FOUR DAYS LATER.
"Since we are born of His breath and shaped from the earth, we walk this life knowing our steps are borrowed. From dust we came, and to dust we shall one day return, not as loss, but as a promise fulfilled. Death is not a betrayal of life, but the quiet doorway through which we return to our Creator.
Our brother Robert, has crossed that threshold ahead of us. He has laid down the weight of this world and answered the call we will all one day hear. Though his absence leaves an ache that words cannot mend, his journey reminds us that our time here is sacred, fleeting, and immeasurably precious.
So let us live with intention. Let us love more deeply, forgive more freely, and walk humbly in the light we have been given. For none of us knows the day or the hour when we, too, will be called home. Until then, may we honor his memory by preparing our hearts, tending our souls, and walking our paths with grace, faith, and compassion."
We stood at the cemetery, laying Robert into the earth. The same Robert who had died in the house I sent Apollo to burn four days ago. The words floated above us like clean, polished stones, smooth enough to hold, heavy enough to bruise if dropped. Holy. Comforting. Almost convincing. Soil waited patiently at the edge of the grave, as if it already knew the truth the prayers could not touch.
Robert was more than an employee to Davis, just as Apollo was more than muscle to me. Robert had been his right-hand man, his loyal soldier, the kind of man who didn't ask questions and didn't need reminders. He had been there longer than most, trusted deeper than family. Losing him cracked something in Davis that even grief struggled to hide.
And hell, it wasn't just Davis. Robert's death shook me too. I swear it did, i mean.. the man had been around so long he felt stitched into the edges of our lives, a familiar presence you stop noticing until it's ripped away. Family, in the loosest and most dangerous sense of the word.
Standing there, listening to prayers and promises about borrowed breath and sacred time, I felt the bitter humor of it all coil tight in my chest. Accidents, they called it. Tragic. Unforeseeable.
But accidents, I knew, don't knock. They don't give warnings. They just arrive, uninvited, and demand a body. And what happened to poor Robert was just an accident.
After the pastor's final words dissolved into the open air, the casket began its slow descent. Rope sliding, wood creaking, gravity doing what it always does. One by one, we stepped forward to offer the small, symbolic violence of soil.
Davis went first. He was, for all intents and purposes, Robert's only family. I watched the way his shoulders stiffened as he bent, the way his hand lingered in the dirt as if it might answer him back. When he finally let the soil fall, he didn't move right away. He stood there, staring into the grave, as though he were measuring something…. loss, maybe, or vengeance.
Then it was my turn.
I slipped off my sunglasses and let them hang against my chest, suddenly aware of how exposed my eyes felt. I gathered a handful of soil, dark and cool, and released it. The sound it made was soft, almost polite, which somehow felt crueler. I crossed myself out of habit more than faith and stepped aside to stand next to my husband, watching the handful of mourners offer their final, awkward goodbyes.
"Babra, we are at war," Davis said quietly, his voice trembling beneath the weight of restrained fury. His voice stayed low, controlled, the kind of calm that came only after violence had already been decided.
He paused, letting the silence do the threatening for him.
"Whoever lit this fire will learn what it means to reach for what's mine. They touched me. They touched my family." His jaw tightened, breath steady, merciless. "But Robert's blood is the price they sealed their fate with."
A faint, humorless exhale followed. "They won't die quickly. They won't die forgotten. Every second will teach them why this war should never have begun."
Each word landed with intention, sharpened and deliberate. He wasn't speaking to be heard. He was sentencing someone.
Me.
Then he looked at me. Not in passing. Not by accident. He really looked.
I couldn't hold his gaze. How could I, when I was the invisible hand that had drawn all this blood? The quiet architect of this grief. I was standing beside a man who had just promised me a slow, unforgettable death, delivering my own eulogy without knowing my name belonged in it.
So I turned away, fixing my gaze on Robert's casket as it sank deeper into the ground, wood disappearing into earth like a secret being buried alive. But my mind had already splintered, thoughts ricocheting in every direction, each one sharper, louder, more lethal than the last.
I might as well have climbed into that casket myself because either way, I was already a dead woman.
"My condolences," one of the mourners said as she approached us.
At that exact moment, my phone vibrated inside my purse, a quiet insistence against the hush of grief. I excused myself and stepped aside, leaving my husband to accept sympathy from a woman whose face would soon blur into all the others.
"Hello?" I answered casually, my voice steady, unguarded.
Then the caller laughed.
It was not warm or accidental. It was deep, slow, and mocking, a laugh that lingered because it wanted to be heard.
"Babra," the voice said at last. It was male and distorted, clearly altered through a voice changer. It could have belonged to anyone. "You are a fascinating woman. And I mean that in the most entertaining way."
My chest tightened. I pulled the phone from my ear and checked the number, then looked back at my husband, who was still speaking politely, unaware of the ground shifting beneath my feet. I lifted the phone again.
"How can you stand beside your husband and mourn with him, when you are the one responsible for his beloved Robert's death?"
The words hit so hard my heart seemed to stop. Sound drained from the world. The wind, the murmurs, the footsteps, all of it vanished, leaving only that sentence echoing inside me.
I turned my head slowly from left to right, my eyes combing through the crowd, every face suddenly suspect. The voice still rang in my ears, close enough to feel deliberate. Too close. Maybe the caller was nearby. Maybe he was already here, hiding in plain sight among the mourners, dressed in grief like everyone else.
My gaze snagged on a man a few feet ahead, phone pressed to his ear, his back half-turned to me. My pulse tightened. I watched him closely, willing him to slip, to give himself away. Then he ended the call and glanced back, just briefly, his expression blank, almost knowing. As if to say no. Not me.
My attention shifted again. Near the cemetery gate stood a woman, her posture rigid, her face tilted slightly downward. I studied her mouth, the subtle movements of her lips, searching for a rhythm that might match the voice I'd heard. My chest held its breath as I watched.
But it couldn't be her.
Which meant the voice did not need to be close at all.
And that realization unsettled me more than anything else.
"Who the fuck is this?"
I asked the question evenly, carefully, though inside me everything was colliding, heat and panic and fury twisting together as I fought not to unravel right there.
"Don't worry," he replied, unhurried, almost amused. "You'll know me." His calm was unsettling, as if time itself bent to his convenience.
I turned just then, my eyes finding my husband. He was finishing a conversation with the woman beside him, nodding politely, unaware. When his gaze lifted and met mine, something in my chest tightened.
"We're going to be friends," the voice continued, smooth and intimate. "Good friends. Because you… you're a fascinating woman." A pause, deliberate. "And I like fascinating people."
The line went dead before i could say anything.
For a moment I couldn't breathe. I stood there, frozen, forcing my face into a weak, practiced smile as my husband started toward me. I couldn't let him see it. I couldn't let him know. Slowly, carefully, I lowered the phone from my ear, willing my hands to steady.
Ting.
The sound cut through me. A notification. A video.
My fingers trembled as I
opened it.
And what I saw shattered me completely.