CHAPTER 17 #2
When I pulled back my eyes were swollen and my nose was running and I probably looked a mess, and none of it mattered, not with how he was looking at me.
“Better?” he asked.
“A little.” I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. “I hate that he can do that to me at all.”
“He doesn't. Not really.” Kenji tipped my chin up with two fingers. “You just did, in under two minutes, what I couldn't do to him in three weeks of buying back his debts. You ended him. That wasn't nothing, Naomi.”
I didn't feel like I'd ended anything. I felt scraped out, the particular hollow that came after saying something true I couldn't take back.
Underneath the hollow, though, something had gone quiet that had been loud in me for a long time.
My father didn't get to be my emergency anymore.
That space in my chest belonged to me again.
Riko made a warm, plain dinner of rice, grilled fish, and clear soup with pale scallion.
We ate in the tea room because some conversations required a softer room.
The kintsugi bowl held the last blue light of evening along its gold seams, and I thought of broken things made stronger where they had been joined.
I did not say it aloud. He knew I knew the bowl's story.
We ate in a kind of comfortable quiet for a while. Then Kenji set his chopsticks down, squared them against the edge of his plate, and looked at me the way he looked at me when he was about to say something he'd rehearsed.
“I want you to hear something,” he said. “And I want you to actually consider it. Not just answer the way you think I want.”
“Okay.” My stomach tightened anyway.
“If you decide you don't want to be part of this.
The fighting. The danger that will keep finding you as long as you're near me.” He said it plainly, no softening at the edges.
“I will find you a safe home. Anywhere in the world you want. Leaving will not cost you money, and it will not cost you my anger.” Something moved behind his eyes that I'd only seen once before, the night he told me whose bowl that was.
“I would grieve it. But you could choose it, and I would let you.”
I set my own chopsticks down slower than I meant to. “Are you asking me to leave?”
“I am asking you to choose,” he said. “That's all I have ever asked you. I will not do it for you, not now and not ever.”
“And if I choose to stay,” I said, “and it gets worse before it gets better?”
“Then it gets worse before it gets better.” No hesitation in it at all. “I will not lie to you about that part, and I will not let you face a single hour of it alone. That much I can promise you.”
I looked at him across the low table: the man who had bought back every piece of my father's promise, stood between me and bullets, and lowered his voice whenever he said my name.
The calm he held in his shoulders cost him something while he waited.
I understood completely that if I stood and said take me to Boston, he would do it even if the choice broke him, because the cage he had created was no longer one he would defend.
“I choose you,” I said.
The room went very quiet. Kenji closed his eyes for one long breath, as though he had been holding it since the day I stepped out of that elevator and had finally allowed himself to let it go.
“Then we go to Hakone tomorrow,” he said when he opened his eyes again. “And after Hakone, we deal with Ryuzaki.” His voice softened into something I didn't hear from him often. “And after that, we come home.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over his, over the place where his little finger ended one joint early, and I didn't say anything else, because there wasn't anything else that needed saying that night.
We didn't talk about it again. There wasn't anything left to add.
We lay in his bed with the lamp off, clothed, my back against his chest and his arm heavy across my ribs, and for a long time neither of us slept.
I felt his heartbeat against my shoulder blade, steady, slower than mine.
A truck downshifted somewhere on the street below, and for one bad second, before the gears caught, I heard something else in it.
I made myself breathe until it passed. At some point his hand found my ring hand and just held it, didn't move it, only held it, like he was making sure it hadn't gone anywhere.
“Sleep,” he said finally, low, right against my hair. “I have you.”
I did, eventually. If I dreamed, I didn't remember it.
I woke to knuckles on a door somewhere down the hall, three careful raps, and Kenji was already sitting up beside me before the sound finished, alert in the dark in a way that told me he'd never really been asleep at all.
“Stay here,” he said, pulling a shirt over his shoulders as he went.
I didn't stay. I gave it thirty seconds and then I followed, bare feet quiet on the cool tatami, the corridor lit only by the city glow through the far window.
I'd spent three weeks learning this house, and I knew exactly which floorboards outside the study creaked and which ones didn't. I stopped just short of the doorway, close enough to hear.
Daisuke's voice came through low and fast, the words running together the way they did when a man had chosen them very carefully. “Oyabun. Kanojo o Hakone ni utsusu koto ga, mou barete imasu. Uchi ni uragirimono ga iru.”
My translator's brain did its work before the rest of me caught up. Boss. They already know we're moving her to Hakone. There's a traitor in the house.
The floor seemed to tilt half an inch. I pressed my shoulder to the wall.
Kenji answered him in the same fast Japanese, and I kept translating without meaning to, my mind doing the thing it had been trained to do for years, turning one language into the other so fast there was no gap left to hide in.
When. Just that, one word, like he'd already decided the answer would be worse than he wanted it to be.
Within the hour, Daisuke told him. Maybe less. Someone in the house had given them the route, the timing. That was enough. They hadn't needed more.
I pushed off the wall before I'd decided to move, and I was in the doorway before either of them noticed me there.
“A leak in the house,” I said.
Kenji turned. For half a second there was nothing on his face but the calm he wore as naturally as a suit. Then it cracked, just enough for me to see beneath it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Who?”
“I don't know yet.”
And that was the part that undid me more than anything Ryuzaki had done.
More than the black sedan at the light. More than my own father's voice on speaker that afternoon.
Because Kenji Tatsuya had an answer for everything.
He had a plan for every shape a threat could take before it finished arriving.
But in the doorway of his study at three in the morning, I watched real fear move across his face for the first time since I'd known him. His thumb found the pad of his missing pinky and pressed, once.
Controlled. Quiet. Impossible to miss.
He didn't know who it was.