Ryuichi’s apartment, Nishi-Shinjuku → October 31st, 2022

  “Some inheritances are not given. They are discovered.”

  Ryuichi stepped through the front door of the apartment, the lock clicking shut with a sound that seemed to echo too loudly in the quiet space. His posture was unnervingly stiff, his shoulders hiked high as if he were bracing for a physical blow, or perhaps just trying to keep his own soul from shattering across the floor.

  Hina was there in an instant. She didn’t need to see his face to know the air had changed. “Ryu... what happened?” she asked, her voice a soft, tethering thread in the darkness.

  Ryuichi didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His throat felt as though it were being crushed by an invisible hand, the words “Kawamura” and “Tsukasa” sticking like shards of glass in his windpipe.

  He did something he had never done before: he walked right past her, his gaze fixed on nothing. There was no gentle greeting, no soft touch to her hair. He threw his motorcycle keys blindly toward the console table—they skittered across the wood and clattered onto the floor, but he didn’t even flinch. He was a man possessed by a cold, hollow vacuum. Hina watched him, her heart sinking; the Ryuichi standing in their living room was a total stranger.

  Ryuichi moved like a ghost through his own home, acknowledging no one as he retreated into the bedroom. He shut the door, the click of the latch sounding final, like the closing of a tomb.

  He let himself fall onto the bed, collapsing under the weight of a history he hadn’t known he carried. He didn’t care about the sharp creases forming in his expensive trousers or the disarray of his shirt; his mind was screaming too loudly for him to care about the surface.

  A wave of violent nausea rolled through him.

  Who am I?

  For nine years, he had defined himself by his distance from the Kawamura name. He had used his “outsider” status as a moral shield, a way to stay clean while working in the dirt. Now, the shield had shattered. His very DNA marked him as the enemy. He wasn’t a Sakamoto who happened to be loyal; he was a Kawamura who had been lied to.

  His body began to shake involuntarily, a deep, rhythmic tremor that started in his chest and radiated to his limbs. Every piece of the puzzle was clicking into place with a sickening thud. He remembered the stem cell transplant years ago. They had called it a miracle—a one-in-a-million match between two “unrelated” childhood friends that had saved a life.

  It hadn’t been a miracle. It had been biology.

  The soft, rhythmic knocking at the door felt like a hammer against his raw nerves. Ryuichi didn’t answer. He didn’t move. He knew it was Hina, and for the first time in their relationship, he was terrified of her seeing him. The toxic thoughts began to fester.

  Was he even good enough for her now?

  He had spent years priding himself on being the one who walked the line, the one who wasn’t truly of the underworld. But the blood in his veins told a different story. He was a Kawamura—a name synonymous with blood, betrayal, and the murder of his own parents. He felt like a walking contagion. She didn’t deserve a man with a legacy this fractured; she deserved someone clean, someone whose name didn’t leave a bitter taste on the tongue.

  The door creaked open, and Hina stepped into the dim light of the bedroom. She found him lying perfectly still, his eyes fixated on a microscopic crack in the ceiling as if it were the only thing holding the world together.

  “Ryu… what happened?”

  She sat on the edge of the mattress, the bed dipping under her weight. She left a careful distance between them, her intuition warning her that his personal space had become a minefield. She waited for him to blink, to move, to give her any sign that the man she loved was still under that mask of stone.

  Ryuichi’s hand reached out, his fingers fumbling until they caught hers. His grip was tight, almost desperate. Hina felt the deep, rhythmic tremor vibrating through his palm, a physical manifestation of the earthquake happening inside his mind.

  “If you... if you feel uncomfortable, tell me,” she stuttered softly. She felt out of her depth, her heart racing. She had seen Ryuichi angry, she had seen him exhausted, and she had seen him ruthless—but she had never seen him hollowed out. “If you need anything... please, just tell me, Ryu.”

  For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound in the room was Ryuichi’s labored breathing. Then, slowly, he turned his head. He looked at her for the first time since he’d walked through the front door, his eyes dark with a grief so profound it seemed to swallow the light in the room.

  Without a word, he pulled himself up from the pillows. The precision he usually carried was gone; his movements were heavy and uncoordinated. He leaned forward, his forehead coming to rest against her lap, his face burying into the fabric of her clothes. He hid himself there, shielding his eyes from the world, as the last of his composure finally disintegrated.

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  Hina placed a hand on his shoulder, her touch light and grounding. Ryuichi didn’t pull away; instead, a low, jagged sob escaped him—a sound so raw it made her heart ache. His body was wracked with tremors as he leaned his entire weight into her, his fingers clutching at her clothes as if he were afraid of drifting away into the dark.

  “I’m here, Ryu… You don’t need to speak. Just breathe,” she whispered, her voice a steady anchor in the storm of his grief.

  The sobbing grew more intense, his breathing coming in ragged, painful hitches. He pulled himself even closer, his face pressed hard against her lap until her clothes were soaked with his tears.

  “Shitsurei...” he choked out, his voice cracking and small.

  Even now, in the middle of a total emotional collapse, his ingrained politeness flickered—an apology for being “improper,” for letting the mask slip, for being human.

  Hina said nothing. She simply wrapped her arms around him, pulling him against her heart and holding him in the heavy, respectful silence he needed. In the year and a half they had been together, she had only seen him cry twice. Both times had been for Shunsuke. But this was different. This wasn’t the empathetic pain he felt for a friend; this was the sound of a man watching his entire identity burn to the ground.

