Yuki #3
“I don’t need saving!” I yelled, my voice echoing through the foyer. “Do you hear yourself? After everything Marius has done, after everything that son of a bitch has taken from us...you expect me to sit back and do nothing?”
“I’m expecting you to stop confusing revenge with justice.”
“It ain’t revenge!”
“It is now.”
“You weren’t there.”
“Whose fault is that! I would’ve been there every step of the way if you allowed me to be.”
“But you weren't. You heard our daughter screams when those bullets started flying. You didn’t have to stand there carrying the burden of if your grandbabies would die before they ever got the chance to live because of something I started.
You don't have to watch that bastard keep slipping through the cracks every time we think we've got him.”
“Yeah, but I watched my wife disappear chasing a ghost. I watched the woman I married become somebody who sleeps with a gun instead of peace. I watched you convince yourself that every line you crossed was justified because the next one would finally be the one that made the pain stop.”
“It never stopped, did it?” His eyes never left mine.
I couldn’t answer him because the truth was standing between us, refusing to let me hide behind another excuse.
Every person I’d buried had only convinced me another body would somehow make the pain easier to carry.
Every secret I’d protected demanded another lie to keep it buried, and every war I’d survived had somehow led me to another battlefield.
I had spent so many years convincing myself I was fighting for justice that somewhere along the way I stopped recognizing when justice had become vengeance.
“I can’t let him live.”
“You can’t keep dying either.” The words landed deep inside my chest, forcing me to look away for the first time since he’d walked through my front door. I swallowed hard, fighting against emotions I’d spent years refusing to acknowledge.
“He shot at our daughter.”
“He did.”
“He shot at our fucking grandchildren.”
“I was there Yuki, I watched it happen.”
“Then you should know he deserves to die.”
Majeston closed what little distance remained between us until only a few feet separated our bodies. His eyes never left mine, and when he spoke again, his voice softened in a way that somehow hurt even more than if he’d screamed.
“And after he does...then what?”
“What?” I frowned, searching his face as though I’d misunderstood the question.
“Answer me.” There wasn’t any accusation in his voice. No sarcasm. No anger. Just a husband asking his wife a question she had never once allowed herself to consider.
“Marius dies tonight.” He gave a slow nod, accepting my answer without arguing.
“Then what?” I opened my mouth, fully expecting another speech about revenge or justice to come pouring out but nothing came.
For the first time in years, I realized I’d spent so much of my life planning Marius’s death that I’d never stopped long enough to imagine what my own life was supposed to look like after he was gone.
“You think his death brings those children back? You think it gives Masina back the years she lost? You think it erases what happened to our family? You think Ysis wakes up tomorrow without scars because Marius stopped breathing?”
“No.”
“You know what it does?” He waited just long enough to make sure I was listening before answering his own question.
“It gives you another funeral to attend.”
I swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat refused to move as Majeston slowly closed the remaining distance between us. There was nowhere left for me to hide, nowhere left to look except into the eyes of the only man who had loved every version of me, including the ones I was least proud of.
“You already lost your son and bestfriend. You almost lost your daughter...and you're about to lose me.” I closed my eyes, wishing for just a second that shutting out his face would somehow keep the truth from reaching me, but it didn’t.
Those sentences found every wound I’d spent years trying to bury, and when I finally forced myself to look back at him, the hurt written across his face nearly brought me to my knees.
“You want to lose yourself too?”
Tears burned behind my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. Crying wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to erase the years we’d lost or the blood that had already been spilled.
“You don’t understand.”
“Then help me.”
“You can’t.”
“Try me.”
I slowly shook my head, not because I didn’t want to explain it, but because I wasn’t sure there were words capable of carrying the kind of guilt I’d been living with for years.
“You can’t understand what it feels like waking up every morning knowing that bastard is still breathing. You can’t understand carrying the guilt of every decision I made, every person I failed, every child I couldn’t save. I should’ve killed him years ago.”
