Death Of A Tyrant

The priest conducted his sermon in a monotone voice: “…beloved husband to Annabelle. Cherished father of Nathan and Rebecca …”

What a crock of shit.

William John Bradshaw was a heartless prick. That’s what his headstone should say. Not beloved husband. Not cherished father. Just the truth, carved in stone for every poor bastard wandering this cemetery to see.

In thirty-three years, he never once fulfilled the role of father to Rebecca or me. He clothed us, sure. Fed us, provided a roof—nothing but transactional necessities. But there was no affection and nothing was ever given freely. Every gesture felt like a business transaction. His version of love—if he even new how to love—was an invoice, not a feeling. He never hugged. Never praised. Never kicked a ball or came to a school event.

I scanned past the sea of black coats. Beneath the towering gum trees, cameras clicked in a polite frenzy, long lenses aimed like rifles. Even in death, the old man drew press.

“… it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy …”

Sure it did. I’m sure your God must be thrilled.

I rolled my eyes skywards then glanced around at the tree tops.

Rockwood Cemetery sprawled around us like a suburb for the dearly departed. The brochure, shoved into my hand by a funeral director, had said it was heritage-listed and the largest working cemetery in the Southern Hemisphere.

Note to self: investigate funeral stocks. It’s a booming business that everyone eventually invested in.

The July wind knifed through the trees, cold enough to make even the expensive suits hunch. Appropriate, I thought. Just like the man of the hour—cold—before and after he entered his coffin.

“… astute businessman, charismatic …” the priest continued.

My attention flicked back to the priest. Clearly, he’d never met the man while he was Earth side. Why did we even have a priest? Or a church service? The only times our family darkened a church doorway were for someone else’s ceremonies—never our own. Our parents never even married in a church. It was an elaborate gathering for recognition and status. A spectacle dressed up as romance. Pictures portrayed rows of people they barely knew, all of them angling for proximity to the Bradshaw name. It wasn’t a wedding; it was a shareholder meeting with floral arrangements. Mum told me once, with a forced laugh, that they spent more on invitations than they did on their first apartment. That said everything.

So, yeah. If there was a God, he’d be double-locking his pearly gates today.

I look around at the bowed heads. It was a large gathering. During the church service, every seat was taken and people stood at the back for what felt like the longest forty-five minutes of my life. Not unlike their wedding, most of them were colleagues, not mourners. Counterfeit grief poured into suits like cheap wine. Quietly calculating who might fill the empty seat at the boardroom table. You could smell it on their breath.

A cousin and his wife stood across from us. And the creepy old lady in the black tulle veil—who the hell was she? A great Aunt, maybe? She looked vaguely familiar. Beyond that, the family tree was either pruned or rotted.

Aside from my sobbing mother next to me, there were no tears.

“… we therefore commit the body of our dearly departed …”

Rebecca, shot me a glare over our Mum’s shaking shoulder. Always the dutiful one. She wrapped an arm around Mum and leaned in for comfort. Her sobs became muffled in Rebecca’s coat. Beyond my sister, a familiar face caught my attention— Alexander Ross. William’s right-hand. I actually liked Alex. He’d been more fatherly toward me than my father ever attempted to be. He was the one who delivered the well thought-out birthday presents every year, each wrapped neatly, with a card written in someone else’s handwriting—his handwriting, I realised years later—signed with love from Dad. I doubt he ever even knew when we were born.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone and typed a quick memo: Arrange a round of golf with Alex.

A small, sensible distraction from the circus around me. A nudge from my left snapped me back to the moment. It was Emily, my girlfriend. She frowned at the phone in my hand—her brows tightening into that familiar shape that meant really, Nathan? Now?

I quickly hit save and slid the phone back into my pocket, exhaling through my nose. It wasn’t like I was scrolling on TikTok. I was trying to survive the afternoon.

She must have noticed the discontent on my face. She placed a comforting hand on my arm before returning her attention to the service, her jaw tense.

“… ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

I watched the coffin slowly make its descent into its eternal resting place. It looked expensive. Mahogany and gold hardware—sent to the ground to rot. Probably the only thing the old man ever bought that he couldn’t depreciate at tax time. I smirked internally.

A dull thud indicated the coffin had reached the bottom. Rebecca led Mum forward, and I followed. The first scatter of dirt hit the lid with a hollow, final sound.

I felt a strange sort of calmness. I stood a moment, waiting for something to stir in me. Anything—a flicker of grief, nostalgia.

Nothing.

I scooped up a handful of dirt and tossed it in.

Enjoy hell, you miserable old bastard.

The mourners and the curious were invited to the Bradshaw family home to ‘celebrate his life’—or his death—depending on which board you sat on. Perched in West Pennant Hills, a forty minute commute to the city on a good day, the house was an overachieving mansion. The kind you buy when you want to be seen, but it didn’t really fit any other purpose. We moved here when Rebecca and I were ten and twelve—she being the older child. The following nine years were a rotation of mostly absences, affairs and arguments that echoed down the vast halls at night.

