The sky was a bruise, low, swollen clouds letting rain drum the gravel into a staccato of tiny betrayals. A black cat, a shadow within a shadow, tore across the slick road hunting shelter and found only the flash of headlights. The car passed like a sentence. It left the cat a smear of black and red and the road colder in its wake.
Madam Hong was dead.
Valent D'Maison's iron empress had been felled in an afternoon; they called it a stroke, and the city swallowed the word like it was a convenient lie. Where suspicion ripened, rumor bloomed: a tidy death for a messy throne.
Rain did not tame the crowd. The Hongs arrived in ordinance black, umbrellas bobbing like a flotilla of mourning boats. Their faces were veils of etiquette; their eyes were small, sharp things. The flowers smelled faintly of money. Champagne whispered against crystal under the umbrellas, polite clinks that sounded suspiciously like applause. It read less like grief than an elegy for restraint: very Victorian, very theatrical.
Madam Hong had been a woman who distrusted blood by profession. She treated kinship like a ledger and kept her ledgers locked. Her children and grandchildren moved through the world like predators wearing expensive skin. They had loved her in installments, for favors, for titles, for the tiny privileges that keep ambition lubricated. Now, freed from her daily tyrannies, they smiled with the ease of people who have just learned to breathe through their nose again.
Joshua Hong stood just off the path, rain flattening the band of his hair and soaking the sharp line of his suit. He did not look like a man undone. If anything, the storm looked right on him, baptismal, theatrical, appropriate for the inheritor of a small war.
He scanned the sea of umbrellas. Each face was a calculus: motive plus means. Each smile was a thin blade.
"Worried your funeral might be next?" came a voice, silk on a razor.
Jun-young slid into view as if he belonged to the rain, umbrella cocked, a wineglass bright under the dim light. He wore insolence like a cufflink.
"Jealous?" Joshua's answer was a smooth stone thrown in still water. No splash.
Jun-young laughed, a small, brittle sound. "Do you suspect me? Maybe I did the family a mercy — put an old woman out of her misery."
Joshua's lips went to a half-smile. "You? You'd trip over your own ego and choke on it before the deed was finished."
The glass stilled. Jun-young's laugh thinned into something like a warning. "She liked you best," he said, almost a confession. "Always did."
"Attention isn't power," Joshua said, voice even."Men like you talk too much and think too little. You want to be feared, but you mistake attention for power. That's why she never looked at you twice, so quit playing victim." Joshua said smooth, cruel and unhurried before he walked out.
For a moment the rain was all the world could hear, a metronome for the quiet war between them. Jun-young's fingers clenched the stem until it sang.
Lightning forked the sky and lit the black marble behind them like an accusation. MADAM HONG. 1949–2025.
Even in death she kept them restless. Even in death she left them knives.