Married to My Mourning

The church smelled like lilies and things left unsaid. Nora stood at the front of it and felt nothing — which terrified her more than the grief she knew was waiting on the other side. Elena's casket was white. She had picked it herself, from a laminated catalog in a funeral home on Meridian Street, while a kind man with soft hands handed her tissues she didn't use. She'd chosen white because Elena had loved it. Elena had always said black was for people who gave up. Nora was starting to understand that sometimes people don't get to choose. The service was short. Elena had been twenty-three and had not yet accumulated the kind of life that required a long eulogy. What Nora wanted to say — the real things, the angry things, the I told you to call me back and I should have driven to your apartment that night — she kept folded behind her sternum where they couldn't embarrass either of them. She thanked the pastor. She shook hands she didn't recognize. She watched people cry who hadn't spoken to her sister in years and felt something sharp move through her that she refused to name. It was only when the crowd had thinned, when the lilies had gone waxy in the heat and the light through the stained glass had shifted from gold to gray, that she felt it — the distinct sensation of being watched. Not the soft, sympathetic watching of mourners. Something else. He was standing near the back, beside a pillar, in a suit so dark it seemed to absorb the light around it. Tall. Still. The kind of still that wasn't rest — it was restraint. Like a thing that had learned to hold itself in because it knew what it could do if it didn't. Nora didn't know his face. But she knew, the way you know a coming storm before the temperature drops, that he had not come here for the eulogy. He had come for her. She turned away. She helped carry the flowers to the car. She told Celia she was fine three times, which meant she wasn't, and Celia — bless her — counted the three and went quiet. The man was gone by the time she looked back. She told herself she'd imagined the weight of it. The way his eyes hadn't moved from her. The way he'd stood like someone who was used to rooms rearranging themselves around him. She was tired. She was grieving. The mind made things up. But at the repast, when the small rented hall was full of casseroles and low voices and the particular exhaustion of communal sadness, someone said her name. Not loudly. Not as a question. "Ms. Kane." She turned. He was closer than she expected. The suit was charcoal, not black — she noticed that now. His face was sharp in the way that expensive things were sharp, edges that looked accidental but weren't. Dark eyes. A jaw that had probably never done anything so careless as smile without cause. "I don't know you," she said. "No," he agreed. "But you will." The audacity of it, at a funeral, with her sister not yet in the ground — she felt her grief sharpen into something useful. "Whoever you are, this is not the place—" "My name is Damien Voss." He said it the way people said names that were supposed to mean something. And something in her memory stirred — a newspaper, a headline, a photograph that Elena had once closed her laptop over too quickly. Oh. Oh no. She kept her face still. She had been keeping her face still for three days. She was very good at it. "Elena knew you," Nora said. It wasn't a question. Something moved through his expression — there and gone, like a fish beneath dark water. "Yes." "Then you know she's dead." "I do." His voice didn't change. But his jaw did, just slightly, just once. "And I know why." The room was still loud around them. Celia was across the hall, watching with narrowed eyes over a paper plate of food. No one else seemed to notice the man who had walked into a grieving family's gathering like he owned the square footage. Maybe he did. Nora was beginning to understand she didn't know nearly enough. "What do you want?" she asked. Damien Voss looked at her with eyes that had clearly seen things they'd never apologize for, and said, very quietly, "I want to keep you alive, Ms. Kane. And I need something from you in return." She should have said no. She should have called someone, pointed to the door, done any of the reasonable things a reasonable person did when a crime lord showed up at their sister's funeral and proposed a transaction. Instead, she heard herself say: "Tell me what happened to Elena first." And he did. That was the moment everything changed — not because of what he told her, but because of the one detail he left out. The silence where a name should have been. The careful omission she wouldn't identify until it was far too late. She said yes to his arrangement. She didn't know yet that she was saying yes to the most dangerous thing she'd ever survived.