Cahira

Chapter 26 - I am sorry

"What's the deal with Rebeca?" Katherine asks, seeming nothing but bothered to need to find her.

"She may be dead right now." Dominic answers passing by her in a rush.

"She what?" Katherine yells.

I pass towards her too not wanting to explain her what's happening but Dominic already disappeared. Katherine grabs my forearm and makes me look at her worried expression. She's worried with Rebecca?

"Dominic went to the wrong place. He'll not find her in my room. Come." She says and picks me up without more words. I let out a little scream of surprise when she does it but her only reaction is start running. She doesn't even give me time time to close my eyes, so now I'm seeing everything around us in a blur not even knowing where I am going.

When she finally stops, dropping me on the floor which makes me hiss when I hit it, both in pain and annoyance - couldn't she just put me on the floor? -, we are in front of a wooden door. Behind me a spiral staircase is the only way to go down and the only little window - that's more a hole in the black stone wall than a real window - lets me see the forest that surrounds the castle in miniature. We're in the tower Dominic told me he would show me one day.

Katherine looks around for a moment, probably trying to find the key. When she doesn't find it, she takes two or three steps back and throws herself against the door making it shatter in thousands of wood shavings that fly in all directions. I scream, protecting my face from the shavings with my arms, but, luckily, they don't hit me.

And then I listen to Katherine roaring in fury. I enter, passing the destroyed door, to find Rebecca in the middle of the dark room, suspended from the ceiling by a rope around her neck that makes her body swirling slowly, her feet swinging without touching the ground. Her glassy green eyes wide open, tears still in her now pale cheeks, her mouth opened in a silent scream. Katherine is in her knees, the roar replaced by a painful scream of sadness, red tears falling from her eyes.

I feel my own eyes watering. Rebecca! It was too late to save her. Danton killed her. I feel someone's arms around me, trying to comfort me and instinctively I know they're Dominic's arms who appeared without any sound. I shake my head, tears falling down, and points to Katherine who is now crawled into a ball in the floor, sobbing, the wooden floor stained with her red blood tears.

"Katherine," Dominic whispers, pain in his voice. He comes closer to her, holding her body that now seems so fragile against his.

Katherine liked Rebecca, I understand, the surprise replacing for some seconds the pain I am feeling. She liked her enough to her death makes Katherine loose her mask of indifference.

Dominic is telling Katherine something that I can't listen. I come closer to Rebecca. There's no blood, no signals of violence. It's what many would call a clean death.

"I'm sorry," I say, my voice breaking. "I'm so sorry I couldn't make it in time." I don't know why she helped Danton. But I know she deserved a better life, a better end. She wanted to see the world and now she'll never can. She is dead. She is dead.

I hug her lifeless body, or try at least; her body too high to let me hug her properly. I grab the dagger in my boot but a hand grabs my wrist. I look up to see Katherine, her eyes deeply red, a tear-stained face.

"Let me do it," she asks, her voice also broken. I drop the dagger without words.

In a fluid movement, she throws the dagger that cuts the rope and sticks with a tutting noise on the wall. Rebecca's body falls like a rag doll, in Katherine's outstretched arms who holds her, tears of blood streaming down her face. And now it's her turn to apologize, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for everything." She keeps singing the words, faster and faster until they don't make sense anymore.