AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Killing bad guys.
Someone had to do them, and I was willing.
I got a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for it, but my survivor guilt from my time in Afghanistan lingers.
Now, I have to use that resolve to make those responsible for my baby brother’s death pay.
CHAPTER 8
Natalia
One Month Earlier…
The dayof the funeral is a nightmare.
I’m a mess, pivoting between tears and sadness, or anger and dreams of violence. My pulse races as I think of Harrison O’Connor and his private club where Sherri went, and which led to her death. I want to search him out, confront him, and I want to slap him, kick him.
Scream at him.
See him fall from his high and mighty place among Manhattan’s rich and famous.
He consorts with Russian mafia types, drug dealers, drug importers, human traffickers, and who knows what else.
Why the FBI doesn’t arrest him for organized crime and racketeering I don’t know.
Maybe they’re watching him, waiting for the right time to strike. Or, more likely, he’s too powerful. His family’s toopowerful. His father has too many powerful friends among the elite of Manhattan’s legal and political community.
Whatever the case, I hate him with a vengeance that never seems to leave me.
I try to put that aside as Michelle and I get ready for the funeral. I curl her hair with a curling iron and she flatirons mine. We do our makeup together at the bathroom vanity, but frankly, our eyes are still too red from tears. It takes a lot of concealer to make either of us look presentable.
We wear black and it mirrors the way we both feel.
Like death.
When it’s time to leave to take our Uber to the church for the funeral mass, we give each other a hug, needing the warmth.
It’s going to be a long hard day.
We arrive at the church,one of the most beautiful in all of Manhattan. Sherri is Catholic, like me, but in a whole other denomination. Her family has been in the US for several hundred years, unlike mine, which has been here since the first decade of the Twentieth Century when my ancestors left Russia during the revolution. My family tries to maintain some cultural connections to Russia, but it’s difficult. Some of the food is the same, some of the words we use are the same, but very little of my people’s original culture remains.
I don’t even go to Mass any longer. I haven’t been in a Catholic Church for a year or more — not since my parents died. I just don’t have the heart. There’s a part of me that longs for the old days, when I still had belief, but that’s long gone. Now, the Cathedral is just a reminder of death to me.
Inside, we sit on the family’s side of the church, and both of us daub our eyes throughout the service, all our efforts to conceal our red eyes and noses lost in the first few minutes.
I mouth the words of the mass, which I know by heart, but none of them mean anything to me. I just do it for Sherri’s mother and father.
When it’s time for communion, I shake my head and wait while Michelle goes up on her own with the rest of the faithful. I can’t take communion anymore since I no longer believe.
If it comforts people, I have no problem with them attending Mass and taking Communion, but it’s not for me.
Not anymore.
When it’s over, we flood out of the cathedral and go down the steps, speaking softly to Sherri’s parents, offering our condolences.
Then, Michelle and I take an Uber to the cemetery for the burial.
That’s going to be really hard. Seeing her casket lowered into the pit, watching as people throw flowers on the grave.
