His Mercy Was My Greatest Betrayal

On the night they laid my father in the ground without the dignity of a proper burial, while I kept vigil beside what little they'd left me of him, they came for me.

A crew of button men stormed the wake, and the silence that a made man's death demanded shattered under their boots. They knocked over the urn that held my father's ashes, ground his memory into the floor, and put me before three strangers with a promise of worse if I didn't do as I was told. Eight hours. A camera. My body used as a lesson.