Page 175 of Sweet Venom

“Jude…?” Kane asks, his words strained and pained, as if his throat is suffocated.

Jude looks at him with a dark face, his fists trembling. “He said no medical empire can bring back the dead. If it could, he would’ve gotten his first wife back or brought me back my mother.”

As Kane clasps Jude’s shoulder and Dahlia hugs me as I sob, I know—I just know—that this will break me beyond repair.

Grief is a strange notion.

I grieved a lot when my mother died, but I think I grieved my tarnished future more than her death. I grieved my loneliness that loomed once my only family was cremated.

That’s what she wanted. Cremation. For her soul to be scattered on the ocean.

Pretty sure the charity that took care of the whole process just discarded her in a nearby lake.

I didn’t understand grief when my mother died. I was sad, lost, and in pain, but it was all abstract.

This time, grief hit me like an intense earthquake—tangible and inescapable.

I’m barely standing, swaying in the black dress and flats I threw on without thinking. My eyes—hidden behind sunglasses—are puffy and bloodshot from crying every day since Preston died four days ago.

We’re at his funeral now.

A ceremony that’s somehow become a spectacle of wealth and grief, wrapped in black silk and gold-trimmed sorrow.

The Armstrong estate looms in the background, its towering columns casting long shadows over the sea of mourners dressed in tailored suits and designer mourning attire.

The sky is an endless stretch of gray, suffocating in itsvastness. Drizzle lands softly, silently, some of it sliding on my nose.

A polished black mahogany casket rests at the front, adorned with stark white lilies. The flowers look wrong, too delicate for someone like Preston, who oozed power and playfulness.

The metallic glint of the engraved Armstrong crest catches the light, a reminder that even in death, he belongs to something larger, something that probably demanded too much from him.

I stand in the back, my fingers curled into fists inside my coat pockets, trying to hold myself together when everything inside me is falling apart.

“You should get something to eat,” Kane’s soft voice speaks to Dahlia, who hasn’t left my side, curling her arm around me as if I’ll break if she stops touching me.

And maybe I would. She’s the only reason I haven’t surrendered myself to the shadows in the past couple of days.

Kane’s dressed in a black tuxedo, with a lily in his breast pocket. He looks tired and distraught, and I know he needs Dahlia more than I do. That’s why I pretend to be asleep, so she can spend more time with him.

He’s the one who lost his best friend, whom he knew practically his entire life. I just came into Preston’s life recently and managed to end it.

“It’s okay, I’m not hungry.” Dahlia strokes his cheek. “Have you eaten, though?”

“I have no appetite.” He pulls her toward him in a hug and whispers something in her ear, and she wraps her arms around him, her eyes shining with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs again and again. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

I use the chance and slip through the crowd, hearing the murmured sympathies mostly directed at Lawrence. His wife stands by his side, looking like she’s straight out of aVoguemagazine in her tulle black dress and sheer black mourning veil draped from her pillbox hat.

In the front row, people bow down to shake the hand of Preston’s grandfather, who’s holding a cane, his face ashen. His wife, Preston’s grandmother, sits beside him, accepting handshakes and saying nothing, looking stern and emotionless as if this isn’t her grandson’s funeral.

Another notable family member, according to Dahlia, is Preston’s paternal uncle, who’s more interested in talking to Julian and a smartly dressed woman at the perimeter.

And then there’s a little girl with curly blonde hair, wearing a black lace dress, who won’t stop hugging the casket and crying—Preston’s sister.

She’s the only one in Preston’s entourage who’s genuinely showing her emotions. But that doesn’t last long. Her mother chastises her in words I can’t hear, then sends her inside with one of the staff members, effectively killing any semblance of actual grief in the Armstrong family.

The only ones who are grieving are Kane, Jude, and Marcus, who seems unaffected while standing in the corner but actually looks like he hasn’t slept a wink in the past few days.