"Please," her pleas turn to desperate cries. "I did not— I did not—"
I draw the fabric over her head.
It settles there, clinging where the damp of her breath catches it, shaping itself over her features until she is no longer a face, no longer a person, only a form that moves beneath it.
Her hands rise, clutching at it, panic blooming without use.
I turn before the sound has even begun behind me, already reaching for the door.
Her voice breaks once—muffled, strangled beneath the cloth—then fractures entirely into something that no longer carries words, only fear, only the body’s last, useless attempt to escape what has already been decided.
It does not last long; nothing does.
Outside, the night waits.
I step out into it without pause, without breath, without anything left that might turn me back, and I do not stop as the sounds behind me fade into silence.
The next door yields as easily as the first, the wood parting beneath my hand without resistance. The house breathes out its darkness to meet me, its silence thick, waiting.
"Come."
He enters.
Doamna Marica does not scream at first. She stares, her hands still dusted in flour, her mouth parting slowly as she takes in the sight of me, of what stands in the doorway where safety once was. Sound comes only when he reaches her—late, thin, breaking as his hand closes and her body folds, the table overturning beneath her weight, her blood spilling across the dough she had not yet shaped.
The door closes behind us.
We walk.
Another house. Another threshold. Another voice rising, cut short before it can form words that might matter.
Mihai the miller answers the door with an iron blade in hand, his face drawn tight with something that might have been courage if it had not trembled so visibly. He does not speak. He strikes.
The millstone outside still turns faintly in the wind, a slow, grinding sound that continues even as his body is broken, even as the blood spreads beneath him in dark, widening shapes.
We walk again, door after door. The night does not change. The village unfolds itself to us, offering its rooms, its beds, its corners where people gather and whisper and believe themselves unseen. I open. He enters. Blood gathers. Silence follows.
At one door, we find them waiting.
A man and a woman, their bodies pressed before the smaller shapes behind them, arms spread as though they might shield what cannot be shielded. Their children cling to them, faces buried, voices trembling into soft, broken cries that fill the room before we even cross into it.
"Please—" the father says at once, his hands lifting not to fight, but to beg. "Not them—take me—take us—but not them—"
Lucian does not move. He waits.
Thechildren look at me. Their faces are wet, streaked with tears, their eyes too wide, too bright, their breaths coming in small, panicked bursts. One of them clutches the other’s hand so tightly the colour drains beneath the skin.
Something passes, then stills.
"I was someone’s child too."
My voice does not rise. It does not break.
The woman sobs, shaking her head. "They are innocent—they are—"
"They are yours," I cut in.
My gaze does not leave them.
