Not that he would. The priest knows my family, our history, and the power of our name. He would never cross my father, not for all the gold in the Vatican. Gold isn’t useful if you’re dead.
My father leads me up the steps, my legs shaking as I silently beg him to stop. But those pleas are answered in the same way the voiced ones were. Ignored. Overruled. Forgotten.
“This isn’t about you, Lucretia!” he’d snapped at me when I begged him to let me return to school, to call off the wedding. “This is about our family!”
“Treat her well,” my father says stiffly as he grips my hand and pushes it toward Horatio.
Horatio inclines his head in a gracious nod, then takes my cold, shaking fingers. His eyes meet mine through the veil. Where I’m falling apart, he’s confident. Of course he is. He’s joining the most powerful family in this city. He’s gotten exactly what he wanted, exactly what he’s paid for.
“Bella.” He smiles as the music stops, the echoes of the organ bouncing around before falling into silence as the wedding guests sit with creaky knees and breathy sighs.
I can barely think, barely stay upright as he grips my hand tightly and turns to the priest.
“Shall we begin?” the old man in the ridiculous hat asks.
“Please.” Horatio is still smiling, happy in his triumph.
The church is silent now. My head is buzzing like an angry hive. I swallow my bile again and just try to breathe.
Noise comes from behind me; no doubt my rowdy cousins are up to their usual bullshit, even at a wedding, even when I’m falling to pieces. All it will take is one look from my mother, and they will get in line like they alwa—I jump when something pops nearby, like the sound of someone hitting a snare for only one tart beat.
I feel something splash against my veil and body. Then the hand that was holding mine too tightly loosens and lets go.
Horatio falls.
I blink and look down. My dress is painted with a spray of crimson, red dotting the satin and lace.
The cathedral is no longer silent. Women are screaming and men yelling. The priest has ducked behind his podium.
I turn and realize the noise I’d heard wasn’t my rowdy cousins. It was the men with assault rifles spreading out across the church, their guns pointed upward or into the crowd. Some of them are firing, the blasts loud in the marbled space. I stare, horrified, as they seem to pick out certain men from the groom’s side and force them to kneel in a row, rifles pointed at the backs of their heads. An older woman has fallen to her knees and wails, and I can only guess it’s Horatio’s mother. More shots. More blood.
It’s slow motion and somehow sped up all at once. None of it makes sense—not the killers in black, not the blood, not the screams. I can only blink, my mind failing to comprehend what’s happening.
It’s chaos, and everyone would be stampeding out the doors if they weren’t guarded by men wielding guns. There’s nowhere to go. We’re trapped, and Horatio’s brothers lie dead on the steps just beneath me. Wiped out.
The screams somehow pull me back to reality, to the present. They send a shock through me, and I realize I haven’t been breathing. My knees threaten to give again as I take in the barbaric enormity of what’s happened in a mere fraction of a moment as I gasp in a breath.
But my eye is drawn up and away from the carnage. A man is striding down the center aisle, his gaze on me. Pale eyes, dark hair—he’s wearing a tux with a red rose in his lapel, a gun in one of his hands. It’s strange what you notice in life-or-death situations, I suppose. Because I focus on the rose, on the tiny bit of beauty that catches my eye. Not on the groomsmen who lie in pools of blood or my intended who weakly tries to crawl away.
I look at the rose as it comes closer, as the man who’s wearing it climbs the steps and aims his gun at Horatio, then pulls the trigger two times. It makes the same pop sound I heard earlier.
The guests scream again, their screeches echoing around the beautiful cathedral and bouncing off the gilt ceiling tiles and the Byzantine fresco of Mary.
Still, I look at the rose. Maybe because I want to see something beautiful right before I die, before a bullet rips through me the same way it did through Horatio. Will the man with the rose shoot me several times to make sure I’m dead, the same way he did to my groom? I swallow hard, my tongue thick and my ears ringing. Even so, I keep my eyes on the silky petals, the edges of them darker than the center. Maybe it’s better this way. It was only last night I was thinking of doing it myself to escape this day. My life was going to be over the moment the vows were finished, so why not end it sooner? But now, now I realize I don’t want to die. It doesn’t matter though, because I no longer have a choice.