“The King’s Man” (Conclusion)

Andrei’s brother, sipping brandy from a crystal snifter, waited in the lone armchair. Viktor paused in the doorway of his room, saw Yuri absorb the disheveled state of his clothes, then sighed and resigned himself to a longer night.

“Why have you kept this shabby little room?” the grand duke inquired, gesturing with his drink.

“I am the King’s Man, Your Grace.”

“You ceased to be the King’s Man when Andrei made you his equal.”

“I was never Andrei’s equal.” Viktor tossed his coat onto the narrow cot in the corner. “None of us were.”

Yuri took a violent swig from the snifter. He was merely handsome where Andrei had been beautiful, but there was a likeness, a reflection of shared features, that named them brothers. Yuri was darker, inside and out. Some found that darkness appealing. Viktor distrusted it.

“She disappointed you, didn’t she?”

“Your Grace?”

“Don’t play the dumb brute with me, Viktor. That’s what you were meant to be, but it’s not what you are. Andrei wasn’t the only one to see it. He was only the one who wanted to change it. He loved you.”

“He loved everyone, Your Grace.”

“Not the way he loved you—and I don’t just mean that way.” Yuri swallowed more brandy to conceal a distasteful twitch of his lip. Viktor saw it anyway. At first he felt compelled to defend his king, but there was little point when his king was dead. Yuri believed what he chose to believe. Still …

“I was not his lover.”

“Of course you weren’t. He’d have died years ago if that was so. No, you kept him alive beyond anyone’s expectation. Long enough to succeed our father, to wed the most desirable woman in the world and get children on her. How did that work, I wonder? Has she said?”

Viktor spoke tersely between clenched teeth. “You knew your brother, Your Grace.”

“And I know Stacia. A woman like that, wasted. Absolutely wasted.” Yuri cocked his head, his stormy blue eyes a little too bright on Viktor’s implacable face. For a skin-prickling instant, he seemed about to suggest something that would provoke the use of Viktor’s dress sword, but he shook his head and settled for more brandy.

The tension eased from Viktor’s shoulders. Slightly.

“Nicky did well tonight,” the grand duke remarked.

Viktor said nothing. Nicky had done well indeed, demonstrating a charm more lethal than what his sire had possessed. No bride had been chosen, but heartstrings had definitely been plucked.

“He’s asked you to stay. That doesn’t mean you have to.”

“I should like to see him crowned, Your Grace.”

“And then?”

And then … Viktor didn’t know. He thought he had known, but now he was unsure.

Yuri studied him from the depths of his comfortable chair. What the grand duke saw was nothing extraordinary in Viktor’s estimation, though he felt the heat of envy as the assessing gaze raked over him. Boots, breeches, open shirt, tousled hair, sharp planes, and sleepy eyes of a deep moss green …

“You couldn’t have disappointed her.”

Small praise, and unwelcome. Viktor was built to please a woman and had done so on many occasions, especially after Andrei had married Stacia. The door on the inner wall was all that separated his room from the Tsar’s, and the new Tsarina had made frequent use of her husband’s bed. There had been nothing to hear, but the strain of not hearing had quickly driven him to spend some nights elsewhere. Andrei had asked why, Viktor had lied; Andrei had offered larger accommodation, Viktor had declined. “My place is near you, my king,” he had said. Andrei had smiled and gently kissed his cheek, and had arranged to visit Stacia’s bed when duty called.

Those nights had been worse.

He took a deep breath. “I believe I did disappoint her, Your Grace.”

Yuri blinked, openly surprised. In the next blink, something occurred and he nodded slowly, releasing a low, “Ahh …” as he formulated his guess. He smiled; grinned, in fact, and Viktor disliked the grin for its predatory smugness. Here was a man who would use her as she willed, who saw her as flesh first and icon not at all; and since she had first been dazzled by his flash and flair, she would likely embrace his advances. Her children, too, would accept him in their father’s stead. They loved their Uncle Yuri, as fun-loving and mischievous as Andrei would have been had his health been less precari—

Viktor’s thoughts froze solid. Breath and body froze with them, doused in ice-cold horror that locked glacial fingers tight around his heart and would not be shaken free.

Yuri drained his brandy and stood up to leave. “Good night, Malokov,” he said on his way out the door.

