“The Tiger’s Skin of course.”
“Of course.”
He stopped walking, and I stopped with him.
When I turned to face him, his expression had shifted. The teasing smirk was gone. In its place was something genuine—something that looked almost like admiration.
"You did good tonight." His voice was serious now. "Really good."
"Thanks."
"No. You don't understand." He held my gaze. "You caught four snakes. The Eyes. Mami. Sako. People we would never have looked at. People we trusted."
My throat tightened.
"My father has clearly put a spy network in place for years and in one night, you ripped it open. You saw what none of us could see."
"I just. . .noticed things."
"That's exactly the point. You notice the things we don’t. You see people. You read what they don't say. That's not just a skill, Velma. That's a fucking gift. We might have lost this war, if not for you."
I widened my eyes. "Thank you for saying that."
He went back to walking. “Now let’s talk about the cocktail party—”
“Absolutely not. And by the way, I didn’t know you were a drama queen.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Bringing it up during the meeting. You wanted to rub it in the Fangs faces.”
“They were rubbing those bento boxes in our faces.”
“You all better keep it chill before Kenji roars at you all again, and you don’t get any food at all.”
“As I told you before, Kenji is going to have to learn how to share you.”
Warmth hit my chest.
I laughed, but the sound felt hollow in my chest. Because beneath the teasing and the warmth of Hiro's praise, questions still coiled in my mind like restless serpents.
Did we find all of them?
Four snakes. The Eyes. Mami. Sako. People who had been embedded in Kenji's life for years—decades, even. People he'd trusted. People he'd loved.
But the Fox had been playing this game longer than any of us had been alive.
Four seemed like a lot.
Four also seemed like not nearly enough.
What if four wasn't the final number?
What if there were more, buried so deep we'd never see them coming?
The Fox had decades to build this network. Years to plant seeds of betrayal in the people closest to his son. It seemed almost too easy—finding them all in one night.
Then again, maybe that was the point.
