An Extremely Overpowered God Of War

Chapter 10

Raymond stayed on his knees.

His hands pressed flat against the dirt in front of the marker, his head bowed, and when he spoke again his voice came out raw and unsteady, the words breaking apart as they left him.

“Those bastards did this.” His breath caught.

 “They let my mother die that they betrayed her, neglected her, threw her out like she was nothing and then had the audacity to stand in front of me and say she left because she was too proud to do chores.” His voice climbed slightly, shaking with something that was equal parts grief and fury. 

“They killed her. They killed my mother. And then they sent me here to this dump, this forgotten place like it was nothing. Like she was nothing.”

He looked at the rubbish piled around the grave, at the crooked stick with the dirty name tag swinging slightly in the breeze, at the neglect that had been allowed to settle over this place like dust over something no one cared to remember.

“They didn't even give her somewhere decent to rest.” His jaw tightened so hard it hurt. 

“This is where they put her. In this ground. With the trash and the forgotten and the people no one claims.”

And then another thought hit him harder than the first, sharper, colder.

His sister.

“And who knows,” he said quietly, his voice dropping to something barely audible, “who knows what they have done to my sister.”

The tears came then.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quietly, steadily, falling from his eyes and onto the dirt beneath him, and he didn't try to stop them at first because there was no stopping them. His mother was gone. 

The woman who had fought for him, who had sacrificed everything to give him and his sister a chance at something better, who had trusted him when he promised her she would be looked after she was gone. And she had died in suffering, Poverty, in a place like this, while the people who were supposed to care for her lived in luxury and celebrated their success.

He wiped at his eyes roughly with the back of his hand.

His mother would not want this. She would not want him kneeling here in the dirt, weeping over what could not be changed. She would want him to stand. To move. To find his sister, because if his sister were dead if they had done to her what they had done to his mother they would have told him. They would have given him a location, or another number, another forgotten grave. But they hadn't. Which meant she was still out there. Somewhere. Alive.

He could feel it.

At that moment Raymond pushed himself to his feet slowly, his legs unsteady beneath him but holding. He stood there for a moment longer, looking down at the grave, at the name tag with his mother's name written on it in faded ink.

Then his jaw tightened.

He had thought when he signed those papers, when he walked out of that house that he was going to let them be. That he was going to walk away and leave them to their celebration and their contracts and their wealth and never look back. That he was done with all of it.

But that was before.

Before he knew what they had done. Before he stood here in this place and understood the full weight of what his trust had cost the people he loved most.

Everything he had given them every contract, every connection, every door that had opened because of strings he had pulled from the shadows while they stood in the light and took credit for it all of it had been built on his work. His sacrifice. His name, even if they didn't know it.

And now his mother was dead because of their greed and their cruelty.

Then his voice came out low and steady, the grief still there but pressed now into something harder.

“I was going to let you be,” he said quietly, speaking to no one and to all of them at once. 

“I was going to walk away and let you keep everything I gave you. The contracts. The fame. The success. All of it.”

He looked down at the grave one last time.

“But now,” he said, his voice dropping to something cold and final, “I am going to take it all back.”