* * *

Andrei’s tomb, a pale monument adorned with grieving angels in the stained glass recess of the cathedral. Viktor knelt beside it, his hands gripping the beveled edge, his brow pressed hard against the cool stone.

I failed you, my king.

All those years, his whole life, spent to preserve a flame that was snuffed while his back was turned. The blows, the insults, the jibes, the pokes and prods and punches he had endured for Andrei’s sake, and all the while, someone had watched and waited, and when Andrei had beaten the odds by living to manhood, an alternate strategy had been formed.

He had faltered on his way to a Cabinet meeting; only when Nikolai had asked his mother when Papa could play football again had Stacia made her fatal misjudgment. An innocent pleasure, a stupid mishap.

And everyone had believed.

“Not Nicky’s fault,” Andrei had whispered, struggling to get the words past the pain.

Everyone present, Viktor among them, had taken it as an order not to blame the boy. Viktor had been a witness to Nicky pleading with his father, to Andrei agreeing. He had played a little himself, stepping in while the Tsar caught his breath. A particularly accurate kick had sent the ball into Andrei’s gut as he dove to save a goal. He had shaken it off with such ease, no thought had occurred that something might have been jarred. Andrei himself had likely not realized it. He had simply relished the time spent with his son.

How could I have been such a dumb brute?

The brothers always shared a private moment before Cabinet meetings. Yuri was an advisor. Had he seen a chance and grabbed it? If he had, there had been time—not much, but enough, had he wanted justice—for Andrei to accuse him. The children had said their farewells, the girls sobbing and Nicky trembling with the stress of outward courage. Stacia and Yuri had remained—and Viktor, standing forgotten in the shadows by the head of his king’s bed, numb with shock and defeat. Stacia had wept freely, clutching his hand between hers as if her grip alone could stop the flood that was killing him.

His voice had bubbled faintly in the waning light. “Care for them.”

“I will,” Yuri had replied.

You knew, Andrei, Viktor thought. You knew and you said nothing.

“Care for them,” he had said.

Yuri had replied … but …

I am the King’s Man.

It meant something different from when he had been proclaimed as a boy. Andrei had seen to that. Andrei had made him more than he was intended to be, more than a dumb brute who took the blows to spare the Tsar’s heir. He had made him a companion, a friend, a brother of sorts, and a protector of all the Tsar held precious.

Care for them, Viktor.

Even Yuri, my king?

A long, bemused silence. A faint smell of incense, and flickering golden light as a candle began to gutter in its stand. The floor hardened beneath Viktor’s knees but he stayed in place, fingers cramping on the marble, forehead pushing hard against a growing urge to weep. The candle flame danced madly in its pool of drowning wax. Viktor lifted his head and looked at it. As if it had been trying to attract his attention, the fire steadied, then flared as bright as Andrei’s winsome smile.

Especially Yuri.

The candle went out.

The King’s Man rose stiffly from his knees and left the cathedral.

THE END

June 14, 2014

“The King’s Man” (Part 2)

He didn’t belong. His blood was not blue, his pedigree was uncertain. His manners were impeccable because he had learned his lessons at Andrei’s side, boys in the schoolroom with Yuri and the sons of the court. He had shared their riding and fencing masters, showing more grace than some and more skill than others, and dissolving into the scenery when it became clear that he was not to better any of them. He remembered nothing of his life before the Imperial nursery, but reminders had been so constant that he had been unable to forget what he could not recall.

Andrei had loved him on sight. Andrei had loved everyone on sight, but Viktor had been proclaimed as special, so Andrei had responded with utter devotion. Neither boy had grasped precisely how special he was until the Tsesarevich had misbehaved and Viktor had been punished for it. The shock had bewildered both boys. Andrei alone had received an explanation.

“You’re my dumb brute,” he had told Viktor, repeating what had been said without fully understanding it.

Viktor had protested. “I’m not dumb.”

Andrei’s face had been pinched with dismay. At six years old, he had set his mouth in a determined line and vowed to protect his friend. He had done his best to honor his word as they grew up, but boys were boys and frail though Andrei had been, he had also longed to prove himself as strong as his fellows. Viktor had been thumped more than once as a result of Andrei’s reckless action; perhaps more upsetting had been his role as proxy for the Tsesarevich in the schoolyard. Forbidden to goad the heir to the throne, they had goaded Viktor instead, driving Andrei to endanger himself by intervening and thus subjecting Viktor to further consequence. The strain had frayed their friendship to the limit of comprehension. Andrei had wanted him to defend himself and Viktor had continually refused. Incensed, the Tsesarevich had demanded to know why.

