I listen to the mundane, maudlin creaking of those wheels and yet again I swear private vengeance on whoever has caused us all this much pain. Luke is going to be borderline impossible to handle now. He already liked to drink far too much, and indulge in recreational substances. He’d gotten clean, but how long will he stay that way with grief gnawing at him?
I know Aiden will stay strong, but I have to wonder how long he will be able to resist the darkness that must surely be growing by the hour. First he lost our parents, and now he loses the brother he raised. It must feel to him as though family is a very transient concept.
Myself? I do not need to worry. I know precisely what I am going to do. I am going to hunt the responsible parties down, and I am going to unleash the kind of cruelty on them that cannot be depicted in cinema due to legal regulations.
This funeral could have been packed, but we have elected to keep Teddy’s passing a secret.
We still do not know who killed him.
He had plenty of friends. Everybody loved him. But none of them were there at the end, and they don’t deserve to mourn him intimately now. We are the ones who have a part of ourselves forever gone. And we are the ones who are going to ensure the person who did this suffers.
“Someone’s here,” Luke grunts.
He’s being hypersensitive. He gets that way when he indulges in things he shouldn’t. Of course people are here, in the broader sense. This is a public cemetery. People are allowed to be here. We would rather they weren’t, but we can’t stop them passing through.
Luke has been agitated by the presence of strangers since the funeral began. If he had it his way, we’d shut down the whole city, tell all nine million of them to get the hell out so we could bury our brother.
Still, I glance in the direction his bloodshot blue eyes are staring. Aiden’s eyes follow as well.
There’s a figure standing a hundred or so feet away. She’s wearing a black coat and standing under a tree in a hapless attempt to avoid the rain. We might not have seen her, except for the way that the wind catches a corner of her coat and the lining is exposed. Looks like a red satin flag being flapped at us.
We turn back to the grave after a moment. There are a lot of reasons for a woman to be in a cemetery. None of them are pleasant, and we have no interest in interfering with other mourners.
Teddy’s coffin continues to squeak its way into the ground. They should really oil the mechanisms, but I suppose operating in these conditions makes it hard to maintain gears correctly.
“She’s still staring at us,” Aiden murmurs a minute or so later.
We turn our heads again. This time, when she sees us all looking, she turns and scurries into the weather. I feel my heart leap like a hunting dog sighting a bird going down.
“Follow her,” Aiden says. “Find out who she is.”
I know he is talking to me. By now, Luke has slumped to his knees by the grave. His filthy blond hair is hanging in a soaked, shaggy mess around his head because he’s refusing an umbrella, and it has started to rain more heavily. He wants to suffer, I think. Luke believes that if he suffers, things will improve. My personal beliefs are different. I believe that making others suffer will improve things for me.
Luke takes after our mother, as did Teddy. She was an artistic woman with a whimsical nature. She loved her babies intensely, and I know that being taken from us so early must have destroyed her more than actually dying did. I pray that she did not know it was happening. I hope one moment she was alive and full of sweet joy, and the next she was at rest. I hope that for her, and for Teddy.
Me, on the other hand, I follow in my grandfather’s mold. He was a stoic bastard whose name is still feared in certain Latvian villages. He was the one who insisted on coming to America and making something of himself. When it turned out that it was almost impossible to do that by strictly legal means, he turned to more creative modes.
The Levin family has run every kind of organized crime gambit there is. We are legit these days, of course, but our grandfather ran moonshine, guns, and anything else he could get his hands on. He was a one-of-a-kind man, and I like to think he lives on in me.
Aiden is more like our father was. Controlled. Precise. Specific. Words that should really only be used to describe an accountant, but when paired with his native dangerous aura… Aiden does not seem like he should be as frightening as he truly is. Foolish people underestimate him all the time. But they only make that mistake once.
I will not see my brother’s coffin reach the end of its journey, and for that I am grateful. I have seen enough. Too much. I have carried enough impotent grief. Following this woman gives me something to do.
I am good at this sort of thing. I keep a good distance, and I do not walk right behind her. If she happens to glance around, she will likely not notice me. I stay at a right angle behind her, triangulating her movement. It allows me to keep her in sight and over a little bit of distance, draw even with her and even get in front of her.
I am closer now than before, and can see her face from time to time. She is pretty. Very pretty. She has wide eyes that give her a perpetually innocent expression, and a full mouth that speaks to sin. She is young. Perhaps around Teddy’s age. I wonder if she was a friend. Or something more.
Levin men do not date much. Aiden does not have time, I am not often able to find a woman who can match my intellect, let alone my interests, and Luke, well, he is likely the exception, though he keeps quiet about it.
I am not so simple as to assume that any woman hanging around a grave is necessarily a girlfriend, however. Teddy was popular. He was liked by a lot of people at college. I suspect if this was one of his school connections, the cemetery would have been inundated with coeds.
It’s very possible that this cute little blonde with the short bob and the snub nose is something else altogether. Something closer to a spy. Plenty of people use attractive young women as runners. They are overlooked as potential threats usually. Traditionally, nobody would dare touch a woman, let alone use her in this way, but it’s 2026, and a lot of the old rules are changing in response to a world that doesn’t play by many, if any, anymore.
She looks over her shoulder repeatedly, nervous. I can practically feel her anxiety as she hurries away, head down. I wonder if she can feel me close. Some people have good prey senses. She certainly looks like she wants to go to ground as soon as possible.
It’s too late for her, though. She is on my radar. I have her scent, and I will not leave her tail until I know everything there is to know about her.
If she is known to Teddy, then she knows she shouldn’t have been at the cemetery. We, the family requested privacy and showing up to stand ominously at a distance is not really the definition of privacy. At the very least, she has been a naughty girl.
