The Heirs
His dying wails were drowned out by the music from the orchestra on the top deck of the yacht. A symphony of thrumming strings and whistling woodwinds, of pattering percussions and the sustained buzzing of brass, swallowed and silenced what would be his final words.
Fireworks rocketed into the night sky, in sync with Mr. Button’s weakening heart, crackling and then exploding into the atmosphere, before losing momentum and fading into a still, unbeating nothingness.
It was too loud to hear the screams that came from below the deck.
Too dark to see the face and the bloodied palms of the figure who staggered away from Mr. Button’s sullen corpse.
And far too late to reverse time and stop this all from happening in the first place. Far, far too late.
The last thing Mr. Button would see before his untimely expiration was the burning hatred in the figures eyes.
At 11:57 P.M., as guests started to depart and the large ship rattled from side to side, no one else knew that Mr. Button had been dead for several minutes.
In fact, it wouldn’t be until 7:21 A.M., many hours after the revels of the night had ended, that the staff would come across Mr. Button’s body and he would be pronounced dead at the scene.
The details that brought us to this point are not at all unusual. But what followed in the wake of this bloody tragedy is notably a lot more interesting than the unfortunate events that came before …