There was nobody but a father to attend Julia's funeral.
Her mother gone. No siblings to speak of. An extended family far away somewhere. He didn't even have a body to bury; Wen had taken that from him too. He simply stood over the spot where he would have put her.
You usually don't have proper funerals in Kolechia. The family takes rusty shovels and buries the body by hand, coffin-less, in a graveyard. If you are rich, you have a headstone carved, and it not, you leave your loved one forever unmarked. It's better than the incineration for those who have no family left free or alive.
In the father's opinion, there will be no proper execution for Wen either. At least, not one the state would provide. The idea of him dying a painless death made him sick to the stomach.
Before Julia's death he had been a good man, an innocent man. He didn't think he was a man who could kill. He had abstained from the Six Year War with a leg defect and wondered how men could shoot their enemies so easily
Now he knew, and he knew well. The second he saw Simon Wen's face in the paper, he felt himself change, as though his mind dipped in ice. The simple hatred he felt was easily tapped into.
I can kill. And I can kill brutally.