Sweet Romance15 min read
Who Disturbed My Grave? — A Blood-Red Moon and a Stubborn Heart
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The machines were laughing when they woke me.
"I told you to stop making that racket," I told the hill, but the hill didn't care. The earth had been quiet for a long time. People liked it quiet when they buried things.
"Who buried you here?" one of the men in suits asked the Taoist with a patronizing grin. He held his phone up, recording the ceremony like it was some novelty act.
"That plot belonged to the old line," the Taoist said, serious as a stone. "Make offerings, respect the boundaries. Or..."
"Or what?" the man in the fine suit said. He looked like a man who thought he owned the map.
"Or the old will speak," the Taoist said.
"Speak? Graves don't speak," the man laughed.
His laugh was the last thing that held the hill in patience.
I sat up inside my carved jade bed and pushed the lid a little to breathe. Dust fell like tiny pale stars. The jade tasted like old cold rain.
"Ugh," I muttered. "Who does one have to bite around here to get some peace?"
I found my legs, swung out, and stretched. My hair fell long down my back like a curtain. I blinked. The world smelled of metal and gasoline and a strange new season of noise. The cover of the tomb had already been scratched. Someone had come.
"Hey!" I said with more indignation than terror. "Who disturbed my nap?"
The team above stopped.
"Something down there," a foreman said.
"A kid with a cosplay," another scoffed. "Probably an influencer."
"Miss," someone called. "This is construction. You need to leave."
"They dug up my property," I told them. "This is private. Who let you dig here, and who gave you permission to bother my afternoon?"
The foreman frowned like I had suggested he owed me money.
One of the younger workers—thin as a pencil and twice as scared—stumbled with words he didn't know he had. "Boss says the Sheng An Group. They got the tender. We're just subcontractors."
"Sheng An Group," I said slowly. The name tasted like cash in my mouth. A big company. A lot of mouths to feed.
"Well, tell your boss this," I said. "Tell Sheng An: if they dig through my house, I will have to charge cleaning fees... and maybe extra for the broken garden."
They screamed and ran. One of them fainted.
"Hey!" the foreman tried to shout. "Wait! We didn't know—"
"Didn't know what?" I snapped. "That disturbing me is illegal? I only need to charge you interest."
He fled.
I swished my fingers in the dust. I put a pale shell windchime back on the wall. I unpacked a teapot nobody had used in centuries. I decide what to take and what to leave. Tombs are full of things that people say are worthless until they need them. I was full of appetite, not sentiment.
Then I heard them.
"Is that a—" the voice was deeper, stranger.
I slipped out to the hilltop in a blink. They saw me then, standing like a child but with something older spilling from my eyes—deep violet pupils that made their stomachs drop.
"Who are you?" the foreman choked. "A ghost?"
"I am Ludmila Michel," I said, picking a name the local tongues could wrap around. "And you are trespassing. Who sent you, and who approved this nonsense?"
They stuttered, naming the Sheng An Group again. The foreman pointed at the company's representative—a man with too-clean hair and a smile like a closed wallet.
"Alessandro Meyer of Sheng An sent me," he said as if that solved everything.
I narrowed my eyes.
"Then Alessandro will have to meet me," I said, because he had broken my door.
They fled faster this time.
*
I am not clever the way a lawyer is. I was clever in a way they no longer taught in schools—tricks with symbols, signs, and patience. I could quiet a storm with a drawn line, carve the air with a chant and a peachwood knife. I had been a daughter and a devil in another age. I was hungry now; that is simpler than politics.
South City—where they called their capital—was thirty miles away, over roads that tried to gather the modern world like a net. The city had lights and many mouths. I had only one hundred and twelve reasons to go. One was my grave.
I dressed like a modern girl to avoid cameras and wore a skirt that smelled faintly of tea. I had a hundred small spells tucked in the lining of my sleeve. I walked.
"It must be a cosplay," someone breathed when I boarded a bus at the edge of town. "Someone with a sense of humor."
"She looks cold," an auntie said, handing me a sweater. "Here, take this."
"I am fine," I said, not wanting to borrow niceness. But I kept the sweater. Old habits stay even when life resets. People give and you take because a kind world is useful for survival.
