"They are already like you." The words fall one after another, unhurried. "Quick to turn. Quick to cast stones at what they do not understand and call it sin. They take what you give them and shape it into something harder."
The mother’s sob turns desperate, her arms tightening around the children, pulling them closer, as though she might hide them within herself, fold them back into something untouched.
"They learn from you. They grow into what you are. Into what you have always been."
The smallest child cries harder, burying their face against her, their small hands clutching at fabric, at anything that might hold.
"You said it yourself," I murmur. "Evil must be cut out at the root."
My head inclines, once.
Lucian moves.
It is quick. The children first.
A blur of motion, too fast to follow, their cries cut short in the same breath they rise, their small bodies falling without time to form it. The sound they make when they strike the floor is almost nothing, swallowed by the stillness that follows.
The woman screams without voice.
The man lunges, but it ends before it begins, his body folding in on itself, limbs breaking at angles that cannot hold, his breath crushed from him in a sound that does not become a word.
Blood spreads.
It finds the children.
It gathers.
The woman’s voice breaks into something unrecognizable as Lucian turns to her, her hands still reaching, still grasping for what is already gone. He does not linger.
The room falls silent.
Doors open before we reach them now. Voices spill into the path, calling names that go unanswered, warnings that come too late. Shapes move through the dark—men with torches, women clutching shawls to their throats, bare feet striking the earth as they run without direction, without knowing where safety might still be found.
There is none.
Bodies lie where they fell.
Some half-hidden in shadow, others thrown plainly across the path, limbs wrong, faces turned toward nothing. Blood darkens the ground in uneven patches, soaking into the dirt, carried by footsteps that smear it further, until the path itself seems to bleed beneath us.
The last house stands ahead, bigger, broader, its door shut tight. Not for long.
My hand lifts. The wood gives beneath it as though it has been waiting for this touch, the latch yielding without sound, the door opening inward with a slow, deliberate ease.
I step inside.
"Come."
The air is thick. Fear sits in it, heavy enough to taste.
Radu stands first, his body held rigid, a knife gripped in his hand so tightly his knuckles pale. His father is beside him, broader, steadier in stance but not in breath. His mother cowers behind them, a torch lifted, its flame shaking, scattering light across their faces in fractured, trembling lines.
And behind Radu—
Elena.
Her fingers clutch at the back of his shirt, her face half-hidden, her eyes wide and fixed on me, on what stands in the doorway where something else should have been.
My smile comes easily. I feel it before I think it, the quiet curve of it, something that does not ask to be understood.
