The Yakuza's Bride (The Syndicate’s Price #13)

CHAPTER 1

Naomi

◆

The last ordinary thing I did before my father sold me was argue with a word.

Rain had been ticking against the kitchen window for almost an hour, soft and steady, the unhurried kind of September rain that never bothered announcing when it planned to stop.

It was a Tuesday, the last week of the month, and I had a mug of black tea gone cold at my elbow, a laptop open to a document I'd already read six times, and forty pages of a Japanese pediatric cardiology paper spread across the table like a losing hand of cards.

Miso slept in my lap, warm and solid, purring in the low, contented rumble he only made when the radiator ticked on beside us.

Somewhere below, a neighbor was cooking with garlic, the smell drifting through the old floorboards at the same hour it did most nights. I didn't move Miso. I never did.

The paper was about a baby girl in Fukuoka, born with a small hole in her heart, the kind that sometimes closes up on its own by the time a child turns two, and sometimes doesn't. I'd been stuck on a single phrase for twenty minutes.

The Japanese doctor had written keika kansatsu.

Most translators would set that down as “watchful waiting” and move on to the next line without a second thought.

But that wasn't quite it. It was closer to watching-over, the specific, patient love of a doctor who checks on a small thing every single day because he badly wants it to get better.

I typed “careful monitoring.” I deleted it.

I typed “watchful waiting” and deleted that too.

A family somewhere, in Boston or Osaka or wherever this file eventually landed, was going to read whatever word I finally chose, and I wanted it to be the right one.

That mattered to me in a way I'd never explained well at parties, back when I went to parties.

One careful word could be the difference between a mother reading that her daughter would probably be fine, and a mother lying awake at three in the morning convinced she wouldn't be.

I used to do this work standing in hospital corridors, translating for families in real time, watching a mother's face rearrange itself the second bad news landed in a language she understood.

I was good at it. I wasn't built for watching it happen, not over and over, so I'd moved the work to my kitchen table instead, one careful document at a time, where nobody's face had to fall in front of me.

I told myself that counted as the same kindness. Most days I believed it.

Next to the laptop sat my other constant: a battered leather notebook, its cover gone soft and dark at the corners from years of being carried in and out of hospital corridors and now just from being carried across my own kitchen table.

I'd filled it since grad school, one column of Japanese medical terms and one of English, definitions scrawled in the margins in three different pens.

It wasn't pretty. It was mine, built one careful entry at a time, and I trusted it more than any dictionary app I'd ever downloaded.

I worked in a cardigan the color of weak tea, sleeves pushed to my elbows, because I always ran warm when I concentrated and always regretted it forty minutes later when the apartment went cold again.

The place was small: one bedroom, a radiator that clanked twice before it agreed to work, a window that looked out on a maple tree that hadn't started turning yet.

On the shelf above my desk sat a photo of my mother and me at the aquarium, her hand warm on my shoulder, both of us laughing at something neither of us could have explained to anyone else.

It wasn't much of an apartment. It was enough. It had always been enough.

Miso stretched, resettled, and went back to sleep.

I'd found him outside a shelter, a scrawny half-grown thing the color of strong miso paste, all amber and brown, and rather than think of anything clever, I just started calling him that until it stuck.

He didn't care what language I used with him.

He answered to tone of voice the same as any other creature smart enough to know who fed him.

I twisted the ring on my right hand without deciding to, a habit older than I could remember starting.

A small band of jade, worn thin at the back where my mother's finger had been narrower than mine.

Aiko. She'd been gone twelve years, and I still reached for that ring the way other people reached for their phones: automatic, more comfort than decision.

I could hear her sometimes, if I let myself, humming low and off-key over the stove on a Sunday, some half-song she never finished because she never remembered all the words to it.

I used to tease her about that. She used to tell me some things didn't need finishing to be worth singing.

I hadn't understood that at twelve. I understood it a little better now, twelve years further into being a person without her.

My phone buzzed against the table, rattling a page loose from its stack. MARCUS BELL, the screen said. Not Dad. I'd never once saved him under that word, not since I was old enough to notice he'd stopped acting like one.

I answered on the third ring, thumb already anxious against the glass. “Hello?”

“Naomi.” My father's voice was the same as it always was, flat and efficient, like he was reading off a memo somebody else had written for him. “You'll be traveling soon. I've made arrangements. Don't argue.”

“Wait. Traveling where? What arrangements?”

He didn't answer. The line went dead before I'd even finished the sentence, and I was left holding the phone against my ear, listening to nothing at all.

I set it down on the table like it might go off again on its own.

Something had pulled tight in my chest, a small hard knot just under my collarbone, the kind I usually got before a difficult conversation.

Except there hadn't been a conversation.

There'd been three sentences and a dial tone, and now there was just me, and the rain, and a cat who hadn't so much as opened an eye through any of it.

I called him back. Straight to voicemail, his standard outgoing message, brisk and impersonal, the kind of thing you'd get from a dentist's office.

I tried his assistant's line next, mostly out of habit, and got the same result: a polite recorded voice asking me to leave my name after the tone.

I didn't leave one. What was I supposed to say?

Hi, it's your daughter. Please explain the arrangements you refuse to describe.

I pulled my laptop back toward me and typed “Bell Corporation” into the search bar before I'd fully decided to.

I hadn't looked the company up in months.

The first results were old: a product launch from two years back, a photo of my father shaking hands with someone at a ribbon-cutting, his tie the same steel gray it was in every photo I'd ever seen of him.

Underneath that, newer. Bell Corporation Shares Fall Amid Restructuring Talk.

Sources Describe Medical-Device Firm Under Strain.

I read the first two paragraphs. Words like default, and bridge financing, and sources familiar with the matter floated past without quite landing anywhere.

I translated medical language for a living, not boardroom language, and this read like a different dialect of the same species: technically English, built to keep a reader from understanding anything specific.

I frowned at the screen for several heartbeats, then closed the laptop.

Whatever was happening at his company, it was happening the way everything with my father happened, behind a door I was never invited through.

He'd tell me when he wanted something from me.

He always did. I'd learned a long time ago not to go looking for the door myself.

The last time I'd seen him in person was over a year ago, a rushed dinner in Boston that lasted forty minutes and ended with him checking his watch twice before the check even came.

I made more tea, chamomile this time, the kind that's supposed to help you sleep, and carried it to the couch along with the one book I never had to think twice about reaching for. Miso followed, unbothered by any of it, and resettled against my hip the moment I sat back down.

The book had been my mother's: a small paperback of Rilke, its spine a deep, faded red, cracked pale along the fold from all the times she'd forced it open flat.

The corners had gone round and soft, more felt than paper anymore.

She used to read to me from it when I was small, in Japanese, her voice dropping into a register she never used for anything else, slower, careful, like the words themselves were something you could bruise if you rushed them.

I'd grown up with two languages doing that to me, English for ordinary things and Japanese for anything that mattered, and I'd never quite untangled which one was really mine.

Maybe both. Maybe that was the whole point of having two.

I remembered sitting at a kitchen table very like this one, years before this apartment, my mother's hand over mine, guiding my pencil through the strokes of a kanji I kept getting backward.

She never rushed me. She used to say the character was patient, and so could I be.

I hadn't thought of that lesson in years, but tonight, stuck on a single Japanese phrase for a paper on the other side of the world, it came back whole: the exact warmth of her hand, the exact smell of eraser shavings on the table.

I found the poem I wanted, the short one, the one that always landed on me like a door closing behind someone who isn't coming back, and read the last line out loud the way she used to, the words coming easier in Japanese than they ever did in English.

Anata wa jinsei o kaenakereba naranai. You must change your life.