32. Dojin
THIRTY-TWO
DOJIN
The forensic sweep took forty minutes. Entry confirmed: front door, lock picked, two operatives, approximately two-hour window between six and eight p.m. when Nari was at a session.
Lobby camera had captured two figures in dark clothing, faces angled away—trained countersurveillance.
No fingerprints. No DNA. No electronic devices planted.
Professional. Clean. Mercer’s signature: expensive, thorough, and deniable.
Reo delivered the summary standing in the kitchen, tablet in hand, the operative’s report open on the screen. His voice was clipped and precise in a way Dojin recognized: the voice Reo used when the situation had moved from inconvenience to threat.
“You can’t stay here.”
Nari crossed her arms. “This is my home.”
“This is a compromised location.” Reo’s tone didn’t shift. “The entry method was professional. The search was targeted. And they know you weren’t home, which means they’re tracking your schedule. You stay here tonight, you’re announcing that you’re accessible.”
“I’m not hiding from Brent Mercer.”
“No one’s asking you to hide.” Dojin kept his voice steady. Calm. The voice he used in board meetings when a conversation was heading somewhere dangerous. “We’re asking you to be strategic. There’s a difference.”
“What are my options?” She held up fingers.
Counted them off. “Hotel. Too impersonal, too many access points, and I’m not living out of a suitcase because a man with a shell company fixation decided to intimidate me.
” One finger down. “Keiser Tower. Your building. Your security. Your territory. I’m not moving into my—into your headquarters while we’re in the middle of a legal strategy that involves your company. ” Two fingers down.
She’d almost said my boyfriend’s headquarters. Dojin caught the redirect. So did Takumi, whose eyebrows climbed toward his hairline but who, miraculously, kept his mouth shut.
“Your parents’ place,” Reo said. “The brownstone has residential security, a vault for the archival materials, and your family’s there. We add sleuth detail. Two operatives on the building, one inside. Not visible. Not intrusive. Present.”
Nari’s mouth opened. The refusal was there—Dojin could see it forming, the independent woman who’d built her own space pushing back against the idea of retreating to her parents’ house at thirty years old.
Then her eyes moved to the booth. To the glass walls. To the chair where she’d been sitting when he arrived, writing her inventory with steady hands and shaking knees.
“Mom will make miso.” Flat, resigned, conceding the point in her own language. “She stress-cooks. The entire brownstone will smell like dashi by midnight.”
Takumi stood. Scooped Emi off the couch and tucked him into the carrier with the practiced efficiency of someone who transported a twenty-pound cat across boroughs on a regular basis. “I’ll drive you. My car’s around the corner.” He looked at Dojin. “You’re following, yes?”
Not a question. An assessment of the obvious.
“I’ll make sure the security detail is set up.”
“That’s a yes.” Takumi zipped the carrier. Emi yowled once—for form, not distress. “For the record, if you hurt her, Emi and I will find you. He’s twenty pounds of fury and I have a very particular set of skills.”
“You’re quoting Liam Neeson.”
“I’m quoting Liam Neeson with sincerity and a cat. The threat stands.”
Nari grabbed a bag from the bedroom. Packed it in three minutes—she moved through the space without looking at the disarrangement, stepping around pulled drawers and restacked cushions with the deliberate blindness of a person who’d deal with the mess later, after the fury cooled and the inventory was filed and the security cameras she’d been requesting for six months were finally, finally installed.
At the door, she stopped. Turned. Dojin was standing in the living room, Reo and the operatives behind him, the loft spread out in its violated state—her kingdom, ransacked by Mercer’s people, still standing.
She looked at the cels on the wall. Hideo’s art. Untouched.
“They didn’t take the thing that mattered most.” Her voice was steady. Her eyes weren’t. “And they didn’t find what they came for. Which means we’re winning. They wouldn’t have broken into my home if we weren’t scaring them.”
Dojin watched her reframe the break-in into a tactical advantage in real time. Turn the violation into evidence of their progress. Stand in a ransacked apartment and find the strategy in the wreckage.
This woman.
He walked her to the hallway. Takumi was ahead with the carrier, heading for the stairs, giving them distance with the deliberate tact of a man who knew exactly when to disappear. Reo’s team was still inside, beginning the process of documenting everything for the legal file.
Nari paused at her door. The scratched lock plate caught the hallway light.
“Thank you.” She was looking at the scratches, not at him. “For coming.”
“Always.”
The word came out heavier than he’d intended.
Weighted with more than one evening’s emergency.
Always as in every time you call, I will come.
Every door that opens wrong, I will be on the other side of it.
Every threat that enters your space, I will stand between you and it, and the only question will be how fast I can get there.
She heard it. He saw her hear it—the slight stutter in her breathing, the tightening of her fingers on her bag strap, her eyes lifting from the lock to his face and staying.
“Always is a big word.”
“I know what it weighs.”
The hallway was narrow. Old building, pre-war dimensions, built for smaller people and smaller lives.
He took up most of the width. She was against the doorframe, her bag on her shoulder, one sneaker propped against the wall behind her.
Close enough that her scent reached him—familiar now, specific to her, lodged somewhere permanent.
She reached up. Her fingers found the side of his throat—just below his jaw—and pressed there.
A small gesture—automatic, intimate, a woman who’d stopped thinking about whether she was allowed to touch a man and started touching him because her hands wanted to.
His pulse kicked hard enough that she had to have felt it.
“Your pulse is faster than usual.”
“You’re taking my pulse.”
“I have excellent attention to detail. I’m a professional observer.” Her hand was still at the side of his neck. Her thumb rested against his throat, directly over his pulse point, and she was not moving it.
“Nari.”
“Your heart rate is elevated.”
“You’re standing in a narrow hallway with your thumb on my pulse. Elevated is an understatement.”
Her lips twitched. The smile broke through the exhaustion and the fear and the fury like sun through cloud cover—sudden, bright, gone too fast. “I’m a terrible person for flirting in front of a crime scene.”
“You’re an extraordinary person for flirting in front of a crime scene.”
She inhaled. Her fingers curled into his lapel—not pulling, not yet, but holding. Anchoring herself to him in the narrow hallway of her violated building with Takumi one flight down and Reo ten feet away and the entire situation impossible and irrelevant.
He leaned down. Not to kiss her. Slower than that.
He pressed his forehead against hers. Held it there.
Let his breath mix with hers in the four inches between their mouths.
Her eyes were open. His were open. He could count her eyelashes from this distance.
Could see the faint tremble in her lower lip that she’d been hiding all night.
“I’m scared.” Barely audible. The first honest confession of the evening—no sarcasm, no legal pad, no inventory of their failures. Her thumb moved against his pulse. “Not of Mercer. Of how fast I’m getting used to you being the first person I call.”