  Hina held him for a long time, letting the silence act as a buffer between the horror of the headquarters and the safety of their room. She didn’t press him for words; she knew that for a man like Ryuichi, words were a currency he only spent when he was certain of the value.

  “My father… he was a Kawamura,” Ryuichi finally said. His voice was hollow, but the jagged edges of his breakdown were beginning to smooth over as his analytical mind fought to regain its footing. “He let himself be disowned by his father. He walked away from everything—the power, the money, the legacy—just to follow his dream. To be a man of the law.”

  He pulled back slightly, looking at Hina with eyes that were red-rimmed and raw. The fear in his gaze was palpable. “I’m one of them, Hina. I’m the thing I’ve spent my life looking down on.”

  Hina didn’t flinch. She didn’t look at him with the pity he feared, or the suspicion he expected. Instead, she reached up and cupped his face, her thumb brushing away a stray tear. She smiled, and it was the softest, most certain thing he had ever seen.

  “It doesn’t matter, Ryu,” she said firmly. “A surname is just ink on a page. You are still the Ryuichi who takes care of Shunsuke. You are still the man who loves Hina. You are still you. A name doesn’t change the shape of your soul.”

  Ryuichi and Hina stepped out of the bedroom together. The air in the living room felt different now, charged with the secrets Ryuichi was carrying. Misaki and her daughter, Lilith, were sitting on the sofa, a stark contrast of innocence and shadowed history.

  “Are you feeling better, Uncle Ryuichi?” Lilith asked, her Japanese careful and slightly broken.

  Ryuichi managed a small, genuine smile for the girl. “I’m fine now, Lilith,” he replied in fluent English, his voice steadying. He looked toward Hina. “Lilith, would you like to go paint for a bit with Hina? I need to speak with your mother for a moment.”

  Lilith nodded eagerly, her eyes bright at the prospect of art. Hina and Ryuichi exchanged a long, meaningful look—a silent communication of support—before Hina led the young girl toward her art room, leaving a heavy silence in their wake.

  Ryuichi sat down on the couch opposite Misaki. He didn’t lean back; he sat with the precision of a man preparing for a cross-examination. He looked at Misaki, seeing her now not just as Shunsuke’s sister, but as his own blood relative—and the sister of a murderer.

  “Misaki,” he began, his tone low. “I need you to tell me more about Tsukasa. How did this all start? With you and him... and then later, with Shunsuke?”

  Misaki stiffened, her posture mirroring the rigid tension Ryuichi had brought into the room. This wasn’t just a memory for her; it was a deep, unhealed wound that she had carried across an ocean to London and back.

  “Tsukasa was the firstborn, but you know that already,” she started, her voice hollow. “In Shohei’s and Sachiko’s eyes, their firstborn could do no wrong. If anyone—servants, guards, even high-ranking members—said a word against him, they were the ones punished. The syndicate members eventually started to avoid him like a plague, terrified of a misunderstood look or a misplaced word.”

  Misaki stared at her hands, her knuckles white. “He started physically abusing Shunsuke when Shunsuke was only five. It was born of pure, bitter jealousy. Shunsuke was such a friendly, radiant child; the members couldn’t help but interact with him normally. They liked him. Tsukasa couldn’t stand that Shunsuke had the affection he could only demand through fear.”

  Ryuichi sat perfectly still, a cold, predatory fury vibrating beneath his skin. Every detail added a new layer of coal to the fire Taiki had lit.

  “When I was thirteen and Tsukasa was sixteen... the physical abuse turned into something worse,” Misaki whispered, her voice trembling. “He started to sexually assault me. I lived in a nightmare for two years. Shunsuke finally found out when he was fifteen. He walked in... he tried to pull Tsukasa away from me...”

  She closed her eyes tight, a single tear escaping. “After that night, Tsukasa gave me a choice, and Shunsuke made one of his own. Shunsuke offered himself up as a shield. He told Tsukasa to leave me alone, and in exchange... Tsukasa went after him instead. He’s been the target ever since.”

  “But Tsukasa didn’t stop abusing you,” Ryuichi added, his voice dropping to a low, painful register. It wasn’t a question; he remembered the shadows in the hallways, the way Misaki’s spirit had seemed to dim until she was a ghost in her own home.

  Misaki nodded, her breathing shallow. “Yes. You know that. You and Shunsuke... you were the only ones who stayed. You took care of me through the worst of it. You helped me get away.”

  She looked toward the door where Lilith had disappeared. “When I got to London, I was so hollow. I thought I would never want a family of my own. But then I found Lilith... or she found me. Adopting her was the first thing I did that was entirely mine. No Kawamura blood, no Gumi influence. Just a choice to be a mother.”

  The room felt lighter with that realization. Lilith wasn’t a product of the nightmare; she was the reward for surviving it.

  Ryuichi stood and moved to the couch, sitting beside Misaki. He didn’t offer a hollow platitude. Instead, he took her hand in a grip that was as steady as iron.

  “I will do everything in my power to get justice,” Ryuichi promised, his eyes burning with a new, lethal clarity. He wasn’t just a law student anymore. He was the son of Ryuuga Sakamoto, the rightful heir who had been murdered for trying to protect his family.

  “For you. For Shunsuke. And for the life you’ve built for Lilith. I am going to end this, Misaki. I’m going to finish what my father started.”