The city was loud and bright and full of the smell of blood—city-blood is different. It is a mix of living things. I smelled it and my stomach tightened. It had been some time, and my teeth were not patient.
I moved toward the Sheng An office because if someone breaks your home, you at least ask for rent.
Inside, the building smelled of polish and firm accomplishment. Men in suits had carved smiles. They bowed to a green-glass water feature someone had bought to show class.
"Your foundation works are finished," a man in grey reported to a woman with steady eyes. "We will open the site. The feng shui master says—"
"A perfunctory ritual," the woman said. "Good. Let's keep it ceremonial."
They spoke of luck and profits. They wore so much certainty like perfume.
I drifted through their lobby like a shadow. The man who would be my target—Kingston Romano—was not there. He was a name they threw like a rope to pull themselves up. But names change. People hold them like flags. I only needed the person who touched the switch.
"Security," one of the men said, "there was a strange girl at the site."
"Not a problem," the guard said.
I stepped forward.
"Hi," I said. "Someone dug my house."
The room went still. Someone laughed then swallowed it.
"Do you have proof?" a man in a suit asked. He looked at me like raw time had been misplaced.
"Yes," I lied, and then I did worse. I showed a promise of a chant hidden in my sleeve. The air hummed. The chandelier sighed. People found their phones heavy in their hands.
"Who are you?" an accountant whispered.
"Call the police," someone said.
"I own this building," a voice cut through it all—a voice that slid like ink over the room. "Step back."
Kingston Romano stepped forward like he had been waiting to be announced.
"Kingston Romano," I said. "So you own this mountain's plans? Did you buy my fence too?"
He blinked as if someone had written the script wrong.
"Miss," he said, politely. "This is a misapprehension. You cannot—"
"Do you often buy graves for fun?" I asked. "Is that in your prospectus? 'Buy bliss, dig sleep'?"
He laughed, which was a small, sorry sound.
"You must be joking," he said.
"Someone dug my home," I reminded him. "My teapot is an antique and they broke the lid. Do you know how much teapot lids cost now? People are greedy."
Kingston's mouth curved, temporarily disarmed. "Then let's make formal restitution. Tell me—what would satisfy the owner of the—" He paused. "—of this grave."
"Compensation," I said. "And an apology with your signature."
"Is that all?" he asked, amused.
"Also," I said, looking at him with the candor of someone who had seen whole dynasties disappear into dust, "you will avoid digging here forever."
He drew out his phone like a gentleman about to sign a treaty. "Alright," he said. "Let's have a meeting. Security? Package for Ms. Michel."
That day in the parking garage the air tasted different. He carried himself like a man who thought he could order the world by tone. I found myself oddly curious.
"Call me Ludmila," I told him. "Most people do not."
"Very well," Kingston said. "Ludmila. Do you have family? Next of kin? How did you—"
"Family is gone," I lied, and it was not really a lie. It was complicated. I told him I had been alone. He looked at me like someone contemplating a strange animal in a zoo and felt sad in a useful way.
"You will need to eat," he said finally, matter-of-fact. "You're freezing. Come to my house tonight. My family will feed you."
"You're offering your house to the owner of a grave you dug into?" I asked, amused and offended.
"Consider it an apology," Kingston said. "And perhaps we can find a way to avoid legal trouble."
"I do not require your pity," I said, bristling.
"Maybe not pity," Kingston said. "Alliance. It is better to have friends who know where your bones are."
He smiled then, and whatever rusted inside me slid a tiny bit.
*
"I don't trust her," Ross Walker told Kingston in the car. Ross was Kingston's younger brother—sharp, quick to irritation, and always hungry to prove he existed. "She could be a troublemaker."
"She just wants her grave to stay intact," Kingston said. "And she can handle herself."
"Her eyes," Ross muttered. "They were weird. Purple."
"Purple," Kingston said. "Alluring color."
That night, I stayed at their house because my pride wasn't as hungry as my stomach. Kingston's room overflowed with tidy luxuries and a neat patience. He had people to do everything for him; it made him quiet in a way that made women fuss.
"You'll sleep in the guest room," Kingston said. "I'll be in the living room."
"You really insist on that?" I asked.
"It's better this way," he said.
"Suit yourself," I said and slept like one who was not sleeping the whole night.
