Left on His Wedding Night, the War God Returned

Chapter 11: Sorry Mama

His voice came out rough and broken, nothing like the cold, commanding tone he used with his subordinates, nothing like the distant calm he wore around Sarah.

Here, alone with a ghost, he was just a boy who missed his mother.

The memories came whether he wanted them or not. He was ten years old, standing at the entrance of an amusement park, holding his mother's hand.

 She was wearing the Sunday dress, the blue one with white flowers along the hem.

She'd told him his father was coming to celebrate his birthday, that the whole family would spend the day together, and he'd believed her because he was ten and she was his mother and mothers didn't lie.

His father never came. The snipers did instead.

He heard the shots before he understood what they were, sharp cracks that split the air like lightning. His mother's hand jerked in his. 

He looked up and saw her face change, saw the shock and then the pain and then something worse than pain, a desperate sadness as she looked down at her son and realized she was about to leave him.

Blood sprayed across his face. 

Warm and thick, tasting like copper when it hit his lips. 

She fell like something that had been holding her up had simply let go, collapsing onto the concrete in a spreading red pool that soaked into the knees of his jeans when he dropped down beside her.

"Mama, get up. Mama, please get up."

Her eyes found his. They were already fading, the light in them dimming like a candle running out of wick.

She tried to speak, tried to lift her hand to touch his face, but her fingers only twitched against the ground before going still.

His father arrived twenty minutes later with a cleanup crew. Not an ambulance. Not a doctor. A cleanup crew. 

Men in dark suits who scrubbed the blood off the concrete and removed his mother's body like she was furniture that needed to be disposed of.

 There was no funeral. No ceremony. No goodbye. His father told him, with guilt pooling in his eyes but never quite reaching his voice, that his mother's body had been cremated according to her wishes and scattered into the sea.

Kevin screamed. Had kicked and bitten and thrown himself at his father's legs demanding to know who had pulled the trigger and why. 

All he ever received was a sigh and a turned back and the same useless words repeated like a prayer: "It was a random attack. A mentally unstable shooter. These things happen."

Two weeks later, his father married the eldest daughter of the Royal family from the neighboring Aurelion Empire.

 The wedding was a national event, broadcast across two empires, celebrated with fireworks and feasts and speeches about unity and peace. Millions cheered. Newspapers printed special editions. The whole world rejoiced.

And somewhere in a corner of the Crown estate, a ten year old boy sat alone in his dead mother's room, holding her scarf to his face, and understood for the first time that his mother's death had not been random.

 The timing was too perfect. The cleanup was too efficient.

The remarriage was too quick. Everything fit together like pieces of a puzzle he was too young to solve but old enough to see.

Three years later, when his father handed him over to a butler who drove him to the edge of a frozen wilderness and told him that if he was lucky he might survive, and if not, death would simply be a relief, Kevin finally understood the full picture.

His mother had been murdered to clear the way for a political marriage. His father had known. Had allowed it. Had perhaps even arranged it.

Kevin pressed his forehead against the cold marble of the headstone and closed his eyes.

Kevin stayed there on his knees for a long time, his forehead resting against the stone, his eyes closed against the afternoon light.

At the age of thirteen, the moment his father treated him as a disposable pawn to please his stepmother and the Royal family she represented, abandoning him in the wilderness through a butler who coldly told him that if he were lucky he might survive.

And if not, death would simply be a relief, he had finally understood that his mother's death was absolutely not an accident, but a premeditated murder.

He'd sworn to avenge her that day, and every year of war, every battlefield, every enemy War God he'd destroyed on his way to building the Temple had been in service of that promise.

Kevin knelt before the gravestone and noticed something that made him go still. A fresh bouquet of flowers sat at the base of the marble, neatly arranged, the stems trimmed at precise angles. White chrysanthemums. His mother's favorite.

Only he and his inner circle knew about this grave. Commander Voss, perhaps. Or Lieutenant Sera, who had served his mother before her death and still wept on every anniversary. One of them must have come earlier today.

The suspicion in his chest loosened. He brushed his fingers across the engraved name on the stone.

"I'm sorry, Mama. I was supposed to bring her to meet you today."

That was all he could manage. The rest of it, the failure, the guilt, the cracked marriage, sat too heavy in his throat to come out as words.