Xavier’s funeral was held on a grey, rain-soaked morning that felt fittingly bleak for the occasion. The sky wept with a quiet, persistent drizzle that soaked through coats and umbrellas, draped the air in a somber hush, and turned the cemetery’s paths into muddy trails of grief. People gathered beneath umbrellas and under trees, their faces pale and somber as they stood around a polished, mahogany casket lowered into the ground.
He was too young. Too alive just days before.
Xavier Laurent—loud, defiant, sarcastic, and vibrant—was gone. Dead at the hands of a brutal fate, after stepping between death and the half-brother he’d only just begun to reconcile with. A hero in the end, despite all the labels that had chased him throughout his life.