Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 154368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 617(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 617(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
She shifted to drawing a circle on my chest. "I know you are."
"Then get off it."
"Kenji," she said my name the way a woman says a man's name when she loves him but won't be moved. "I'm not bringing a child into the middle of a war and carrying your baby while the Fox is still breathing."
“Tora—”
“If he killed a Black woman that Hiro just took on one date, what the hell do you think he will do to a pregnant-me?”
I clenched my jaw.
She was right and I hated it.
"When it's safe," she whispered and pressed her lips to my chest. "When the war is done and the empire is yours and there's no one left who can touch us. Then. . .we talk about babies."
"And the ring?"
"And the ring."
I was not a man used to a moment like this. Typically, I ordered and it was followed, immediately. But I was learning more and more that in these delicate moments. . .my Tiger was the one in charge.
She has more power over me than she will ever understand.
I exhaled through my nose and let my hand slide up her spine. My fingers traced the ridges of her vertebrae. "Fine."
“Thank you.” She kissed my chest again. "Now. . .I have to get up—"
“Not yet. I want you laying across me like this.”
“There’s aftercare.”
“Not yet, Tora.” I closed my eyes. “Just lay against my chest and hold me. That’s enough aftercare for now.”
And she did as I asked, soothing me down to my soul.
And behind my eyelids, I saw her.
Standing in the garden—my mother's garden, the one from the fever dream, the one with the koi pond and the cherry blossoms.
My Tiger wore white, and her hand rested on her full belly. And the sun hit her brown skin and turned it gold. She was barefoot in the grass and she was smiling at me.
The little girl with her eyes sat by the pond, dragging her fingers through the water while the koi circled her hand.
The boy with my jaw and eyes chased a dragonfly across the lawn, laughing so loud the cherry blossoms shook.
Yes. Soon.
I watched my Tiger in the garden for as long as the image held. Memorized the curve of her belly. The way her fingers spread across it—protective, proud, already a mother in the way she stood.
She'd get off the birth control.
Maybe not tonight.
Maybe not this month.
But one day, I would walk into a room and she would look at me with those eyes—the same ones that had watched me burn tonight—and she would tell me that she was pregnant.
And I would drop to my knees.
Soon.
I tightened my arm around her and pressed my lips to the top of her head. "Thank you, Tora."
She was already half asleep on my chest.
And I held her in the ruins of everything I used to be and understood finally, that surrender was never the end of power.
It was the beginning of something stronger.
Then, darkness took me.
Chapter twenty-six
Black Water
Kenji
In my dream, I stood naked in a lake of black water. Ink-dark. It came to my waist and clung to my skin like oil. Beneath the surface, I couldn't see my own body or the bottom.
Where am I?
Above me, the sky was a flat, suffocating gray that stretched in every direction. There was no sun, clouds, or horizon.
Cold silence pressed against my eardrums.
I turned and realized there was no shore or land in any direction. It was only black water meeting gray sky.
Something pressed against my hip.
I looked down and a white flower began to break the surface. Slowly, petals unfurled against the black like a fist opening.
It was a chrysanthemum.
More of them rose from the water, rippling the surface and blooming white above the black water until they surrounded me in a widening ring.
A sickening sweet scent hit me and coated the back of my throat. Beneath that sweetness came the taste of wet earth. The mineral tang of a fresh grave.
My stomach twisted.
The flowers kept coming. Petals pressed against my stomach. My forearms. The spaces between my fingers.
Pushing the air out of the space around me.
The water began to disappear under the flowers.
White swallowing black.
I tried to move and couldn't. Then, stems began to wind around my wrists and beneath the surface they tightened around my waist and ankles.
I pulled again and the flowers held me.
I was rooted to the center of all this white, black, and gray and I couldn't get free.
And the flowers climbed.
They rose past my stomach.
Past my chest.
Petals brushed the base of my throat and I felt them reaching, stretching toward my jaw like fingers. The sweetness was so thick now I was breathing it.
Swallowing it.
White filled my peripheral vision until I couldn't look down without seeing them pressing against my collarbone, blooming in the hollow of my throat, close enough that if I dropped my chin they would touch my lips.