My throat tightened.
"You don't have to fight our ways, Nyomi. Just keep being you. Keep loving him. Keep feeding us." A small smile tugged at his lips. "Keep calling me brother and hugging me."
I let out a shaky breath.
"Change will come. It's already coming. But it has to happen slowly. Organically. If you try to force it, you'll break everything, including my brother."
I stared at him for a long moment.
This man, who had held a knife to my throat while sleeping.
This man, who had just held me while I fell apart.
This man, who was telling me truths I didn't want to hear, but needed to.
"I hate this," I whispered.
"I know."
"Reo is hurt because of me."
"Reo is hurt because of Reo. He made a choice. He accepted the consequence." Hiro stepped closer. "That's what loyalty looks like in our world. It's not pretty. Sometimes loyalty is very fucking bloody, but it's real."
"I still don't like it."
"You don't have to like it." His voice was gentle now. "You just have tounderstandit. Do you?"
“Yes.”
His eyes held mine. "Don't give my brother shit over what he did to Reo."
The ocean receded. Just like that—the warmth, the brotherly softness, the man who'd just held me while I fell apart—all of it pulled back like a tide before a tsunami.
What remained was something older.
Colder.
The thing that lived beneath the water.
Hiro's eyes didn't change. His posture didn't shift. But the air between us went thin and sharp, and I understood with sudden, perfect clarity that this man had killed people.
Many people.
And he would do it again without hesitation if his brother required it.
Even more. . . if I bothered Kenji over Reo, Hiro would be knocking at my door. And it wouldn't be Mr. Nice Guy with the cooling ocean breeze hugs.
“I’ve got to just. . .swallow it, Hiro?”
“Yes.”
My grandmother's voice echoed in my head:"Baby, you can't change a man by fighting him. You change him by feeding him, loving him, and being so damn yourself that he forgets what he was fighting with you about in the first place."
I had so much I wanted to counter with Hiro, but instead. . .I let the words burn away in my throat. “Fine.”
Hiro looked at me for a moment longer before reaching out and lightly brushing my arm with his fingertips. It was such a gentle, almost brotherly gesture that it momentarily stole my breath. “Thank you, sis.”
I frowned. “I’m learning.”