I should explain something simple: I have teeth that like certain tastes. I am very careful to be civilized, but when the world changes, habits haunt you. When Kingston cut himself the night after the car crash—the crash he did not tell me about—I licked the blood and panicked when the room turned violet and my teeth ached.
"You drank? Why would you drink?" he asked later, sober and not angry and not accusing either.
"I tidied the wound," I said. "I worry about flavor."
"You worry about... taste?" he asked, truly bewildered.
"It's complicated," I said. "I do not bite strangers. I bite to survive."
He laughed, only because something about me made anything else rude. "Something tells me this is going to be a strange season."
"Seasons are honest," I said.
*
The blood-red moon came in like a judge, slow and indifferent. The next night changed everything.
"Do not go outside," I told the house. "Close the curtains."
"What's wrong?" Kingston asked.
"Moon," I told him. "Red moon. It will mark people."
He stared at me as if my word and the weather were two different things, and then the lights of the city blinked like hiccups.
"Is that a—" on the television they called it a rare astronomical event. The web pages called it fascinating.
"Everyone watch," a news anchor smiled. Hobbyists filmed it like it was a wedding. The moon swelled and pulsed. The sky hummed.
Ten minutes after the moon peaked, people reported fevers. Strange posts spread online. "If you are exposed to the moonlight, stay indoors." A hashtag, then a panic.
People changed.
They didn't all become the same in a moment. Some sat down, clutched at their chests, then wilted like flowers under sudden frost. Others craned their necks toward the red light and what came next unstitched them. Skin dried, mouths turned jagged, sights went dark and empty. The city smelled of cooked iron and old rain.
"We must prepare," I said. "The moon is not mercy."
"That's a plague," Kingston said. "We need to leave."
"Now," I said.
We locked the doors. Kingston called his family and found fever on two of his employees. Ross checked our supplies. We had canned food. We had guns. We had enough to starve a king.
"Who do we help?" Ross asked. "Who do we leave?"
"You help those in your car," I said. "You cannot help the whole world."
In the morning the world outside had become a theater for old nightmares. People bit and turned and the bite was a rumor that spread. The city was no longer entirely human.
"What are these?" Ross asked when they saw the first wave—empty-eyed people who moved like puppets with too little grace. "Zombies?"
"They are what happens when the sky betrays the moon," I said.
"Do you know how to stop them?" Kingston asked.
"Hit them in the head," I said. "It is always the head."
He looked at me like a man learning rules for a new board game. "Kill the head. Keep the supplies. Save the people."
"Yes," I said. "And keep your friends close."
*
We learned fast. Kingston learned to make choices. Ross learned to be quiet. The family we gathered in the house was ragged and competent. We hunted for supplies. We found wolves first—real ones that had gone wrong—and then other creatures. We found crystals inside the broken skulls of the things we killed. The little stones shivered with a strange light.
"These crystals," I told Kingston as we cleaned one, "they taste like hunger and repair."
"Can they make me stronger?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe they will make you better."
He smiled and placed it into a small blue case. The group began to change. Some people developed sparks: a woman who could mend with a touch, Ross's private guard who could pick up a car and toss it, others who made fire from their palms. The crystals were like seeds in wet soil.
We practiced.
"Again," Kingston said one afternoon, throwing a bolt of lightning toward a practice target.
"Conserve energy," Ross said. "Don't use more than you can recharge."
"This isn't a game," a newcomer said. "This is survival."
"No," Kingston said. "This is life now."
And I—who had lived beyond generations—watched him learn humility and warmth, and the parts of me that used to be only appetite began to keep time with him in my chest.
We were not the only ones who learned. The animals and the dead and those who had been bitten changed into different patterns. The slaughter and the tenderness both left scars. People did terrible things—some for food, some for politics. Families that had once mattered began to fracture.
At the supply depot we found other survivors: the Sun family, who were proud and capable; the White family, clever and sharp; the Yang family, slick and opportunistic. We made brittle alliances.
"Thanks for the wolf meat," Sun's eldest said to me. "Your blade moved like a storm."
"You did the talking," I said. "I did the cutting."
He laughed. "Both count."
But there was a man among them who smiled too much. Alessandro Meyer, who had previously sent diggers into my home, now had the audacity to offer us a trade. He arrived with a caravan of "supplies" and an entourage that smelled like gold-laced promises.
