“I was attacked by a beast,” her mother said, her voice straining and raspy and desperate; sweat glistened on her face like hot wax. “You must kill me, my dear child! You must—.”
Aramei wipes away a tear with the tip of her finger.
“Sissa,” Filipa says in her most loving voice. “Please….”
“I believe Mother was killed by one of them,” Aramei says. “I was only ten then and thought that the fever was only poisoning her mind, that it was making her say things.” She turns around. “But I believe in my heart that she was telling the truth.”
Filipa stands there, stunned by Aramei’s admission. For a long moment she can’t seem to say anything, but Aramei soon realizes that Filipa doesn’t believe her. Or, also afraid of the superstitions, she doesn’t want to believe her.
“I want you to stay away from this man,” Filipa says with a bit more care than before. “I beg of you. He is turning you into someone I do not know.”
Aramei, not wanting to create a divide between her and her sister, nods once to acknowledge Filipa.
But soon after, it would be Viktor himself who would cause Aramei to stay away from him.
Chapter 14
Balkan Mountains – Eastern Serbia – Winter 1761
JUST DAYS AFTER THE savage death of Vela, Aramei, bundled in her heaviest winter clothes and boots, sets out alone to meet Viktor in the forest. Last night he came to her window and asked that she meet him at sunrise past the eastern border of the valley that merges with the woods.
He told her to come alone.
She had spent many days with him alone and had grown to enjoy his company and the many things he was so willing to teach her. She hopes that on this day he will teach her more, maybe of hunting the black wolves that Viktor spoke of, those that keep killing the village’s livestock, the ones that killed her horse and left nothing but half of the carcass behind.
Aramei tucks her knife down into the front of her coat where it’s hidden well behind the thick fabric. Although she trusts Viktor and has no reason not to, she has always at least carried her knife along. It gives her a sense of security even if she’s fully aware that he could easily overpower her if he wanted to.
She ignores the fact that she has any reason to carry a knife around him at all, makes herself believe it’s just precautionary when truly her heart knows something her mind isn’t telling her.
She slips out before Filipa wakes up, but that was always an easy thing to do because Filipa had always been a heavy sleeper and never likes to get out of bed early if she can help it.
Thirty minutes of walking in the frigid winter air, Aramei sees Viktor’s figure approaching her in the distance. She raises her gloved hand to wave at him and her smile brightens. She pulls her woven hat tighter around the edges of her face, trying to warm her ears.
“You came,” Viktor says, but he’s not smiling back. Nothing about his face suggests that their meeting will be like any of the others and instinctively Aramei’s hand disappears underneath her coat. She looks all around her without moving her head, wondering what’s caused him to appear so alarmed.
He moves to stand in front of her, the thickly-packed snow crunching under his leather boots.
“You must leave these mountains,” he says with a forceful urgency. “You cannot stay here.”
Aramei shakes her head, perplexed by not only his demeanor, but now his words as well.
She takes one step backwards, her eyes darting all around every which way.
“Why, Viktor? Why do you say these things?”
He steps toward her, closing that one-foot she just created, but she doesn’t move. “Because I must,” he says. “Come with me. You will be safe under my protection.”
“No…,” she shakes her head once more, taking yet another step back, her face hardened by doubt. “I cannot just leave my family, I—”
“Milady, you have to.” He reaches out and takes a hold of her shoulders and she freezes with fear. “Please trust in me.”
Aramei jerks her body back, forcing his hands away from her and she takes two steps to the left.
“You expect me to leave my father and my sister to go somewhere with you because it’s not safe for me here?” she says, her small voice rising with every syllable. “Yet you won’t tell me why. And worse, you would want me to leave my family behind?”
She’s put off by the very thought of it, were it not for that she might’ve actually listened to him.
Viktor lets out a deep, heavy breath and brings his bare hands up in front of him, balling them into fists. But then he seems to think better of what appeared to Aramei as some kind of impending outburst, and he lets his fingers unfold from his palms. The soft lines around his mouth are deepened only briefly, accentuated by the scruff of his facial hair. He has grown a long, dark goatee since the summer and he wears it braided now; a heavy weave of hair that winds down to the top of his chest. His handsome green eyes stare at her under dark brown eyebrows and a matching frame of hair that falls around his face and drapes his broad shoulders.
“A war draws closer to this valley every day,” he says, softening his hardened eyes, but not his voice. “I do not care about any soul in these villages except for yours and I mean to save it.”
“But it is my soul to save,” she says, her eyebrows hardening. “What war, Viktor? The Turks? Russia? Who could be invading now?”
Viktor reaches out a hand, but pulls away when he sees that she quietly detracts from it.
“This is a war of a different kind,” he says. “Between my people and those who were once my kin.”