“It’s my place,” Viktor had replied. Then he had added, “Calm down, Andrei, before you hurt yourself.”

“Hurt myself? Hurt myself? How can I be more hurt than by you taking my lumps? I should hurt myself; that would teach them!” He had spun a circle on one heel, scanning wildly for an object to do the most damage. In the end, he had thrown himself at the wall and Viktor had tackled him before he struck the plaster, twisting in midair to take the fall on his own back. Andrei had sprawled on top of him and burst into tears. Viktor had lain gasping, his arms locked around his sobbing prince, terrified that something had been ruptured by his rash act of deterrence.

“I hate it when they hurt you. I hate it!”

Viktor had tried to hush him, half-aware as he stroked Andrei’s hair that their argument had been overheard and trouble was imminent if he could not settle the Tsesarevich before it arrived. “Stop crying,” he had hissed. “You are not to die for me.”

“But I would! I would die for you, Viktor, I would …”

An eerie stillness had come over him at Andrei’s muffled confession. The blond head had come up, pure eyes sparkling and swollen, dripping tears onto his skin. Viktor had calmly met those eyes and known what came next, what was inevitable when he thought of the distress Andrei always displayed on his behalf. His heart had dropped a beat. What was he supposed to do? How could he avoid what he had known for years?

While he was distracted, Andrei had kissed him. Sweet, soft, tremulous, afraid of rejection but more afraid of an opportunity missed, his mouth had been warm and tasted of apples. Viktor had accepted the kiss with his eyes wide open, watching Andrei’s close and listening to the pulse deepen in his belly. The resonance had stirred between them and he had considered resisting, but it was just a kiss, and probably Andrei’s first, and when it was over, the love in those blue, blue eyes had threatened to crush him.

“You’re a bleeder,” he had croaked, fighting tears of his own.

“The cost would be worth it.”

“Not to me, my prince.”

“I hate them for this.”

“You hate nobody, Andrei.”

“You’re wrong.” Gentle fingers, long and poetic, had caressed Viktor’s hair where it fell away from his brow; dark hair with a cinnamon tint to complement the apples in Andrei’s kiss. Viktor had tasted them once more before a shift in the silence had made him turn his head to see Yuri standing in the doorway.

* * *

Andrei’s daughters, six and ten, whom he had called his little darlings, curtsied for Viktor in the white salon. “We’ve been practicing,” Tatiana solemnly informed him, repeating the motion with a wider fan of her skirts. Susanna emulated her sister with less success, wobbling frightfully as she dipped. Viktor steadied her with one hand in the guise of delivering praise.

“Well done, my ladies. You’ll have men lined up to claim the first waltz.”

“Mama says we can each have one dance before bed.”

Did they remember dancing in their father’s arms, clasped to his chest, whirling and spinning as he hummed a melody? Susanna was too young, but Tatiana would have memories for life.

“I want you, Viktor.”

He looked down at the tug on his coat. Susanna gazed adoringly from eyes as clear and blue as her sire’s, beneath hair as thick and fair as his had been, and as her brother’s was. He smiled. “You don’t want to waste your one dance on me, my lady.”

“Yes, I do.”

He laughed without committing either way. Tsar Nikolai had done submitting to further fussing, this time at his mother’s hand, and was growing impatient. “Go on ahead, Viktor,” he commanded. “Clear the way for the prize bullock.”

“I told you, my king, you’re the buyer.”

“Just get on with it.”

Perhaps Yuri was right. Despite his physical resemblance to Andrei, Nicky’s moods called to mind his uncle more often than his father. Viktor risked a glance at Stacia, found her fixed on adjusting Tatiana’s pearl choker, and briskly obeyed his king.

The ballroom looked the same, but rather than being sucked into a vortex of dark silk and darker velvet, the light from a dozen chandeliers laughed and played over a glittering pastel palette. This was the first occasion in a year when the court could shine in rainbow colour, and every one of them had shed their mourning to burst like butterflies from their shadow cocoons. Musicians played a waltz in the gallery and footmen in royal livery balanced silver trays of crystal flutes as they circulated seamlessly among the guests. And such guests! Foreign envoys in their chains of office, Cabinet members in their ostentatious best, military officers in full dress uniform, and the nobility themselves had turned out to see and be seen at Tsar Nikolai’s first public showing. Viktor had a brief word with the herald and stepped into the corridor to await the family’s arrival.