"You saved us at the gas station," he told Kingston. "We should align."
"You dug up a grave," I said.
"That was a mistake," Alessandro said, and he looked at me like someone apologizing to a porcelain bowl he had cracked.
"People who break things usually pay," I said.
He bowed. "If humiliation would be enough—"
"It won't be," I said.
We built a plan with the army commander, a level-headed man called Jalen Tang, who had set up a base at East River and was trying to keep order. He offered food in exchange for help clearing the supply lines. For a time it seemed sensible.
Then Alessandro plotted.
He began to whisper to others. He promised the Yang family extra fuel if they let him keep a shipment. He also convinced some of the guards to "secure assets" for him. The roads were dangerous, and promises sound like rope in chaos.
When we discovered the theft, it was too late for the convoy. Several vehicles had been driven off at midnight and never returned. Families woke up to empty trunks and missing diapers and found men in cheap suits with loaded hands.
"Alessandro," I said quietly when we cornered him. He thought the wind was on his side.
"You have to understand," he said. "This is business. I traded for safe passage."
"Aside from being a thief," I said, "you told Yang to push people off the convoy route. You left kids without milk."
He blinked and had the thin flash of suffering that appears in browns when a man is finally caught. "You don't know the world," he hissed. "You don't know how it works."
"You thought we wouldn't notice," Kingston said through clenched teeth.
"You thought no one would know until it was too late," I added. "But we saw. The people we saved remember."
He laughed once, brittle. "And what are you going to do? You are a...strange woman who likes graveyards."
We took him to East River because Jalen Tang insisted on a proper hearing. The base was crowded that day. People washed with river water. Children traded pieces of chocolate for stories. There was a line of survivors outside the mess tent. They looked at Alessandro like a spoiled rat.
Jalen arranged a tribunal under the flagpole. The whole base gathered. Soldiers and families, the Sun family, the White family, our ragged band—everybody. There were more witnesses than stars.
"Alessandro Meyer," Jalen said, voice like a bell. "You are accused of theft, of endangering people's lives, and of betrayal. How do you plead?"
"Not guilty," Alessandro said. "I am a businessman trying to help."
"Help?" cried a woman whose infant had died because the convoy's formula had never arrived. She stepped forward, hands shaking.
"Where is the convoy?" the woman demanded. "My boy died because your trucks vanished."
Alessandro's face lost color like paint under water. "I—"
"Who took the trucks?" Jalen asked.
"You aided them," Kingston said. "You conspired with the Yangs to take them."
"That's a lie!" Alessandro snapped. "I needed fuel. I bartered! If I hadn't, we might all have starved, yes? Survival requires exchange."
"Exchange?" someone shouted. "Is that what you call it? You sold a child for a case of diesel?"
He looked at the crowd and for the first time saw faces that were not coated with the soft glaze of polite agreement. He saw hunger, grief, the raw red of anger. He laughed, but it broke.
"You think I am a villain," he said. "I am just a man."
"Not just a man," I said. "A man who took more meat than he needed."
He took two heavy breaths and decided to speak like an accused man: loud, a stage voice meant to charm. "If you all knew what it cost to keep offices running, you'd pity me," he cried. "I have investors. I have commitments. The world doesn't stop because you can't keep a schedule."
"You killed a schedule," Kingston said.
Alessandro's eyes flicked up to the faces he expected to be offstage—the Yangs, who had come to watch. He saw them shift. They stepped back when the soldier sitting by the gate took off his sunglasses and nodded.
"Let's hear his defense," Jalen said.
Alessandro began to spin his narrative: goods exchanged, a misunderstanding, the desperate edge of business in a dying city. People listened. Some were convinced, but the woman with the dead infant—her name was Bianca Johnston—did not move.
"Where is my coffin?" she said, not even giving him the courtesy for drama. "You promised supplies for my husband. He is buried; I wanted to honor him. Now his burial is nowhere because your men took the trucks."
Silence sucked the air out of the square.
Then Bianca walked forward and spat at Alessandro's shoes.
"Shame," she said. "We will not eat what you gave."
A soldier lifted his boot. The crowd swelled. People began to chant, simple and unanimous: "Justice! Justice!"