I refused the decree to ‘join the family business’ the moment I finished school. Instead, I moved out when I turned nineteen, couch-surfed around the CBD, and eventually landed a job at Halcyon Capital. The cream on that cake being that Halcyon was one of my father’s rival companies. That caused a meltdown of biblical proportions. I still remember the purple-red shade of his face when he found out, along with the threat of being disowned and disinherited.

Bradshaw Holdings was his kingdom. Chairman, founder, and self-appointed god of the balance sheet. Every decision, every transaction and every market move had to orbit his approval. The industry recognised him as a visionary. To those who worked beneath him—especially family—he was a tyrant disguised as a businessman. If he’d have been a deity, control was his religion.

Inside the house, nameless faces streamed between the kitchen and the lounge, offering their condolences between canapes and whisky refills. Every handshake reeked of opportunity.

Will you be joining the family business? No? What firm did you say you’re with?

Grief had quickly become networking hour.

I drifted toward the glass doors that led out to the courtyard garden, needing a barrier between myself and the nonsense. Outside, the manicured lawn glittered with the early drops of rainfall.

There was movement close to me and the faint tang of body odour filled my space.

“Nathan. I’m sorry for your loss. Jeremy Anderson—True Steel Holdings.”

I turned to find a thin, nervous man in a suit two sizes too big. It looked like he had dressed for the day, then shrunk unexpectedly under pressure. His scalp gleamed beneath the chandelier—either polished on purpose or simply losing the fight to the elements. I couldn’t pick his age. The hollow cheeks and rapidly receding hairline said fifty-plus, but his smooth features and sharp, calculating eyes were more mid-forties.

I shook his hand firmly.

“Thanks for coming, Jeremy. I believe William may have mentioned True Steel,” I said politely.

No, he hadn’t. I’d never heard of them in my life.

“Yes.” Jeremy said, scratching the shiny part of his head—fascinating behavior considering the hairless area was the part that itched. “We’ve been operating since two thousand, as part of the Arctos mining group.”

Ah, Arctos. That name rang a bell—from a visit to the family home two months earlier. Mum had insisted Rebecca and I visit our father two months ago, after another unsuccessful round of chemo. Emily had echoed the guilt trip: You’ll regret it if you don’t say your goodbyes.

Spoiler: I did regret it. Going, that is.

It was a complete waste of time. He had spent the entire two hours barking orders down the phone like he was trying to close a hostile takeover before death tapped him on the shoulder. The man clung to control the way drowning people cling to driftwood. I remembered him ranting about Arctos entering the exchange and to not ‘make a move’ until he gave the word.

I adjusted my grip on my glass.

“You’ve just registered on the ASX, haven’t you? How’s that going?”

Jeremy’s eyes flicked around the room. He leaned in.

“I owe William a great debt. And that is the only reason, I’m doing—telling—you this” He lowered his voice. “Two months ago, we signed a major deal with Ascento. Our shareholders are chomping at the bit.”

I could almost feel my pupils dilate. This could be big.

“When does this hit the market?”

He stepped back and shrugged casually, pretending he hadn’t just dropped an insider grenade.

“Most likely Monday. Keep your ear to the ground and don’t hold back.” He grinned. “You know what they say—bulls make money, chickens get slaughtered.”

He winked and slipped away, his over-sized blazer swaying behind him like a cape.

I grimaced. I hated that saying. My father used to throw it around like gospel. And yet, standing there among the whisky glasses and fake sympathies, I could almost hear his voice whispering approval.

That’s when I first saw her.

A woman stood in the doorway—a stranger. Short black hair, eyes just as dark. Her skin was so pale the chandelier’s warm glow didn’t just touch her; it seemed to cling to her, pooling across her cheekbones like it was reluctant to let go. She stood perfectly still in the bustle of the room. People moved around her—passing trays, removing coats, murmuring between themselves—but none of them seemed to notice her presence. They drifted by without a single glance, as if she was occupying a sliver of space that the rest of the world couldn’t see.

She didn’t blink. Just stared at me with a stillness that felt deliberate, as if she already knew me and was waiting for my recognition to set in. There was something in her expression, a message hovering behind her eyes, something she wanted to tell me but couldn’t.

The stare cut through my outter layers with alarming ease, sinking deeper, settling in a place beneath bone and reason. It was the kind of look that made your body react before your mind caught up; a cold warning you couldn’t explain but absolutely felt.

A prickle slid down my spine. The skin at the base of my skull tightened. There was something about that cold, fixed gaze that made every inch of my skin crawl. A man drifted between us, pausing to pluck a glass from a passing waiter’s tray, blocking her from view for barely a second. But when he moved on—she was gone.

Just—gone.

I blinked, scanning the doorway, then the crowd, a flicker of irritation rising beneath the unease. Where had she slipped away to that quickly? I angled toward the kitchen to look for her, but a tall, wiry man with oversized glasses stepped into my path— Colin Milne, the family solicitor.

“Nathan. I’m sorry for your loss. A sad day indeed.”

I shook his hand, suppressing a sigh.

