I let the braid slip free.
Wound it again.
And let it go.
That calmed me more than standing outside the door.
Oh, Tora. I will never let you leave me. Never. You are my protection. You are my pleasure. You are my peace. You are my love.
My lips found her shoulder.
I pressed a kiss there—soft, reverent, barely a brush of skin against skin.
I kissed her again.
And again.
I truly craved to bite her, but I couldn’t let her wake up to pain.
You’ll feel my teeth later.
I pressed my forehead against Nyomi's shoulder, breathing her in.
You saved me.
The thought settled into my bones.
You saved us all.
Thirty more snakes. Sako had managed the entire network. Recruited them. Trained them. Gave them their orders. Reported back to my father through a system so simple it was almost elegant.
They had a special way of messaging my father. Two spaces between the period and the last word of every sentence. That's all it took. That tiny signal told the Fox the text message was authentic, that it came from one of his snakes.
For so many years, that's how they'd communicated.
I kissed her shoulder again, harder this time.
Stop. She's safe. You found them in time. Because of her.
And I was going to spend the rest of my life making sure she knew what that meant.
Get some rest. Soon we will be hunting the Fox.
We were going to use Sako’s little text message system against our father. The hackers would wait for his response.
And if that didn’t work, then surely my hackers would track his call to the Butcher.
Soon. We’ll have our vengeance very fucking soon.
I closed my eyes and the darkness wrapped around my tortured soul, and I thought sleep might finally claim me.
Then my Tiger moved.
A small shift at first—her fingers tightening around mine, her breathing changing rhythm. I felt the moment consciousness returned to her body, the way her muscles tensed slightly before she recognized where she was and who she was with.
"Kenji?" Her voice was thick with sleep, soft and uncertain in the darkness.
I kept my eyes closed. "I'm here, Tora. Right here."
