as clearly as if someone had said them in her ear. A current, potent and electric, surged from Vera’s core to her fingertips. Her free fingertips. Thomas continued to struggle with his trousers. Where moments ago, she’d been ready to surrender, now her instincts screamed at her to act.
Vera groped wildly around her head, searching for anything she could grab, and her fingers closed on something that easily fit in her palm. Her hair splayed across her face, blocking her view.
Distantly, she heard a shout from the front of the chapel as she swung her arm at Thomas and made contact.
It was all so quick. He wasn’t on top of her anymore. Vera was free. She lifted her head a fraction, and her hair fell away from her eyes. Arthur stood above her, having bodily thrown Thomas off her. Thomas had tumbled backward over the destroyed statue and now clung to the lifeless stone, trying to heft himself back up. Arthur’s sword was drawn, and the last vestige of rage hadn’t yet fallen from his face as he stared at Thomas in shock.
What had been a monster beyond reckoning was now replaced by a terrified man, barely clinging to life. In his attempt to rise, Thomas only made it to his knees. His eyes were clear and filled with fright. He clutched at his throat as blood gushed in horrible voluminous squirts between his fingers.
Vera rolled over onto her knees and pushed herself up, transfixed, as Thomas’s breaths grew shallower, and his eyes bulged while he gurgled. He opened his mouth, and blood dumped from it as freely as if from an upended bucket.
It was perhaps only seconds of this sputtering, gasping, and squelching that felt an eternity. They echoed through the chapel’s pristine acoustics, a chorus that was the song of death. As the stretches of silence between his breath lengthened, the color drained from Thomas’s face before he collapsed, wide-eyed and blood-drenched and completely still on top of the broken statue.
Vera’s eyes flashed to Arthur’s sword, shining and clean, reflecting brilliantly in the dim light. She looked down at what her hand had found in desperation: Thomas’s small knife. The knife he’d wiped clean on her dress that was now freshly bathed in ruby-red blood.
Vera stared at Thomas’s body, not initially able to grasp that she now looked upon a corpse. His face was pressed against the statue’s pregnant belly so that his cheek was mashed up next to his vacantly staring eyes, as lifeless as the stone beneath him. Blood trickled from a mouth hung slack.
