CHAPTER 18 #2
The words came out plain, no flourish anywhere in them.
I understood, hearing it, that he hadn't chosen them on purpose at all, that they had simply been the truest thing sitting closest to his mouth in that moment.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding since the kettle left my hand, all of it at once, and swayed a little on my feet.
His hands tightened at my jaw. “Naomi.”
“I'm fine. I just forgot to breathe for a while there.” I reached up and touched the blood at his cheekbone with one finger, light, testing. “You're hurt.”
“It is nothing.”
“It's still bleeding, which technically makes it something.” I pressed my sleeve to the cut before he could argue the point, and he let me, standing motionless under my hand the way he'd once held steady for stitches. “Hold that. Don't touch it, your hands are filthy.”
“Yes,” he said, and something that wasn't quite a smile moved at the corner of his mouth, there and gone, like he couldn't quite afford the whole thing yet but wanted me to see him reach for it anyway.
He caught my free hand before I could lower it, turned it palm up, and looked at it like he was checking for a wound I hadn't mentioned. It wasn't much, just a faint red line across my palm where the kettle handle had bitten in on the throw.
“You could have missed,” he said quietly, no accusation in it anywhere, only something closer to wonder.
“I didn't have time to worry about missing.” I closed my fingers around his. “I just knew I wasn't going to stand there and watch.”
“I do not imagine you were.” Something moved behind his eyes, complicated and enormous at once.
“Are you angry with me?”
“No.” The word came immediately, no hesitation in it at all. “I am terrified of you. There is a difference, and I am still learning to tell the two apart where you are concerned.”
I almost laughed, a small broken sound that came out somewhere between relief and disbelief. “That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me after a firefight.”
“It is the only firefight anyone has ever said anything to you after.” Something in his voice loosened, lighter than it had been a moment before, like he was testing whether he had room left for it tonight. “I intend to keep it that way.”
I turned before he could stop me and went to the man Hiro had shot in the shoulder, the one breathing hard against the wall. Some old instinct, built out of years in clinic waiting rooms, put my knees down on the tatami in front of him before my brain had caught up with the decision.
“Daijoubu,” I told him, low. It's okay. “Ugokanaide.” Don't move. I didn't know if either sentence was true. I said them anyway, the way you say them to anyone bleeding in front of you, guilty or not, because fear doesn't check a person's record before it takes hold of them.
I got the kit open with hands that had gone strangely certain.
I packed gauze against the wound and pressed down hard, direct pressure, the way I'd learned from watching a hundred nurses do it before me.
His pulse fluttered too fast and too light under my fingers when I checked his wrist. He was going into shock, I thought, his pupils too wide, his breathing too quick.
I kept up a low, even stream of Japanese the whole time I worked, the same voice I'd used on frightened mothers and hurting children in that Nishi-Azabu clinic weeks ago, because it turned out my hands didn't know how to tell the difference between a patient and a man who had just tried to kill us, once he was bleeding in front of them.
Behind me, I heard Kenji go very quiet.
I looked back once. He had a hand pressed briefly over his own mouth, his thumb finding the flat scarred place where the last joint of his smallest finger should have been, pressing there hard, the way I'd seen him do only when something in him was working very hard to hold its own door shut.
It lasted a second. Maybe two. Then his hand came down, and his face was his own again, composed, contained, the face he wore into every boardroom in this city.
But I had seen the other one first. I wasn't going to forget that I had seen it.
Daisuke crouched beside me a moment later, quiet, watching my hands work without once offering to take over. When I finally sat back on my heels, the bleeding slowed under a fresh wad of gauze, he looked at me with something new in his face that hadn't been there yesterday.
“You did well, sister,” he said.
I looked up at him, startled enough that I nearly lost the pressure I was holding. “I threw a kettle at a man.”
“You threw it exactly where it needed to go. Then you knelt down in the middle of a war and did this.” He nodded at my hands, red-stained even through the gloves. “That's not luck, Naomi. That's a person who was always going to be useful, whether she asked to be part of a war or not.”
He crouched there a moment longer, forearms on his knees, watching the wounded man's breathing even out under my hands. “For what it's worth, I've seen soldiers freeze doing less than what you just did tonight.”
“I don't feel steady,” I admitted. “I feel like my hands got borrowed from someone braver.”
Daisuke's mouth curved, something halfway between amusement and approval. “Or maybe that's just what steady feels like from the inside, the first few times.”
Kenji crouched in front of me next, taking over from Daisuke without a single word passing between them that I caught, and helped me to my feet like my knees might not be trustworthy. They weren't, particularly.
“We are not staying here tonight,” he said. “Pack the small bag. The one from Boston, if it still holds what matters to you. We leave for Hakone within the hour.”
“And the leak.” My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. “Whoever let them in.”
“Daisuke will find him.” Kenji's jaw stayed hard, but his eyes, finding mine, had already gentled for my sake. “It will be handled. Not tonight. Not with any more blood than this floor has already taken.”
I nodded and didn't ask what handled meant, because some nights a person only has room to carry one hard truth at a time, and I had already spent mine on the man bleeding against the wall behind me.
We rode down to the parking garage in silence, the three of us, Kenji and Hiro and me, the elevator doors sealing out the wrecked foyer and the smoke and the men Daisuke's people were already sorting into whatever categories a war sorts men into.
I had the first aid kit clamped against my ribs, though I hadn't noticed I was holding it until the doors shut and there was nothing left for my hands to do.
The number above the door counted down in small green digits, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, and I watched them because it was easier than watching anything else in that steel box.
Hiro stood against the mirrored wall, carbine finally lowered, his eyes on the same numbers as mine.
Nobody spoke. There was nothing efficient left to say, and everything else felt too large for a room this small.
Kenji reached over and took the other one, the empty one, laced his fingers through mine, and squeezed once, firm, the same way I'd checked for a pulse a few minutes before.
“Kimi ni, boku no tsuma ni natte hoshii,” he said into the steel silence of the elevator, his eyes fixed on mine.
I want you to become my wife.
Then he tightened his hand around mine. “That is not a claim. Not tonight, and not while danger has narrowed your world. When every door is open and every choice is yours, I will ask you properly. You may say no.”
The words reached me through smoke, blood, and the aftershock still moving through my body. He was not naming an outcome. He was promising me the question.
“Then live long enough to ask,” I said.
“I will.”