“And if you couldn’t?”
“What if tonight is another trap? What if somebody else dies? What if the next body on the ground belongs to you?” I could hear the fear under every word. “How many more people have to pay for one man’s sins before you finally admit this isn’t justice anymore?”
My fingers curled into fists as I fought the urge to look away from him again.
Every instinct inside me was screaming to end the conversation, to walk past him, to climb into one of those waiting SUVs and finish what I’d started years ago.
I had come too far to stop now. I’d buried too many people.
I’d sacrificed too much. I couldn’t let Marius keep breathing.
“I have to finish this.”
Majeston stood there studying me for so long that I could almost see the war taking place behind his eyes. He wasn’t searching for another argument because he already knew none of his words were going to change my mind.
Slowly, he nodded to himself, not in agreement but with the quiet resignation of a man finally accepting a truth he’d spent years refusing to believe. “If you walk out that door with those men, there’s no coming back from this.”
His voice remained almost painfully calm, forcing me to hear every syllable whether I wanted to or not.
I searched his face, waiting for the slightest crack in his composure, waiting for him to tell me he was bluffing, waiting for my husband to become the man who always found another way out. He never did.
“Because if you start another war,” he continued, never taking his eyes off mine, “not only will I finish it...” He paused, allowing the severity of his words to land before delivering the part that finally stole the air from my lungs.
“...but then you’ll have to deal with going to war with me after it. ”
In all the years I’d known Majeston, in all the years we’d loved one another, I had never seen him like this.
He wasn’t threatening me. There was no anger behind his eyes, no desire to win, no satisfaction in forcing me into a corner.
There was only heartbreak. He looked at me the way a man looked at someone standing on the edge of a cliff, fully aware that one more step meant losing them forever.
It was then I realized I was afraid of the future I’d been chasing all along.
Majeston held my gaze for several more seconds before speaking again. “Go upstairs.”
I remained where I was, my feet refusing to move even as every part of me understood he wasn’t giving me an order out of control. He was trying to save me from making one decision I could never take back.
“I said...” His voice dropped even lower, but the authority behind it only grew stronger. “...go upstairs.”
I don’t know why I listened. Maybe a part of me was exhausted from carrying revenge for so many years.
Maybe a part of me still trusted the man standing in front of me more than I trusted myself.
Or maybe, beneath every hard truth he’d spoken since walking through my front door, I could still hear the husband who had spent years trying to keep me alive while I insisted on sacrificing myself one piece at a time.
Without another argument, I turned and started toward the staircase, each step feeling heavier than the one before it.
I never looked back because I already knew what I’d see if I did.
By the time I reached the landing, I heard the front door open behind me, followed a moment later by the click of it closing again.
I stood there for several long moments after the front door closed behind Majeston, staring at the empty space where he’d been standing as though I could somehow will him to walk back through it. The silence inside the house felt different now. It no longer carried the anticipation of another war.
Instead, it settled over every room like a mirror, forcing me to sit with everything I’d spent years running from.
His words refused to leave me alone. They replayed over and over inside my head until I could no longer tell whether I was hearing his voice or my own conscience finally finding the courage to speak.
You already lost your son and bestfriend, you almost lost your daughter, and you're about to lose me. You want to lose yourself too?
For years I’d convinced myself that revenge was the only thing keeping me alive.
Every decision I made, every order I gave, everybody that fell in pursuit of Marius had been justified by one simple lie—I was protecting my family.
Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped noticing that my family had become the very thing I was sacrificing in order to protect.
A knock broke through my thoughts before Chen slowly stepped back inside the foyer. “We’re ready, Madam.” I looked at him for a long time before answering.
“No.” Confusion crossed his face.
I removed the pistol from the holster resting against my side before placing it on the foyer table. One by one, I laid every spare magazine beside it until the familiar weight I’d carried for so many years no longer rested against my body.