Two others moved away from the back of the crowd.

The gray-suited man’s smile widened.

My hand closed around the grip beneath my jacket.

And in that breath before the first scream, I understood the ugliest truth of my life.

They had not come to my father’s funeral to mourn him.

They had come to finish burying us.

### Part 2

The first gun came out beneath a folded funeral program.

That detail stayed with me longer than the shot itself. A cream-colored card with my father’s name printed in navy ink, bent around a pistol grip like grief had been turned into a disguise.

The man raised it toward the front row.

Toward my mother.

I grabbed her collar and pulled.

“Move!”

She did not scream. Not then. She moved because I had told her to, dragging Eliza so hard my sister stumbled out of one heel. I shoved both of them toward the tent as the first shot cracked across the cemetery.

The sound shattered the service.

People dropped flowers. Chairs flipped. Someone screamed my father’s name, as if he could still get up and fix this too.

I drew and fired in one motion.

The shooter folded backward into the grass.

I didn’t look at him again.

There were more.

There are always more.

A man near the road stepped out from behind a parked sedan. Another came from the tree line. Two moved through the crowd, using terrified mourners as cover. That told me they were not amateurs. They had planned for panic. They had counted on innocent bodies making me hesitate.

They had miscalculated.

I moved left, low behind a granite headstone shaped like an angel, and put myself between the shooters and my family.

“Kyle!” I shouted.

“I see them!” he called back.

His civilian jacket opened just enough for him to work. He moved like he always did, quiet and exact, steering three guests behind a stone bench before returning fire.

The cemetery became a box of noise.

Gunshots slapped stone. White lilies burst apart. Rain began to fall in cold, fat drops, as if the sky had been waiting for permission to grieve.

I saw the gray-suited man walking away.

Not running. Walking.

Calm.

He had expected this to be finished in seconds. A fast ambush. A dead son. A dead widow. Maybe a sister too, depending on whatever message his boss wanted to send.

He glanced back once.

I wanted to chase him, but two men were still advancing from the SUVs.

One fired wild, hitting the casket stand. My father’s coffin shifted with a heavy wooden groan.