His heart always beat too fast at these damned things. Large gatherings annoyed him and relentless exposure had failed to alter the fact. Before he had married, Andrei had hosted balls for political reasons as well as holidays and historical anniversaries. After he had wed, he had invented reasons to host them, but his deeper purpose had always been to show off his bride. True to his romantic nature, Andrei had loved his imported princess on sight.

So had Viktor. The marriage had been arranged by ambassadors when Andrei survived childhood to become a viable prospect for continuing the bloodline. He had protested at first, citing Yuri as a worthier candidate, but when Stacia’s sledge had arrived at the Ice Palace and an anonymous bundle of brindled furs had been unwrapped before him, he had promptly abandoned his argument.

She had not changed in fifteen years. She walked the corridor on her son’s arm and was as beautiful tonight as she had been on the arm of another fourteen-year-old boy. Viktor felt as young looking at her now as he had been then, spellbound by a beauty he had not imagined in his dreams. She had looked at him then, and smiled as she passed; just as she looked at him now, and smiled as she passed, but the smile tonight held a different meaning despite its singular radiance.

She had danced with him once, at her wedding ball, when they had been strangers and neither had known what to say. Her eyes had continually strayed to Andrei anyway, so Viktor had not minded being mute. It was meet that she be in love with her husband; how could she not be in love with him when he all but worshipped her before witnesses? He had been so proud of her, so pleased to be the prince of a storybook princess. She had wanted for nothing, and when she had borne him a son, she had surpassed the Deity Himself in Andrei’s pantheon.

“He liked to look at me,” she said later, lying tangled in the sheets with sweat drying on her skin. “Not the way you do,” she added, dryly.

Viktor smiled. “How is that?”

“Like you want to devour me. It makes me skittish and shy, and sets me afire at the same time. Andrei wasn’t like that. To him, I was a work of art, a sculpture of marble and flame. That’s what he used to say. ‘Marble and flame’.” She swallowed hard and her eyes filled with tears. “Am I betraying him by being here with you?”

“I don’t know,” Viktor replied, truthfully. His voice was husky in the snug confines of the bed.

Stacia laid a hand on his arm, following the curve of his bicep with her fingers. “I loved him so much, Viktor. I loved him and yet I wanted you.”

Viktor waited. He had waited fifteen years to be with her; waiting a few minutes while she gathered her thoughts was no hardship. He wondered, though, if Andrei had known. Nothing had been said, but nothing said meant nothing. He did know that Andrei, despite his inclination, had been faithful to her. To them both, if one dared to look closely enough.

“When we made the girls,” she said, “he was driven by something more than desire. I felt that he was reaching for something beyond me, something beyond himself, and I just wanted him to break me, to shatter me into a thousand little pieces, and put me back together one bit at a time until I was whole again, and safe in his arms. In his arms, Viktor. I wanted to be flesh with him—but I never was. I loved him and he loved me, but we were never truly flesh.”

“You mean ‘merely’,” Viktor said.

Her eyes flicked briefly to his and away again. “I suppose so.”

“He couldn’t,” Viktor said. “You know that. The risk was too great.”

Stacia made a sound between laughter and despair. “He wouldn’t bruise me like a man, yet he risked it all to play football with his son.”

Viktor was silent. They hadn’t known he was injured until it was too late. He had seemed fine, completely normal, and Nicky had been so happy that Papa had taken time to practice penalty kicks with him. What had he been thinking? What madness had possessed him?

“I want you to hurt me,” she said. “Punish me, Viktor. Use me, ride me, make me feel something mortal.”

Viktor refused.

She stared at him from dark, haunted eyes. “Then I have no use for you.”

to be continued …

“The King’s Man” (Part I)

Fog rose in clouds from the frozen ground and hung there, shimmering, in the weak winter sun. Andrei’s wife tore through it at a reckless pace, shredding it to ribbons with her mount’s iron-shod hooves. Neither joy nor laughter trailed in her wake. She had simply bolted, or her horse had. Either way, she was in danger of harming herself and that could not be allowed.

