Her fingers dig into the cloth. Her breath shakes. Her voice clings to something that no longer answers.
My hand lifts in a small gesture.
Enough.
Lucian steps forward.
For a fraction of a moment, hope flickers again in her eyes—misplaced, stubborn, refusing to die where it should.
Then his hand closes at her throat. The blade follows.
Her breath spills out of her in a wet, broken gasp, hands flying to her neck as though she might hold herself together, as though she might keep what is leaving her from going. Blood slips through her fingers, fast, too fast, soaking the front of her nightgown, spilling down her arms, dripping from her wrists in steady, quiet lines.
Her fingers loosen, slide. Fall. Her body collapses at my feet, her head striking the floor with a hollow thud, her hair fanning around her as though she has simply lain down to rest.
The blood spreads, reaches the hem of my dress.
The door remains open behind us.
People still run, shadows breaking from doorways, from corners, from places where they thought themselves hidden. Some clutch children. Some carry nothing. All move toward the same place.
The church.
Before it, the stake still stands, blackened, split, the wood charred and twisted where the fire had taken it, where it had held. I do not look at it for long. The shape is familiar, distant, like something seen once, long ago, like a bruise that once ached and no longer does.
We pass it, and I feel it beside me—the shift in him. Something coiled beneath the stillness, something that remembers, that answers to what stands before us. The air around him tightens, the night itself seeming to lean away, to make space for what moves beneath his skin.
The square stretches before us, filled now with what remains—limbs bent wrong, mouths open where breath no longer comes, eyes fixed on a sky that does not look back.
The living ones do not see us until we are already among them. The first falls before he reaches the steps, his body striking the stone, the sound swallowed by the next cry, the next movement, the next breaking.
It does not stop.
Feet slip on blood, hands grasp at one another, at themselves, at the open space that narrows too quickly as bodies press toward the steps. Voices rise, pleading, calling out to the man within as though he might still open for them, as though the door has not already begun to close.
It shuts.
Wood meets stone with a final sound as the latch falls.
Those closest pound against it, fists striking, voices breaking into prayers, into cries, into something that fractures before it can be understood. The others gather behind them, pushing, pressing, trying to force their way through what will not yield.
"Father—please—"
"Open—"
Inside, something shifts, but silence answers. Popa Dorin has chosen.
Lucian laughs, almost delighted.
A man turns too late, his mouth still forming a prayer as his hand closes around his jaw and breaks it sideways, teeth scattering across the stone before he is thrown back into the others. They stumble, fall, tangle together, and he is among them, tearing through them as though they are nothing more than reeds beneath a blade.
A woman slips, her body dragged down by the weight of those behind her. She reaches up, fingers clawing at the steps, at the edge of the door that will not open. Lucian’s hand finds her ankle, pulls. Her body slides back through the blood, her nails scraping uselessly against stone before he breaks her, the sound lost beneath the others.
The cries thin, then finally stop, the steps falling silent except for the slow, steady drip that remains.
The same wood stirs beneath my fingers as every other door they met, this one only larger. Heavier.
As though that might have been enough.
