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)
The baby giggled again.
Oh. She’s here.
I turned, and she was near my ear this time. “You’re my niece.”
Aki grinned. “You have to roll us a joint with the same stuff you smoked.”
Yuki winked. “Please.”
“Okay. I got word that somehow Yoichi and Rin survived the fall, although they’re badly beat up.” Kenji put his phone back in his pocket and hurried over. “What’s going on with Hiro? Is he still out of it?”
The baby girl disappeared.
Dark exhaustion was already climbing into me and up the long bones of my legs. I knew I had maybe one sentence left before I passed out completely, so I decided to spend it on the truth.
I struggled to look up at my brother, but when I did. . .I spoke, "That was your baby that died on the island tonight. That was the little ghost."
The twins looked at me like I was crazy, but Kenji and Reo did not. They studied me and processed those words.
“What?” Horror covered Kenji's face. His eyes told me that he was going over all the details of tonight and coming to the realization that I could be right. Then, grief filled his gaze. Next, guilt and sorrow.
I had seen my brother take a hundred blows and never once show this much expression. I had watched him bury his mother and Jobon with a face carved out of stone. I had stood beside him through every horror our world could invent, and I had never, not once, seen the Dragon's face do what it did now.
The war drained out of him as well as every layer he had built over these years of being the most dangerous man in Japan peeled away, until what was left was just a man hearing words he could not survive and could not run from.
His mouth opened.
Nothing came.
And then a boy's voice came out of a king's body, small, broken, and in so much pain. "No. . .our baby? That can’t be. . ."
And then darkness swallowed me whole.
Chapter twenty-four
The Last Story
Nyomi
Deja still hadn't returned. I needed news. Every passing minute pulled my nerves tighter.
About Rin.
About Kenji.
About the war that was deciding who would still have a heartbeat by dawn.
The visions stopped. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. I almost feared that it had been a temporary thing. Or perhaps, I’d used it so much that. . .it needed to charge up. Either way, there was peace in being able to look at people again and not see their private memories.
Yet, waiting was its own kind of torture. It sat in my jaw. It sat in the meat of my hands. It sat behind my eyes. It was a slow burning hot iron pressed against the skin, searing, unbearable, and impossible to escape.
Time stretched and twisted, bringing more uncertainty, worry, and fear.
Every second felt like an eternity—a never-ending cycle of agony and anticipation.
To not go stir-crazy, I gave two of my men strict orders to guard the twins. Then I drifted from room to room through the Bamboo Garden building, searching for any way I could help the medical teams.
The children's room needed me the most.
Fear had settled over the children. They didn't understand the battle, mafia politics, or the scent of blood in the air. They only knew that their fathers had gone to war, and no one could promise they were coming back.
So. . .I entertained them.
God, I hope this is helping.
The children's book had cardboard corners and a rabbit on the cover with a lantern in his paw.
I held it open across my knees, and the children pressed in close around me, looking at the pictures and listening as I read to them in Japanese.
Zo snored in the bed on my right. If he woke up now and saw this, he might pass back out in shock.
My mouth easily found the sounds even though I had no knowledge of the language beforehand. My NY accent was still in there. I could hear it living underneath the vowels, softening the words and giving them a little bounce that didn't belong.
Still, the words came out clean.
The kanji made sense on the page. Every character was a small door, and I walked through each one like I'd been walking through them my whole life.
A little girl with a bandage around her wrist had her hand on my knee.
Another one, no more than five, leaned her whole weight against my hip and breathed with her mouth open.
A boy in the bed nearest to me lay on his side so he could see the pictures. He had an IV line taped to the back of his hand.
There were now thirty beds in this makeshift hospital ward, and all of them were filled. Some injured adults lay on mattresses on the floor. Three nurses in blue moved through the space. Two exhausted doctors did their best to treat everyone. They were overworked and understaffed, and I wished I could do more for them than sit there and entertain the kids while the war drummed around us.