“Yeah. I jokingly call them The Silent Ones. They blend in. Staff, gardeners, vendors. Some stay in the hidden wings. Some choose the shadows. They serve him without ever being invited. They answer to no one except his mother’s last wishes to protect him.”
My eyes drifted to one last painting—a fisherman pulling a net from the sea, the shadow behind him was a crouched leopard.
So. . .I haven’t been hallucinating all this time? I really do see Kenji’s dragon-shadow.
The realization hit with a force I wasn’t prepared for.
This wasn’t just a metaphor or a poetic moment between lovers. This was something older—something that sat outside anything my rational mind could classify.
A pressure built behind my ribs as I tried to take it in. I wasn’t losing touch with reality. I wasn’t imagining things out of fear or desire. I was seeing something other people had painted, documented, passed down.
Something his mother’s bloodline accepted as fact.
The dragon-shadow is absolutely real.
My brain scrambled to make sense of it, but this was beyond the edges of my mental bandwidth.
Some truths weren’t meant to be solved.
Some were simply meant to be witnessed.
My grandmother used to say that the world had layers—one for the body, one for the mind, and one for the spirit that only opened when the person stopped pretending, they were in control.
Then, there were stories about déjà vu that wasn’t just coincidence, about odd dreams that arrived with warnings, about hearing one’s name in an empty room right before life changed direction.
I thought of synchronicities—meaningful coincidences—I'd brushed off before. Moments when the universe nudged me. The way 11:11 kept appearing on clocks, receipts, license plates—patterns that felt too deliberate to ignore.
The instinct to turn left instead of right and avoid something dangerous.
The sense that someone was standing behind me when no one was there.
This animal-shadow concept felt like that.
Bigger than logic.
Bigger than fear.
Bigger than me.
I exhaled slowly and let the truth settle. I wasn’t imagining shadows. I wasn’t unraveling. I was standing inside a world where some people walked with two silhouettes, and I was one of the few who could see the second shadow because. . .I truly loved Kenji and was his soul mate.
A strange validation warmed my chest.
Yet, I was still so confused and had even more questions that I honestly didn’t think would ever get answered, probably due to his mother’s secret lineage and how it seemed they really kept a lot of knowledge close to their chest.
And maybeunderstandingwasn’t the point.
Maybeacceptingit was.
Hiro motioned ahead, grabbing my thoughts back to the moment. “The Personal Scales’ suite is close.”
I steadied myself. “Okay.”
My adrenaline picked up.
Chapter thirty-four
Mafia Gossip
