CHAPTER 15 #2
She held his eyes a long moment. Her free hand found the small jade ring on her right hand and turned it once, twice, the same small anxious motion he'd watched her make at the elevator on her first night in this city, and again at the counter the morning he told her about her father.
“I accept it,” she said. “But I want all of it. Every part. Even the parts that scare me.”
“You will have it,” he said. “Every part I am permitted to give you, you will have.”
She nodded, and didn't let go of his hand for the rest of the drive home.
Before midnight, Daisuke added a one-touch distress locator to Naomi's phone. He explained exactly when it transmitted, who received it, and how to disable it. Naomi activated it herself and chose Hiro as the first recipient. Kenji accepted that distinction without argument.
At the penthouse he didn't wait for his coat to come off before he called Daisuke.
“Full alert,” he said, in Japanese, the words clipped and fast, a register Naomi had never once heard from him, built for speed instead of warmth.
“Ryuzaki's men made themselves visible on Kototoi-dori.
Deliberately. In front of her. I want every camera live tonight and every downstream holder on her father's debt bought or broken by morning. I do not care what it costs.”
Daisuke's voice came back steady, already moving. “I will call the last three tonight myself. Two will sell easily enough. The third is stubborn, but stubborn men sell too, at the right number.” A short pause. “How is she?”
“Steady,” Kenji said, and found, saying it, that it was true, and that it mattered to him more than he had words to explain. “Tell the household no one goes anywhere alone tonight. Tell Riko she stays here, not at her own apartment.”
“Understood.” Daisuke's voice dropped a register, thinking out loud now rather than reporting.
“This is early for him to show his hand. Ryuzaki does not start what he has not already decided he can win. If he is testing you this soon, he wants something from you before it becomes a war he has to fight.”
“Put two more men on the ground floor tonight,” Kenji said. “One outside her door until morning.”
“Already arranged,” Daisuke said, and Kenji almost smiled, because of course it was.
“The old lion has learned his neighbor has a wife,” Kenji said. His father had used the line about another rival in another decade, and Kenji had not known until this moment that he had kept it, waiting for a use.
Daisuke went silent on the line for a moment. “Then let him learn what that costs him,” he said.
“He will,” Kenji said, and ended the call.
He found her on the balcony. She'd wrapped her own arms around herself against the cold, looking out at the city the way she'd looked at it on her very first night here, from the corridor, as though it were a thing she hadn't yet decided whether to trust.
He came up behind her and set his hands on her shoulders, and turned her gently to face him.
“Kowagaranai de,” he said. “Watashi ga iru.” Do not be afraid. I am here.
“I am afraid,” she said, her voice steadier than he'd expected it to be. “But I am with you.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The strand of hair she'd tucked back an hour ago had come loose again at her cheek.
Her eyes stayed level on his in the cold.
Her chin lifted the small, particular way it lifted when she'd decided something and didn't intend to be argued out of it, and something in him that had been braced since the black sedan pulled level with theirs finally let go.
He kissed her. Slow. Private. Above a city of eleven million people who didn't know either of their names and didn't need to, because none of this had anything to do with them.
When he lifted his head, she had both hands fisted in the front of his coat.
“I'm not leaving,” she said, low. “Whatever this is. Whoever he is. I'm not going anywhere.”
“I know,” he said. “That is the part that frightens me.”
He didn't go to her bed that night. Daisuke arrived within the hour with a laptop and a folder thick with names, and the two of them sat at the desk in Kenji's study until past four in the morning, striking those names out one by one the way his father had taught him to strike names, quickly, without sentiment, because sentiment was a luxury that got men killed before their time.
By the time Daisuke left, two of the three remaining holders had sold.
The third hadn't answered his phone all night, which told Kenji nearly everything he needed to know about the coming day.
A little before five he went to her room instead of his own.
She was asleep, curled small under the blanket, one hand fisted in the sheet the way she must have fallen asleep waiting for him to come.
He undressed only far enough to lie down beside her, still in his shirt, and drew her back against his chest. She had been trembling, faint and constant, even in her sleep, a small current running under her skin that he could feel through the thin cotton of her nightclothes.
He felt it ease out of her in stages as the night wore toward morning, her breathing slowing, her hand loosening until it lay open against his forearm instead of clenched in the sheet.
He watched the window go from black to the gray that comes before real light, one hand resting over the small ring on her finger, and thought, with a plainness that surprised even him, that he would take the city apart floor by floor before he let any man teach her to be afraid in her sleep.
He was still awake when the first light came. His phone woke on the nightstand, screen bright in the dim room, silent, because he'd muted the ringer hours before out of habit. Her hand lay curled against his chest. He didn't reach for the phone while she held him there. It went dark. It woke again.
This time he eased his arm out from beneath her, one degree at a time, until her hand came to rest against the sheet instead of his skin, and she didn't wake. He rose. He crossed the tatami in bare feet and picked the phone up before it could ring a third time and disturb her.
The number was blocked. The message sat already open beneath it, waiting for him, three short lines of Japanese. He read them once, went very still, and read them again.
“Omae no gaikokujin no isha wa azukatta. Kanojo no yuujin mo. Nokori wa isshuukan da.”
We have your foreign doctor. Her friend too. One week remains.
He closed his thumb over the scarred end of his little finger, grounding himself in an old injury while every other part of him wanted to break the glass.
He looked up from the screen at Naomi, asleep in the gray light, one hand curled loose against the sheet where his chest had been a moment before, entirely unaware that somewhere in the city, a clock had just started, counting down every hour she had left to feel safe.