ASTER
When the light goes dim…
My lover.
My life.
My North Star.
What did you do? What did you do?
Grief blew through me like a parched, stricken desert.
Dry and brittle.
No stars or light or reason.
A total eclipse.
I’d only wanted to go. To leave. To escape.
Money didn’t matter. My comfort was in you.
So I’d trusted you to whisk us away. To come to your senses. For you to turn your back on the greed that had tainted my family.
Our time had come and gone.
One a.m. then two.
Dread had filled me to overflowing and threatened to wash me away in the undertow.
I’d heard the frantic footsteps that pounded the compound, the shouts and the anger and the disbelief.
With my heart barely beating, I’d sneaked back inside and slipped down the hall where I’d pressed my back to the wall outside of Papa’s office, listening to the chaos that ensued inside.
It was filled with men, but it was Jarek who’d ranted in stark pain. “That asshole,” he’d hissed, holding himself way up high on his side. “He killed Antonio in cold blood, Andres. He tried to kill me. He took the stones. He took them,” he gritted in abhorrence.
Devastation curled.
Wound and whispered and made me sink farther against the wall to keep myself from slipping to the floor.
My uncle? My uncle was dead?
How could I believe it?
That you would do it?
In shock, I’d peered into the room as if it might paint a different picture.
But it was blotted in red.
Disfigured and mangled and wrong.
The light on Papa’s desk shined through the darkness and illuminated the blood that dripped onto the floor.
Jarek’s shirt was soaked in it.
To me, it’d looked like death.