“You need to hide this in your dress, get it back to the house, and we’ll destroy it there.”
Perdita looked at the shirt wearily, clearly wanting to do anything else, but knew there was no other choice. So she shivered and took the shirt from her sister, careful not to touch the drying blood.
“What now?” Romeo asked the question that had been on all of their minds.
What now?Fola thought as she looked up at the bloodied horn protruding from the head of the taxidermy rhino that had just pierced her father’s neck. She remembered their awful lessons in taxidermy from years ago, how her father always liked to remove the horns of the animals he slaughtered…
That was it. That was what she needed to do.
Fola wouldn’t place the burden of dismantling and getting rid of the bloodied horn on her siblings. She’d handle it, like she handled everything else. She would get rid of the evidence. Keep her family from ruin. She just hoped that no one would notice the difference between it and all the other dead creatures on the walls.
“Now we figure out alternate timelines,” Fola said, already thinking of how she might destroy theweapon. Animal horns were made of keratin, softer than bone and thus easier to grind into dust. “We need to figure out places we could have been instead of down here. Try to stay largely unseen when we head back up. Hopefully the drones and the fireworks will keep the attentions of the guests. And the lights on the yacht have been dimmed for the display, so that should work in our favor,” she continued through bleary eyes, refusing to make eye contact with her father’s corpse. “But most importantly, we need not to draw any suspicion toward us. From this point on we treat our false alibis as the truth. We pretend that thisneverhappened,” she finished with as much certainty as she could muster, but it was all a lie. She had no faith in this strategy working; there was no real science behind it. They very well could still be doomed.
But she would do all she could to make sure they wouldn’t be.
Their plan was far from perfect; in fact there was a strong possibility that they’d all be behind bars by Monday morning. They needed a whole ocean of luck to somehow stay in the good graces of the universe now.
Everything from that point on was a haze of uncertainty.
They had to get comfortable in that uncertainty. Things were never going to be the same.
There was only one thing that was certain now.
Their father was dead and they were to blame.
THE AFTERMATH
THE BUTTON MANOR
Several weeks had gone by since the death of Leontes Button and the arrest of Henry Xu.
The halls of the Button Manor had never been so quiet. The Button Manor, which was technically Perdita’s house per their father’s will, now belonged to all of them. As coexecutor, Perdita had decided to reject her father’s will, and put all of their names on their house as a finalpiss offto him. She also decided to give a significant portion of her inheritance to people like her mother—setting up her own charities to end the exploitation of vulnerable women and refugees. Doing all of this was the only thing that made things feel right in the twisted reality in which they all resided.
The Manor and its grounds had been shut off to the world ever since the funeral, including all press. The occupants of the Manor, the Button siblings, hardly came out of their rooms. Their meals were delivered to their doors by the small handful of staff who hadn’t yet quit, as though they were prisoners in their own home. This of course was not the case, but the staff knew they would not be in the mood to sit around a dining table and play happy family.
Each and every one of them was too destroyed to show their faces, anyway.
They’d all seen the papers though, and the headlines the media were running about the tragedy that had befallen the Buttons.
Octavius read the newspapers obsessively, more than anyone, keeping himself up to date with all the details of Henry’s trial.
BILLIONAIRE BLUDGEONED BY BUTLERwas the headline that ran in theDaily Trailpaper, which had bothered Octavius greatly, seeing as Henry wasnota butler.
Their father had referred to Henry as his secretary, but they all knew that Henry was so much more. Henry, who had been more of a father to them than Mr. Button ever had. Henry, who, for whatever reason, had lied and taken the fall for their terrible crime. Now he too was gone from their lives.
Octavius really hated Henry for being the one to take the fall. Hated him even more because the secretary refused to let any of them visit him in prison or speak to him. Henry refused to use the Buttons’ legal team too. It was like he was trying to do everything in his power to ensure that he’d be the only one sentenced.
They’d all tried to speak to Chief Waxler to ask for some kind of plea or appeal. Unbeknownst to his siblings, Octavius had even gone to Waxler to try and turn himself in, in exchange for Henry.
But Waxler had replied,If you know what’s good for you, son, you’d all stop this. Henry has confessed, Henry will stand trial and serve time. It is what Leontes would have preferred… It has been agreed.
That’s when Octavius knew that even if there was explicit evidence or footage of what happened that night, the chief was not going to help besmirch the Button name, especially not when the Button Estate, per the fine print of the will, was still a massive funder of the police department.
None of this was fair.
Octavius couldn’t even ask Henry why he was doing all this; all he could do was sit in the discomfort of his quiet room, where the versions of himself trapped behind his wallpaper screamed on a constant loop all day and all night. Like they were doing now.
He couldn’t bear being in his room anymore. He threw the newspaper down and for the first time in weeks opened his bedroom door and walked out.