Aramei senses that there is something hidden in his words, but it’s too vague to give her any reason to probe further. She buries her hands inside the sleeves of her long coat, each hand shoved in the opposite sleeve, and tightens her arms over her chest to shut out the freezing air.
“Aramei, listen to me,” his voice grows intolerant and it only makes her more leery of him. “If you stay here you will die. I can help you...you have to leave with me.”
“Not without my family!” she shouts; a wisp of visible breath spats from her lips like a puff of smoke. “Why do I feel like you are lying to me? Why can you not understand that my family is more important to me than my own life?” Her hands break free from her sleeves and she motions them out in front of her, her once gentle face now misshapen by confusion and disappointment. “And if you cared for me at all…Viktor, you would not ask me to leave them.”
Viktor’s face falls underneath his winter scruff, the tense look in his eyes vanquished by something deeper. He takes a deep breath and suddenly kneels in front of her in the snow; one knee is bent upward, the other lying pressed against the ground. He reaches out his arms to her in a desperate, pleading display, “I beg of you to come with me…because…I have fallen in love with you, Aramei of the Valley, and because of who I am, your family will never approve of our joining.”
Aramei’s eyes grow wide. Her breath is caught in her chest and she feels like she’s lost control of her thoughts suddenly. Absently, she shakes her head over and over as if to deny his admission on her ears.
“Love?” she says, unbelieving. “No…Viktor, I never meant…I never meant to lead you to love me. Forgive me, please, for it was not my intention. I take full blame. Forgive me.” Her backward steps become more numerous and her fears more profuse. She had never even remotely contemplated love with Viktor. She never visualized the two of them sharing more than company and friendship. Aramei had only ever wanted to become something more than a wife of the valley, she wanted to see the world and her dreams had only ever been occupied by travel and experience, but she rarely had time to dream of love.
Her idea of love was freedom.
“I’m sorry,” she says again and goes to leave, barely turning her back to him because there’s still this strange feeling scratching away at the back of her mind, warning her that she isn’t safe, that even though he has professed his love for her, that it is not without danger.
Viktor, unable to retain his dominant emotions, reaches out quickly and grabs her by the back of her coat. She gasps and her heart solidifies like metal inside her chest; for a moment it refuses to beat. Her green eyes are wide with fear as she looks up into his angry face horribly warped by rejection.
Aramei looks down quickly at his hand as it makes its way to her wrist, his strong fingers clutched around her tiny bone with enough force to cause her pain. She tries to jerk her hand away, but his grip is like iron and she can’t move it.
“You’re hurting me!” she cries out. “Let go!”
Viktor thrusts her body forward and their chests slam against one another. She can feel the heat of his breath all over her face, making it feel like a layer of sweat has formed over the surface of her skin. “You refuse me?” he spats with venom in his voice. Her heart slams against her ribcage, the blood shooting through her veins like scalding hot water. Her lungs would be heaving rapidly if she could pull her chest away from his, but the weight of him restricts them, as if she were pinned to the ground with a large rock on her chest.
“I said let go!” She screams out, and half a second later her free hand comes up against his face, her fingernails digging into the skin under his eyes and along his cheekbones, but it doesn’t seem to faze him.
A deep growl reverberates through his body and he stares down into her tear-streaked face as a man she has never met, one that had never been kind to her. One she had mistakenly grown to revere. This is a man with a darker soul, one who she never would’ve befriended if she knew the true depths of his real self. She struggles in his grasp like a butterfly whose wings are trapped between his powerful fingers. Tears barrel from her eyes and her heart beats so fast now that she briefly pictures it exploding. Is that what he wants? Would Viktor rather see her dead than to see her run away from him?
The thought intensifies her fears just when she thought she couldn’t be more afraid.
In a split second, Aramei, without having any sense of plan, instinctively thrusts her free hand into her coat and fumbles for the hilt of her knife. Once she has it, her hand comes out of the confines of the thick fabric and the glint of the silver blade is distinct enough that it catches Viktor off-guard. And in only a half a second more when he pulls away from her, Aramei plunges the blade right into his chest. She screams out as the pain of realization devours her, as she sees what she has done, what she knew she had to do.
Viktor clutches his hands over the wound and the bloody knife tumbles into the snow.
Aramei stumbles backward and falls, but she can’t stop looking at him, peering deeply into his eyes as if frighteningly mesmerized by them in their final moments of life. She tries to look away but it’s as if Death himself is forcing her to look, punishing her by refusing her any reprieve.
Viktor falls to his knees and looks down at his hands in shock and disbelief. Blood pours out of the wound and oozes in-between his fingers; a pool of red soaks up in the snow as his body begins to lean forward. “Why?!” Aramei screams out at him. “Why would you make me do this?” She nearly chokes on her own tears.