Chapter 10
After My Funeral
The woman on my table had waited eleven years for someone to give her face back.
Her skull rested inside a padded cradle beneath the north windows of Belladonna House’s former ballroom, where winter sunlight spread across rows of workstations, clay tools, evidence trays, and monitors displaying dental charts from three jurisdictions.
I pressed a narrow strip of tissue-depth marker above her left cheekbone, checked the measurement against the updated demographic table, and returned to the asymmetry around her orbital rim.
The old fracture had healed several months before her death, leaving enough remodeling to suggest she had survived one attack before the final one.
Behind me, printers produced identification packets for investigators who had learned to answer our calls promptly.
Downstairs, lawyers prepared restitution claims for people declared dead while the Mercy Society spent their inheritances.
Elias’s clinic occupied the eastern wing, where the old receiving rooms had become private treatment spaces with windows, unlocked doors, and furniture selected by survivors rather than administrators.
The upper floors housed people waiting for safe identities, family reunions, or court testimony.
Belladonna remained a home at its center, though the boundary between family and work had become fluid enough that breakfast occasionally included an international prosecutor, two missing heirs, and Knox arguing that security lasers improved the atmosphere.
Six months had passed since Saint Mercy burned.
The Society’s structure had collapsed faster than its consequences.
Trials moved through courts at different speeds.
Families fought the restitution trusts. Medical boards reviewed decades of falsified records.
Investigators opened graves and found empty coffins, substituted remains, or bodies carrying names that belonged to living people.
Every recovered file created another question, and every question had once been a person Helena expected the world to stop searching for.
I shaped the woman’s mouth from the evidence available in her teeth and jaw, building neither peace nor fear into the expression.
A reconstruction was an invitation to recognition rather than a story imposed upon the dead.
She deserved the dignity of uncertainty until someone who loved her supplied the details I could never derive from bone.
The ballroom door opened quietly.
Cassian entered carrying two folders and a cup of coffee prepared exactly the way I drank it.
He wore charcoal trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back, the clothes expensive enough to reveal habit while lacking the weapons and formal layers he once used as armor.
A tablet rested beneath one arm. His dark hair had grown slightly longer, curling at the edges whenever the weather turned damp.
He stopped outside the taped boundary around my workstation.
“May I come in?”
“You own the building,” I said without looking away from the skull.
“The survivor trust owns the building. You control this room.”
“Then your respect for municipal borders has become touching.”
“I have suffered extensive reform.”
I glanced toward him. “Enter.”
Cassian placed the coffee beside my left hand, safely beyond the evidence zone, then waited until I set down the clay tool before offering the folders.
That pause had become one of the changes I trusted most. He still arrived prepared.
He still considered twelve outcomes while everyone else debated the first three.
He had simply stopped treating preparation as permission to move the rest of us around the board.
“The Vale restitution hearing was moved to Monday,” he said. “The international accounts released another nine million into the survivor fund, and the court approved permanent transfer of the north property to the identification program.”
“That property needs structural repairs before we expand.”
“I obtained estimates.”
“Of course you did.”
“I also received a request from the trauma clinic for two additional consultation rooms.” He opened the tablet, showing me a floor plan. “The least disruptive option converts the small archive beside your imaging lab. I have an alternative layout if you prefer to keep it.”
“You are asking before moving my walls.”
“Yes.”
“Are you ill?”
“Elias evaluated me. The condition appears permanent.”
Cassian asked before moving my furniture now. Growth was miraculous and occasionally inconvenient.
I studied the plan. The small archive had become storage for older case files awaiting digitization, while the clinic’s waiting list had doubled since survivors began referring people who distrusted conventional hospitals.
“Convert it,” I said. “The files can move to the fireproof room upstairs. Keep the connecting door between the lab and clinic.”
Cassian entered the authorization but stopped before submitting it. “May I allocate identification funds toward the renovation, or would you prefer the clinic budget cover it?”
“Split the cost. The room serves both programs.”
He confirmed the change. “Done.”
“You disagreed.”
“I believe the clinic should carry the full expense.”
“And?”
“You decided otherwise.”
The answer still affected me, though its power had shifted from surprise into something steadier. Cassian’s obedience had never made him gentle. It made his sharpness trustworthy because he offered it rather than hiding it inside protection.
I touched the edge of his folder. “You have thirty minutes tonight before the chapel.”
“I cleared three hours.”
“Ambitious.”
“I was advised weddings occasionally run long.”
“This one has four participants and no guests. Efficiency seems achievable.”
His gaze settled on my hands, where a thin line of gray clay marked my knuckle. “You are still working.”
“She is close.”
“Then finish.”
He leaned down after I lifted my face, kissed me once, and left without asking me to abandon the dead for a ceremony among the living.
That freedom remained one of the reasons I followed him with my eyes.
I completed the final layer along the woman’s jaw, photographed the reconstruction from five angles, and uploaded the image to our restricted matching network.
Her case number joined dozens awaiting identification, yet the face on the screen looked present now, capable of reaching through eleven years of paperwork and asking whether anyone remembered her smile.
Before leaving the ballroom, I crossed to the display cabinet near the old fireplace.
My final death mask rested inside.
I had cast it myself three weeks earlier, using the same plaster mixture the Society once pressed over living prisoners to control their identities.
Elias had monitored my breathing. Knox had stood beside the emergency release with unnecessary tools.
Cassian had remained outside the room because I asked him to wait, though I heard his footsteps stop and begin along the corridor until the plaster came away.
The finished mask showed my face with closed eyes and a smooth, neutral mouth.
The Society would have painted it ivory, attached a brass nameplate, and preserved the version of me that required the least explanation.
I carried it to the worktable near the window and struck it with a small forensic hammer.
The fracture opened from forehead to chin.
A second strike separated the left cheek.
A third broke the jaw into two clean pieces.
I arranged the fragments inside a shallow black bowl, leaving space between them, then filled the openings with small flowers gathered from Belladonna’s winter greenhouse: black roses, white anemones, purple hellebore, and green vines Knox claimed had survived because his security system provided emotional encouragement.
The Society preserved women by closing their eyes. I preferred mine broken open and full of things still growing.
I brought the bowl downstairs.
The main hall had once contained Cassian’s surveillance network.
Screens covered the walls then, displaying train platforms, hospital corridors, street cameras, and fragments of my life collected without permission.
Those machines were gone. The room now held the public archive of Mercy victims, each file accessible only according to the survivor’s instructions.
Some shelves displayed names and photographs.
Others contained sealed boxes marked with dates when the contents could be released.
Empty spaces remained for people still deciding how much of themselves they wanted returned to public view.
Cassian waited there wearing black.
He had stripped the room personally after Saint Mercy fell, though he asked me to choose what replaced every cable, server, and locked cabinet. One section of the original surveillance wall remained exposed beneath glass, preserved as evidence rather than memory.
On the table before him lay a single black rose.
Its thorns remained intact.
“You usually remove those,” I said.
“I used to remove every risk I could identify.”
“And when removal became impossible?”
“I removed people’s choices instead.”
He picked up the rose carefully, allowing one thorn to press into the pad of his thumb without breaking the skin. “This seemed more honest.”
I accepted the flower. The stem bit lightly against my fingers.
“Love with thorns.”
“Love without guarantees.”
“Terrible marketing.”
“Accurate terms.”
I set the broken mask among the archive’s memorial objects. Cassian studied the flowers growing through my plaster face, then turned toward me.
“Do you have doubts?” he asked.
“About the wedding?”
“About any part of this.”
His question contained neither suspicion nor demand. It offered an exit before we reached the chapel, precisely because the ceremony held meaning only while departure remained possible.