Viktor spurred his own horse into the sparkling swirl behind her. The fog closed over him like an icy shroud, stealing his breath before he could draw it. He called for her—“My queen!”—and the dulled notes of his voice alerted him to silence where there should have been a drumbeat gallop floating up ahead. His stallion fought the bit as he drew rein too sharply, but as the surly beast settled beneath him, he strained for a sound he desperately hoped not to hear.

There was nothing. Then there was a muted scuffle and the unmistakable whinny of a startled horse, and Zultan reared as a phantom grey mare charged past him with her stirrups flapping wildly against her flanks. Viktor was out of the saddle and running while his horse was still poised on its hocks. He plunged into the fog with his pistol half-drawn, roaring her name to let would-be ruffians know their game was lost before it began.

The fog thinned toward the wood. Viktor found her standing near a cluster of birches, her white fur and dark hair blending almost perfectly into the bark so that he might have missed her had he not been looking. He stopped short, skidding slightly in the snow, and rapidly assessed the scene.

She was utterly alone. He spied no fleeing cloaks, heard no thundering retreat. Andrei’s wife stood calmly in the crystal mist with frost jewelling on the tips of her fur collar. Viktor felt his breath die in his throat. She had always been beautiful, but grief had given her a fragile translucence that elevated her beauty to something ethereal. Viktor stared, caught himself, dropped to one knee, bowed his head to deny himself the vision. “My queen, are you hurt?”

“I’ve lost my horse,” she replied.

More than that, she had lost her husband, and in an entire year spent mourning, she had said not a word to him though they had spoken almost daily. He heard it now in her voice, the weight of loss and sorrow creating a similar effect to her tone as to her beauty. He could avert his gaze, but not his ears. In the muffling fog, sound took on sensation and became a soft caress. Viktor raised his head and let himself absorb her. Sable hair and velvet eyes, slender bones and eloquent grace. She was, and always would be, his icon.

“You called my name,” she said.

“I beg your forgiveness, my queen.”

She smiled. The icy mist insulated them from the real world and placed them in another time and place, a momentary world with no history and no future. Viktor stayed on one knee as Andrei’s wife approached him. Her furs were pristine, her cloak unmarred by the fall he had heard. With a start, he realized that she had not fallen at all, that she had dismounted and sent her mare flying back the way she had come. She saw the dawning in his eyes and stopped her progress. Her composure remained, but beneath the milk of her skin, she burned like a candle behind a frosted pane.

Normally immune to panicking, Viktor fought the urge to do it now. He stood instead, holstering the pistol to avoid meeting her eyes. His hands were clumsy—with cold, he presumed, lying to himself in hope of deceiving her as well, but the truth thickened in the space between them and when he finally got the damned weapon secured on his belt, he glanced up in the same instant as her fingers brushed his sleeve. They closed on his forearm, drew her in too near, and though he could have—should have—stepped back, he stayed where he was, waiting to hear the magic words.

“I loved my husband,” she said. “I wanted you.”

An eyebrow quirked. “Past tense, my queen?”

She pressed herself against him, put her lips less than a breath from his, so close than he felt a brush like falling snowflakes when she whispered, “I loved my husband. I want you.”

The growl came from somewhere so deep inside he wasn’t sure it was his. “Stacia.”

“Yes,” she murmured, her eyes turning dreamy as she sighed. For a heartbeat they hung together, trapped between their love for one man and desire for each other, then Viktor took her face in his hands and kissed her.

* * *

Andrei’s son, tricked out in full military regalia, studied himself in the full-length mirror. “Hm,” he grunted, emulating his uncle rather than his father, who had never grunted that Viktor could recall. Nikolai Andreivich Slovoyanov grunted a great deal for one so young, especially in the last year. Trying to be a man while still in the schoolroom. How well Viktor remembered Andrei at the same age, a task made easier by the resemblance in the boy before him now. Like his father, Nicky was tall and blond, with clear blue eyes and a winsome smile. Unlike his father, he was in robust health and had been so from the day of his birth.

Viktor remembered that occasion, too. “I have a son!” Andrei had crowed, flushed with pride and astonishment. “Imagine, Viktor, I have a boy, an heir to my throne and all of my Empire! My queen, my Nastacia, she has made me immortal!”

