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)
Kenji has already lost more than most men survive. Hiro stands beside him now. Half a brother, twice the weapon. Together they walk toward the one reckoning no son is ever meant to face.
And Nyomi carries something none of them can see—a secret heavy enough to save everything, or take it all away. The question was never whether she would give. It’s how much, and whether she can survive the cost.
Everyone bleeds before morning.
Everyone gives something up.
The only question left is who’s still standing when the dust settles—and who actually gets to walk off the island
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
The Smiling Dead
Hiro
In the war room, six oni masks rested along the massive table between me and the Claws. Polished obsidian. Gold leaf. Crimson silk cords pooled beside them like spilled blood.
Every mask carried its own expression—wrath, sorrow, cruelty, and hunger.
Art twisted into violence. Will this be enough?
I sucked harder on the pink lollipop in my mouth. When I bought the gender reveal lollipops for Sora, I’d kept two extra boxes for myself—pink and blue.
Now. . .
My heart ached.
Now I would use them as fuel for my vengeance.
I looked away from the masks and even the Claws, and focused on the smiling dead people beyond them. Ghosts. They stood there, bleeding, watching me with smiles too wide for their wounds.
Sora had died in the clinic today, due to Kiko infiltrating my brother’s men. Now he stood in front of them. He held a pink lollipop in his left hand and a blue one in his right. His wide grin was proud, the way it had been the day he showed me the ultrasound photo.
Welcome back, ghosts.
My Tiger had helped them disappear after the Claws party, but Kiko had called them right back in that clinic.
I rolled the pink lollipop against the roof of my mouth and put my focus on the oni masks spread across the table.
Demon.
That's what oni meant.
The thing in Japanese folklore with horns, fangs, and skin the wrong color. The thing that waited in mountains and ate what wandered too close. The thing wicked souls became after death—murderers, tyrants, punishers in hell or the ones being punished. That's what the legends said.
But I had never believed the legends.
I believed oni were made—mountain hermits, starving women, abandoned warriors. People driven so far past the edge of what a heart could carry that the heart became something else.
What if the demon was the final shape of survival? The terrifying shell that grew when the human could no longer protect the wounded heart inside.
It didn’t matter anymore.
Tonight, I would become an oni to win this war.
I bit down on the lollipop.
The candy cracked between my teeth as I picked my mask up.
Hannya. The horned female demon.
She had been human at first, then heartbreak had consumed her until sorrow transformed her into a terrifying demon.
My tongue found the cracked bits of lollipop.
The mask’s horns had been polished smooth at the base and sharpened to lethal points. I intended to drive them through my enemies and spill their entrails across the battlefield. By sunrise, I expected blood to coat the front and intestines to be hanging from the horns.
Soon.
I twisted the mask to the side.
One angle revealed rage.
I turned it the other way and the new angle revealed mourning. I tightened my grip on the mask.
Perfect.
I flipped it over and in the dark gleam at the inside of the mask, I saw her.
Nura.
Beautiful dark brown skin. Lips parted. The smile she had given me in my father's hospital room a fraction of a second before the bullet found the side of her head.
I blinked.
When will I stop thinking about you, Nura?
I set the mask back down on the table.
Probably never.
My hands shook.
I placed them in my pocket.
Maybe. . .I’ll become a real oni one day.
Grief was already hardening my teeth into fangs. Betrayal was already growing my ears and sharpening them into horns. This unbearable rage had already wrapped around my soul.
I crushed the rest of the lollipop between my molars and lifted my view to my brother.
Kenji stood across the war room with a hardened expression on his face—his own real life oni mask made of his flesh and carved from so many years of doing brutal things to become the Dragon.
He stared at the phone as if contemplating something that would change all of our lives forever. His thumb moved across the screen and stopped.
Moved and stopped.
Moved and stopped.
What’s wrong?
My brother never hesitated. He had been making impossible decisions since he was young. However, the man across the room was doing something I had never seen him do before.
He was stalling.
What are you about to do, brother?
I set my mask down and looked at it.
After this war, which side of the mask would I be left wearing?