“Thanks Colin. So when do we finalise his estate? I assume everything is in order?”

“Tuesday morning. Eleven a.m. At my office,” he said flatly.

“Tuesday?” I questioned.

“Yes. Explicit instructions,” he said before nodding. “I’ll see you then.”

He walked toward my mother, who had finally stopped crying and was now inhaling a bottle of wine while Emily hovered beside her—comforting her in short, awkward bursts, then pausing every so often to rearrange the same vase of flowers on the table next a framed photo of my father. It was the third time she’d adjusted it since I was watching. A pointless, nervous ritual she probably wasn’t even aware she was doing.

My sister appeared next to me.

“You need to say something to her,” she said without looking at me.

I followed her gaze across the room and took a sip of my drink. As I swallowed I asked jokingly:

“Who? Mum or Emily?”

She cocked her head at me and raised an eyebrow sarcastically.

“What’s there to say?” I swallowed the rest of my drink in one gulp.

“She needs to know we have her back.”

“She knows we do. She had ours—most of the time.”

A waiter walked by with a tray a glasses gleaming with amber liquid. I grabbed one and took a sip.

“Why is she even so upset?” I asked. “Are they tears of relief?”

Rebecca shot me a flat look, but the glint in her eyes agreed. Our father had broken our mother long before the cancer did.

I let my gaze drift around the room—the room he’d spent a fortune furnishing, but never actually lived in. Everything was expensive. Curated and sterile. The kind of decor you hired a consultant for so you could brag about ‘clean lines’ and ‘timeless neutral palettes’. Marble floors. Imported rugs. No warmth. No softness. No family portraits. No childhood photos of Rebecca and me. No holiday snapshots. Just abstract paintings and a giant, pointless mirror, overlooking a fireplace. Typical William Bradshaw.

He’d curated a house the same way he curated his life—impressive from a distance, hollow up close.

My skin prickled again. I glanced back toward the doorway, the one where the dark-haired woman had stood, half expecting to see her watching again.

And she was.

Same place. Same posture. Same eerie stillness. Only this time, her eyes weren’t fixed on me—they were fixed on my mother.

A flicker of unease tightened in my chest.

“Who is that woman over there, by the kitchen?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

Rebecca followed my gaze frowning.

“What woman?”

I glanced to Rebecca then back.

A split second distraction.

The doorway was empty.

Cold trickled down my spine, like someone had run an icy finger beneath my shirt collar and drawn a slow line down to the centre of my back.

I scanned the room, pulse quickening. Faces blurred into a wash of muted expressions—warped and stretched, the way portraits look when some pretentious painter smears oil across the canvas like a two year old and calls it art. The kind of artwork I never understood. That’s what the room felt like. Almost real. But mostly surreal.

The movement in the room suddenly seemed to slow. A strange pressure settled over my ears. I glanced at Mum who sat with her wine glass pressed to her lips, but she wasn’t drinking. Her hand hung suspended in mid-air, fingers stiff around the stem. A waiter beside her was frozen mid-step, one foot hovering just above the floor, his tray tilting at an almost impossible angle for the glasses to not slip and spill. For a second, the whole room felt… paused.

A flicker of movement to my right broke the stillness.

Outside.

A pale face pressed against the window, eyes locked on me again. Those unblinking, depthless eyes. The glass pane distorted her features just enough to make her look less human, more apparition than woman.

And then a whisper brushed the side of my ear.

“Tik-tok”

I spun around. No one was there.

I looked back to Rebecca. She was staring at the floor in front of her, unmoving, paused in permanent thought.

“Bec,” I said nervously. She didn’t react. Didn’t even blink.

A deep chime rang out across the quiet room that made me flinch.

My gaze snapped to the clock above the mantel: 4:25 p.m.

Why was it chiming? It only chimes on each quarter. Twelve, three, six and nine. Not at 4:25.

I looked back to my sister, concern starting to build into panic.

“Rebecca,” I said louder, stepping toward her and waving my hand in front her face—like you would to test if someone was blind or unconscious. Her eyes didn’t move. Didn’t even flicker.

“Naaathan.”

The whisper slithered across the back of my neck, sending icicles hurtling through my veins. I spun again, this time so fast my vision blurred.

A hand suddenly touched my shoulder from behind. I jolted around violently.

The glass slipped slightly in my hand. I tightened my grip before it fell, knuckles whitening. against the glass. My chest cinched tight, breath stalling somewhere between my lungs and my throat.

“Jesus, Nate. Are you alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Rebecca was staring at me, wide-eyed, brows meeting.

Movement had returned to her face, horror dawning at my reaction.

I blinked rapidly, scanning the room.

Mum was sipping her wine. Waiters were moving among the crowd, offering refills and collecting empty glasses. Emily was rearranging the flowers on the table again.

Everything was normal.

Ordinary.

Completely unchanged.

I glanced back at the window. Nothing but my own reflection stared back at me.

I swallowed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t sure that I was. Something was happening to me. Something I didn’t understand.

I looked back to the clock. The second hand was ticking onward, steady and innocent.

Tik-tok.