Let me in

The rain fell. Thin. Quiet. Like mist dripping from a memory.

I didn’t move. Couldn’t. My fingers gripped the envelope as if it might vanish and take my last shred of sense with it. The paper was damp, soft at the edges. I didn’t care.

Across the deck, Reika stood. A statue. A silhouette carved from elegance and danger. Watching. Not intervening. Like she’d seen this before. Maybe she had.

Ryoji? Gone. No glance back. No hesitation. Just precise, efficient steps out of my life.

Tears stung before I noticed. Hot, bitter, senseless. My chest heaved. I pressed my palm to it, but it didn’t help. I leaned against the railing, biting my lip.

Why?

Why did it feel like the world kept doing this to me?

Kyoshi had walked away. Without a word. Like I’d never existed. Shizuka—technically still in touch, but the truth was, school ended, and so did everything we were.

This wasn’t high school. Not crushes, not hurt feelings, not waiting by the phone. This was blood. Guns. Safehouses in the mountains. My father. My life. My future, signed away like paperwork.

Ryoji had done what he said he would: protect me. Cut the wire. Pushed me out of the fire. So why did it still feel like I was burning?

Was that why he made lunch? That baked rice—no tactics, no plans. Just food. A memory to carry with me. A farewell baked into tomato, salami, stubborn orange crust.

He spent the day wrapping the edges of my life, sewing them closed like case files. Cooking. Talking. Laughing. All while preparing to disappear.

He struck a deal. He saved me. And now I was supposed to go back. Back to Luciana, Sylvie, Venice. To pointe shoes, choreographers, polite applause. To a world where none of this happened.

And Ryoji? He would go back to war.

I couldn’t move.

The envelope hung limply in my hands, soaked through with rain and tears alike. My heart thudded against my ribs, every beat dragging fragments of memory with it—scenes that refused to stay buried.

The way he looked at me on the plane, that deadpan humor wrapped in a cracked smile.

“You’re heavy,” he had said.

“You’re bony,” I shot back.

And yet he never once let me fall.

That ridiculous shopping mall scene, pretending to be his girlfriend. My back pressed against his chest inside the changing booth, my breath caught in my throat while his voice dropped to that quiet, serious pitch only I seemed to hear.

Then the disguises. The punk wigs. That onsen. Me panicking at the elevator in the Yamada building while he held me, calm as ever.

That awful fever in the school. His arms around me in the bunk, my tears soaking through his shirt while he told me everything was going to be fine. The way his hand lingered on mine—not out of obligation, but because I needed it. Because he needed it too.

And now—

Now he was tearing it all down, for my safety.

No.

No.

No.

This wasn’t protection. This was sacrifice.

And he wasn’t doing it for himself.

He was doing it for me.

But I didn’t want that.

My father, still out there.

My life, split between too many truths.

The silence of the Kuroda family.

That classroom in the dream—the blackboard, the chalk, the kanji that wouldn’t fade.

Rika’s voice echoing in the temple.

I had to go. Not just for my father.

Not just for me.

But for him.

That stoic, stubborn man who carried a thousand miles of regret in his eyes.

Who smiled at my jokes even when he didn’t have to.

Who brushed my hair from my face when I was unconscious, as if it meant something.

Who never said what he really felt because somewhere, long ago, he had learned not to.

I’d seen past the mask.

I’d felt the boy under the armor. Alone. Fractured. Waiting for someone to call him back.

And if no one else would—

I would.

I had to find him.

I had to stop him.

Because he was worth saving too.

That’s when the fire returned to my veins.

My vision, blurred with tears, sharpened into something fierce. A resolve that lit up behind my eyes—not in spite of the crying, but because of it.

I walked forward, toward the door Ryoji had disappeared behind. Every step louder than the last.

And then—

She stepped in front of me.

Reika Yamada. Hair perfectly pinned again, sundress flowing like she belonged to another world. But her stance—legs slightly apart, arms relaxed but ready—wasn’t that of a vacationing heiress. It was the stance of a gatekeeper.

For a split second, I was back in the past.

Was this what Shizuka should’ve done?

Stopped me that day on the rainy street?

Reached out when Kyoshi walked away without looking back?

But Shizuka didn’t. Shizuka had vanished. School ended, and so did we.

But this wasn’t the same.

This wasn’t about romance and teenaged pain anymore.

I wasn’t that girl anymore.

I had stood alone my whole life.

Now, I chose not to. Not out of desperation. Not to fill a void.

I’d found someone like me—lonely, haunted, hardened. But also quietly brave. Stubborn. Loyal. Soft in all the places the world tried to break him.

I would not let him carry it alone.

Reika’s gaze flicked up as I neared. No words. Just a slight movement of her hand. A warning. A test.

I met her eyes. For the first time, she flinched. She saw it—the steel behind my tears. The will to walk through fire and not look back.

Her arm dropped. Barely. And in the next breath, I was past her.

No words.

I ran.

The hallway was narrow, metallic, humming with engines and the muted hiss of sea wind.

I ran past doors, past stares, down the polished corridor of the lower deck, my feet drumbeats echoing on steel.

Under the stairs, in the shadows, he walked away. Again.

I didn’t think. My hand shot forward, grabbing his wrist—the same way I had in that tiny café back in Verona.

“You’re mine now, Darlin’.”

The words slipped out, strange and warm on my tongue.

I didn’t know why I said them.

I didn’t know where they came from.

Just a playful whisper through the ache in my chest, a trembling smile on my lips.

But something… clicked.

Ryoji stopped.

He didn’t turn. Not yet.

But his body went still. Like something ancient inside him had heard it too.

None of us knew why it mattered so much.

Not him. Not me.

But the words echoed with something older than memory.

Like a promise whispered in a dream long forgotten.

We had no reason for it.

But some things—

Some things slip past the edges of forgetting.

“You’re mine now, Darlin’.”

I said it again, smiling through tears. He looked at me as if he’d been waiting all his life.

We had dreamed and forgotten. Fate hadn’t.

Ryoji’s fingers curled around mine. Slowly, he turned his head.

Everything stopped. Like the café. Like back then.

His gaze wasn’t cold. Lost. Fragile. Wide open. Behind those dark eyes, I saw it—the boy. The dream. The home he’d never had.

“It’s your life,” I whispered. “Let me in.”

He didn’t speak. He just stared, as if the weight of every wall he’d ever built was shifting, crumbling, crashing down in a silent avalanche.

“Don’t be scared,” I said, voice shaking. “Don’t run away. Let me in, Darling. Let me in…”

His breath hitched.

And then—like a dam breaking—

He turned.

He pulled me to his chest, suddenly, completely.

Held me like he needed it to breathe.

Like letting go would destroy him.

His arms locked around me, trembling just barely. His chin rested on the top of my head.

“Natsumi,” he murmured.

And though I couldn’t see it—

I felt it.

A tear.

Hot and real, sliding from his cheek to mine.