Alessandro's face, so used to calling the shots, crumpled. The man had a moment of complete disbelief, like a king who discovered his crown was made of straw.
He flailed.
"Stop this—stop—" he said. "You don't understand contracts. I can be useful—"
"Useful?" a teenage boy in army fatigues cut in, his voice already loud enough to pass for law. "You are useful to thieves."
"You think you can bargain?" Kingston asked, and the question was cold.
Someone began to film. It started as one phone, then another, fingers copying the scene under their thumbs as if to remember the exact way a powerful man looked when stripped.
"Everyone record," Jalen said. "We need to document this."
Alessandro's bravado dissolved. The first step in a fall is always small and then the air changes. He tried to smile and it failed. He spat out a coin—an attempt to throw a bribe—and people laughed. A child threw it back at him for the sport of it.
"Please," Alessandro said suddenly, kneeling without ceremony. The sound scraped like a match. His expensive suit was now muddy, eyes pleading. "Please—I'm sorry. I will return the goods. I will… I will do any task. I've got talent. I can procure for the base. I'll make it right. I swear on—"
He grabbed at Jalen's boot and we all watched. The crowd's reaction was a wave: some angered, some shaking heads, some relieved at the sight of a villain humbled. Phones were raised. The chant quieted, replaced by mutters.
"You betrayed people for the sake of profit," Bianca said, face stony. "You call that leadership?"
"No," Alessandro sobbed. "No, it's not. I can… I will help now. I will give everything back. Please. Don't—"
He had moved through the four stages of disgrace in less than a minute: confidence, denial, panic, collapse. Now he begged in front of everyone who had lost something to him. Guards who once deferred stood and watched. Someone nearby began to clap—not in encouragement but as a sound to measure the moment.
"Your punishment," Jalen said, steady as a gavel. "You will work. You will carry supplies. You will be exposed every day so people can see that you are doing what you promised. There will be cameras. There will be witnesses. You will not be alone in the dark corners any more."
Alessandro's knees shook. "Please," he said again. "I'll—I'll start now."
"We'll also have a witness committee," Kingston added. "And you will be required to apologize to each family publicly."
"You'll be our labor," I said simply. "And if you fail, you will be judged by the same people you stole from."
He nodded like someone bargained down to a sentence and did not know the fine print.
Then the crowd closed in. People shouted, threw small insults and worse. Someone recorded his kneel and uploaded it to the network with no commentary—just the image. It trended because people find pleasure in justice. Alessandro wept. He tried to raise his hands to beg again and found them not strong enough.
"Please," he said one last time when he saw he was being filmed and the empire of his reputation had been set to collapse. "Please, I will not fail." His voice was tiny.
But the cameras continued. They were patient. The crowd turned to the living, to their own wounds, and walked away. Alessandro stayed on his knees in the dust and there were those who pointed, those who took pictures, those who filmed him hating him and loving the moment. He was public property for a while longer.
It was more than spectacle; it was a lesson written in mud so any other would read it.
He worked the next day carrying crates. We watched. He did not take anything back, not all of it, but some. The woman with the dead infant spat on him each morning until he made a sign of wanting to change. It was the only penance the time allowed.
*
Time bends oddly in disaster. We built a route and found allies and enemies and small moments of tenderness. Kingston learned to say things like "Stay with me" without irony. Ross learned a proverb and said it poorly and it made us laugh.
One night, after a long day of training a new group of survivors to fight, Kingston and I sat under a tarpaulin by the faint light of a repaired lantern. He looked at me with a sort of careful hunger that had nothing to do with the way I used my teeth and everything to do with the way he wanted to know me.
"You've changed," he said finally. "You used to blink less. You used to… close off."
"I used to sleep less," I said.
"Do you miss the old times?" he asked.
"I miss some things," I admitted. "But I don't miss the loneliness."
He reached for my hand—something he had practiced in private—and the world narrowed to the warmth of his palm.
"Stay," he whispered.
"Are you asking me to make a choice or offering one?" I asked.
"Both," he said.
"I choose you," I said, because hunger is complicated and some hungers are softer. He smiled and it lit the tent.
Outside, the moon watched and the city trembled, but inside, for a while, it felt like someone had finally come home.
The End
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