Jax was going to be fine.
He had to be fine.
There simply wasn’t another choice.
Our life had only started. It wasn’t possible for it to end yet.
A bored sigh sounded behind me, and it could only be one person. Fucking Kosuke. Funny, I never thought I’d be sitting there cursing the name I’d been given at birth.
“Must you?” I asked him, offering my own sigh in return.
He gave a strange sound like a cross between a grunt and a groan, which I kindly refrained from mentioning was very wolfyof him, and then he started pacing at the foot of Jax’s bed. “I don’t understand,” he finally said after a few moments of that.
I lifted a brow at him. “Clearly.”
He paused the pacing and glared at me. “I understand children are raised to be rude today, but you are still an heir of the Igarashi. You should have better manners.”
I rolled my eyes at him, which didn’t help my case, but seriously? Raised to be rude? “Children are raised to be modern humans today. Maybe in your era we were all supposed to be good little drones and do as we were told, but that’s literally not how society works anymore. We haven’t done anything wrong, and our parents didn’t raise us incorrectly. We’re how we have to be to survive in the current world.”
He frowned at that, but he didn’t speak for a moment, crossing his arms over his chest and considering.
“I wasn’t spoiled, you know,” I went on, trying to drive the point home. “The people I was given to? They barely acknowledged me. They didn’t encourage me or give me everything I ever wanted. We lived separate lives, and they just used the money they’d been given to make sure I didn’t die of starvation or drop out of school.”
This, finally, seemed to capture his full attention. “You were not raised by family?”
“No. Jiro killed my parents, and apparently a servant of the family realized what had happened and knew if he didn’t get me away, I’d end up dead too. So he let people think I’d been in the car with my parents and smuggled me to America.” Not for the first time, I wished he had found almost anyone other than my bland, disinterested... funny, I still thought of them as my parents. Even though they had never really been that.
For most of my life I’d simply wondered why they had adopted anyone, when it was clear they didn’t want to be parents.
“He should have gone to the head of the family,” Kosuke insisted, practically growling the words as he slumped into the chair across the bed from me.
Odd, and I wondered how he did that, since he was a fucking ghost and incorporeal, but the chair didn’t move beneath him. He simply appeared to be in it.
I leaned forward and met his eye steadily. “Jiro was the head of the family by then. He’d murdered his father, the family head before him. And my father, the heir. He was the guy in charge. If the man who saved me had gone to him, I’d be dead now.”
That brought him up short, and he sat up, straight as a board, staring at me in horror.
Good.
I doubted he would ever understand, but I, for one, was grateful for the long dead man who’d smuggled me out of the country. Not only for saving my life, but because even though I disliked the people who had raised me, I was pleased with the track my life had taken.
If I hadn’t been in San Francisco, I might never have met Jax at all. Never been awakened by him. Never fallen in love. Never started planning this ridiculous wedding.
Never been stuck staring at his still form in our bed, waiting for him to wake up too.
“You should be head of the family now, then,” Kosuke finally concluded, seeming, for the first time in our acquaintance, truly thoughtful. After a moment, he looked back up at me. “They tried, didn’t they? You turned them down.”
I smiled at him. “Look at you, finally starting to listen to me. Maybe traditional lines of succession mean I should be the head of the family, but how do you think that would end up? I have no respect for tradition. No respect for how things ‘should’ be. And most of all, while I studied it in college, I’ve never lived in Japan.Putting me in charge of a family there is a travesty. So I pressed them to put Minori in charge.”
“A woman?” he asked, but he sounded interested, not horrified.
I nodded. “She’s the only one who could do it, and that’s not a bad thing. She’s perfect for the role. Smart and strong, but also never one to rush into decisions without stopping to think first.”
He leaned back in the chair, considering for a while. When he finally opened his mouth, the last thing I’d ever expected came out. “No one knows, but when I originally took over the family I was... I was too much like you. A hothead, who thought all tradition was wrong. My mother kept my decisions measured. Made me stop and think before speaking. Without her, the Igarashi would be long dead.”
How shockingly forward thinking, for a man of his era.
We were silent for a long time, just sitting there across from each other, me holding Jax’s hand, and him staring contemplatively off into space.