It had been difficult to set aside a lifetime of dread to share in the Tsar’s unbridled joy. Such purity had been Andrei’s gift, an irony given that his was the death feared by everyone else. He had been preserved through childhood, married to a princess, and made Tsar of all Russia by his fifteenth birthday. Fatherhood had come soon after, well in advance of a normal boy’s life plan, yet he had seized every moment and wrung it for all he was worth.

“Your father would be proud,” Viktor said, forcing himself back to the present.

Nikolai frowned at his reflection. “I wish he was here. Then I wouldn’t have to be on parade before every ambassador with a princess for sale.”

“Remember, my king, you are the buyer.”

Nicky snorted—something else his father had rarely done. His grandfather, on the other hand …

“Are you still in here? You’ll never get laid if you don’t come out of your room.”

“I doubt that’s entirely true, Uncle.” The boy spoke plainly, but his ears turned red enough to crisp. He appeared mildly discomfited by the chummy clap to his shoulder and tried not to duck his head as Andrei’s brother turned him about for inspection.

“You’re too handsome to be my nephew,” Grand Duke Yuri proclaimed. He grinned and applied a second hearty clap. “You could be my son.”

Nikolai tensed in his uncle’s hands. Viktor let himself take shape from the shadows where he had retreated on Yuri’s arrival. “Your Grace,” he said, politely but with an edge.

Yuri answered in kind. “Malokov. Still here, I see.”

“As my king commands, Your Grace.”

“It seems to me that your king was my brother and since he is gone, I don’t understand your purpose here. Perhaps you might explain it to me.”

Nicky nervously intervened. “Uncle, you know that I asked him to stay.”

“Do you know what he was before you were born?”

The boy clung resolutely to his station. “He was Papa’s friend. That makes him my friend. Is there something I can do for you, Uncle Yuri?”

The grand duke removed his hands from the young Tsar’s shoulders, keeping them aloft as he stepped back a pace. “Not at all, my king. I came to advise that your mother awaits her escort to the assembly. She has asked for you.”

Which meant that he had come from Stacia’s apartment. Viktor kept his muscles soft but casually laid his hand on the dress sword hung at his hip. Nikolai scouted for his hat, anxious that his mother not be kept waiting. Finding it abandoned on a chair cushion, he snatched it up and stuffed it beneath his arm. Head tipped high and spurs jingling, he walked to the door, then pivoted to face the room once more. Viktor’s heart plumped with affection at the desperate plea in the boy’s eyes. Of no one in particular, Nicky asked, “Must I marry one of them?”

“You can’t marry them all,” Yuri replied.

“What if I don’t like any of them?” And, silently, What if none of them like me?

“Then we’ll do this until we find one that suits.”

“Viktor?”

“It’s a ballroom, my king, not a stockyard. Try to enjoy yourself.”

“And stop crushing the life from your hat,” Yuri added, striding forward to rescue the flattened headpiece. Nicky let him take it, frowning slightly as he watched it reform in his uncle’s expert hands. Yuri was the glamorous one, always immaculately groomed in tailored coats and polished boots. He had taken similar pains with Andrei, sparing the Tsar unfavourable comparison by ensuring that both royal brothers cut fashionable figures in formal company. Even his mourning clothes had been stylish. Stacia had initially been more dazzled by him, an advantage that he likely intended to press now that his competition was no more. Yuri was a natural charmer, and Viktor might have been concerned had his lips not yet tingled from the memory of Stacia’s kiss.

He watched her son suffer the grand duke’s fussing with less than his father’s inherent good nature, and wondered himself why he was still at court.

to be continued …

“The King’s Man” (Preface)

The story starting tomorrow was written during my vacation a couple of weeks ago—since I wrote about its evolution over four days, it’s only fair to give it air time now that it’s finished.

It’s set in Imperial Russia, but the characters and the royal family name are absolutely fictitious. Historic accuracy is becoming an oxymoron as modern day writers seek to create something new where everything has been done. I wasn’t trying to be historically accurate here, because the story isn’t about Russian history. It’s about people. Not vampires, not angels, not warrior magicians. People. Okay, rich people (mostly), but fragile mortals all the same. I’ve kept the working title despite using the word “Tsar” in the text; the same goes for Viktor’s position within the family. He is very much the King’s Man.

I can overwork a piece to death and I want this one to remain as fresh and raw as it was written. It’s a tale of love, loss, and loyalty. None of those virtues need much airbrushing.

Enjoy.