Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Too. Fucking. Close.
Before I could think anything else, his right hand was already moving.
It came low, fingers not curled into a fist but spread and rigid for a deadly strike aimed at my throat. He was not trying to hurt me. His body simply did not know yet that it was me, and his body's default in the dark was to kill whatever it touched.
I rolled my shoulder back and his fingertips grazed my collar and found nothing.
His body was already adjusting, already calculating the miss, already loading the next sequence—I could feel it in the tension of his wrist when I caught it and held it still. “Hiro!!”
He froze, still sleeping, with the leg hung in the air at an angle that should have been uncomfortable. His striking hand sat locked in my grip. His chest rose and fell at the same slow rate of rhythmic sleep.
Behind me I heard the Claws murmur worry.
Of course his left hand still held the gold lollipop.
And then finally. . .Hiro’s eyes slowly opened.
He stared at the canopy first. Then the dark surrounding him. Then the muzzle flash strobing through the trees. Then the masked figures moving at the tree line. Then Reo's table and the four men moving pieces by phone-light farther away.
Next he found my face again.
Hiro sniffed. "You smell different. Why?"
"The war is here, brother."
He stared down at the gold lollipop. “Who gave this to me?”
“Probably the Silent Ones.”
Lowering his leg, he frowned and placed the lollipop in his pocket. “The bastards did something to me. Where is Nyomi?"
"She's safe."
"That's not an answer."
"She's in the Bamboo Garden."
Slowly, Hiro went quiet. He looked down at the ground between his boots and I watched his eyes move across the leaf-litter and the soil the way they moved when he was seeing a thing that was not there.
Does he see a ghost? I hope not. I need his mind with us.
I did not know what held his attention in that dark patch of dirt. His jaw worked once and then stopped. "What happened in that forest, Kenji?"
"A lot."
Hiro looked down at the dirt, seeing something the rest of us could not. His bottom lip quivered. Then, he stared at my hands. “What are those lines on your palm?”
“The war is here, brother. That conversation is for another time.” I picked up his mask and held it out to him. "Get this on. We need to fight. I have confirmation that our father is on his way."
Hiro took the mask from my hand. He looked at it for one breath—that single angle that showed mourning, that single angle that showed rage—and then he pushed it down over his face.
And because I was so different now, I appreciated Hiro in a more intense way.
My brother.
My weapon.
The most dangerous man in any room I walked into.
Always, I saw loyalty for me within his eyes. I had even seen devotion so complete it had never asked for a name. I had never let myself see what was underneath those things.
But the ritual had changed what I was capable of seeing.
In that one breath, before the Hannya mask swallowed Hiro’s face, I saw it.
Clear.
Still.
Undeniable.
Hiro was a king.
And not in the way I was a king—inherited, forged out of grief and necessity, built from the outside in until the architecture of it became the only self I knew how to inhabit.
That was my throne.
Constructed.
Intentional.
A thing I had learned to carry.
What I saw in Hiro's face, eyes, and even the line of his jaw was the cold economy of great power.
I thought about what it would look like. Hiro in control of Tokyo. Hiro’s hands on the table Reo had built for war. The pieces moving under my brother’s instruction. The war running cleaner because the man reading it had been born to read it, not taught. I thought about what the Claws would become under him—not just loyal, but freed into something the loyalty had always been reaching toward.
I thought about Nyomi too and our lives without this mafia empire.
Her laugh in a room with no war in it.
Our children I had not yet held.
Mornings of peace.
The throne had cost me everything I had not yet admitted I wanted. And I had paid without complaint because I had believed there was no other life—that the Dragon and the empire were the same thing.
That to release one was to destroy the other.
But Hiro put his mask on and rose from the ground in one motion, and I understood that I had been wrong.
The Dragon did not need to sit on the throne anymore.
The Dragon just needed to choose who did.
All the Fangs arrived—except Yoichi—and stood among the Claws.
Hiro brushed his clothes off. “Something bad happened in that forest.”
“I’ve got control of my dragon-shadow.”
“But at what cost?”
I looked at him. “I don’t know.”