Page 128 of Kotori
Everything else is just details.
But as the city lights blur past the window and Takeshi navigates toward the compound, one thought echoes through my fading awareness:I am alive. My family is safe. The threat is ended.
It was worth it.
All of it.
37
Paige
I'mpacingthemainhall like a caged animal when the compound's gates explode with activity at 2:47 AM.
Car engines roaring up the drive, doors slamming, urgent voices cutting through the September night. My heart hammers against my ribs as I run toward the entrance, bare feet slapping against cold floors.
Through the windows, I see Takeshi's car—damaged, the rear passenger door hanging open like a wound. Men moving with desperate efficiency in the headlights.
"HAYASHI!"
The scream tears from my throat raw and broken, echoing off ancient walls like the wail of a dying animal. Pure desperation made sound, bouncing through corridors and filling the compound with my absolute terror.
"HAYASHI! HAYASHI!"
She appears instantly, as if she'd been waiting for this moment her entire life. One look through the window at the damaged carand she's already moving, issuing rapid commands in Japanese to staff I didn't even know were awake.
"The doctor?" I ask, following her toward the medical room I've never seen before.
"Already contacted. Dr. Yamada will be here within ten minutes." She glances at me as we hurry down a corridor I didn't know existed. "This is not the first time, Paige-san. We are prepared."
I can hear the tension in her voice, see the way her hands shake slightly as she prepares the medical bay. This feels different. Worse.
The medical room is hidden behind a concealed door in the eastern wing—fully equipped with surgical lights, monitors, enough medical supplies to run a small hospital. Everything needed to treat a yakuza oyabun who can't risk public hospitals.
"How long have you?"
"Too many years," Hayashi says, pulling sheets back from a surgical bed. "Since the first time young Kaito-sama came home bleeding from his father's wars."
The front doors burst open and my world stops.
Takeshi and Nagumo carry him between them, his suit torn and bloodstained, face pale with blood loss. His right arm hangs useless in a field sling, and there's blood—on his clothes, his skin, seeping through makeshift bandages.
But his eyes are open. Dark, unfocused, but open.
Behind them, another man limps in. One of their own, blood streaming from a head wound, moving like every step costs him.
"Where?" Takeshi asks Hayashi, and I can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the strain of someone who's seen too much tonight.
"Here. Careful with the shoulder."
They transfer him to the surgical bed, and I can see the full extent of the damage. The shoulder wound bleeding through field dressings, massive bruising across his chest where kevlarstopped bullets, cuts and scrapes that speak of close combat. The vest probably saved his life, but barely.
"Kaito." I'm beside him before I realize I've moved, my hands finding his face. "You came back. You promised and you came back."
His eyes focus on me with visible effort. "Told you," he whispers, voice rough as broken glass. "Too much to live for."
"Don't talk. Save your strength."
"Girls?"
