Page 1 of The Oni's Heart

1

Shadows on the West Coast

MOMOI TAKEHIDE

The first time I saw my father was through a cracked motel window, the kind of dirty glass you only find in places where people don’t bother to look too close at what’s really going on. I was seven. Maybe eight. I’d been staying with my mother at a seedy hotel on the West Coast, the kind where the walls smelled of cigarettes and cheap whiskey. She’d just finished with a client, a man who looked as if he’d been born in a bar and had spent his whole life there. My mom wasn’t much of a person to look up to, but that night, she’d made a decision to call him.

“Stay in the room, don’t answer the door,” she told me, her voice rough from a long night. “And whatever you do, don’t make a sound.”

She thought I’d listen. But I didn’t.

I cracked the blinds open just enough to see him—my father—leaning against the back of an expensive car. I could barely make him out in the dark, but I could tell from how he carried himself that he was someone who didn’t need to be seen to be feared. He wore the kind of black suit that made you wonder ifyou were looking at a man or the shadow of something darker. The way he stood there, one hand in his pocket, as if the world belonged to him… I felt the air shift, thick with something dangerous.

I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe because he had the same eyes as me. Dark, cold, like he knew what it meant to live without mercy. My mom always said that he wasn’t someone to be bothered with. But I couldn’t stop staring. The piece of me that didn’t belong to him was curious.

He never saw me. That night, I watched him for a long time, until he disappeared into the shadows with my mother’s last words in my head,“Don’t make a sound.”

From that moment on, everything I did was to escape what I was born into. A legacy built on violence and betrayal. It wasn’t just him, it was the whole damn thing—the crime, the power, the blood. It suffocated me from the inside out, like something I could never outrun, no matter how far I went.

By the time I turned sixteen, I was already a product of that world. I was raised in the kind of streets where loyalty is something people sell, and love is a commodity. My mom’s addiction was my babysitter. My father’s empire was the shadow I couldn’t escape. I didn’t even know who I was outside of it—other than the girl, no one cared to notice, no one cared to help.

I could’ve left. I should’ve left. But the life we lead—it’s a sticky thing. It wraps around you and doesn’t let go until you’re so tangled in it that every attempt to get free just makes it worse. So, I stayed. And I learned the ropes. How to survive. How to make myself invisible when I needed to, how to fake smiles, how to make people forget that I was anything more than a ghost in the room.

Then he died.

I was now in my twenties.

My father, the big shot Yakuza boss. Dead in some gang war—one of his so-calledbusinessrivals getting the best of him, so the news said. The world was supposed to be mine, they told me. The inheritance, the connections, the power. But all I got was a partial payout and the cold emptiness of knowing that no matter how much money I’d get from the bloodshed of others, I’d never be free.

Bitterly, I didn’t even want it.

It was a slap in the face. A reminder that I was his daughter, but I didn’t matter. My half-brother, the one who would’ve taken over if he hadn’t been locked up for life, was useless to me now. He was still there, stuck in some prison cell while I was left to pick up the pieces of a world that wasn’t mine to begin with.

So, I decided to leave.

I packed what little I had left of my life and bought a one-way ticket to Japan—the land my mother came from, a place that felt as foreign as the idea of peace. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just knew I had to leave California, leave the crime, the filth, the ghosts.

What was I supposed to do? Stay there, surrounded by the same people who tore my family apart? Or worse, end up just like them?

But there was one thing that the world never told me: there is no running from yourself. No matter how far you go, the shadows always follow.

2

Broken Bonds

MOMOI

Ishould’ve known better than to think that my mother’s homeland of Japan would save me. It wasn’t about escaping—it was about forgetting, or at least trying to. But the thing about trying to forget is, the more you run, the faster it catches up to you. And I wasn’t even running that far.

The moment I stepped off the plane, the air felt different—thicker, colder. There was a taste of something heavy in the wind, as if I was stepping into a world that didn’t care about my past, but sure as hell had a way of dragging it back into the light. The streets of Japan, at least the ones I saw first, were quieter than the ones I’d grown up in. But quiet wasn’t always a good thing. Sometimes, it just meant the storm was waiting.

I took what money I had saved up over the years through deals on the street and other unsavory activities… and yes, even the partial payout. Despite my feelings on the matter, it would have been stupid for me not to. My mother, much to my reluctance, also shoved some money at me to help me relocate from the only life we had ever known. Any other person in my situation would have been grateful for the extra income I wouldbe taking with me. But culturally? All I felt was guilt and shame for my decisions—for my decision to leave my mother alone and vulnerable, still loosely involved in a dark, underground world.

I rented a crappy apartment in a building that smelled of mildew and cigarette smoke. It was the kind of place that made you want to scrub your skin raw, but I didn’t care. I didn’t come here to find comfort. I came to find something else—whatexactly, I had no idea. A fresh start. Maybe. Or maybe just a place to disappear.

The problem was, I didn’t know how to disappear. The landlord made sure to remind me of my past by offering me a discount on the rent if I gave him monthly access to my body. All he did was laugh as I glared daggers in his direction, imagining how I would peel the skin off his face and feed it to him while he was sleeping.

I tried calling my half-brother, Kaito, after I landed, hoping for something—anything. A little support, maybe. Some kind of reassurance that he’d help me pull some strings, even if we never really had a brother-sister bond. He was still locked up, serving a life sentence for a dozen different things that didn’t matter much to him anymore.

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