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I step out onto the open road, tilting my head back and letting the cool drops touch my eyelids. For years, rain felt like blood. Tonight, it just feels like water.

I shake my head, squeezing his hand. “No. I like it.”

A tender curve touches Kento’s mouth. He tightens his grip as we start walking down the winding private road in sync.

I swing our joined hands slightly, just to test his tactical decorum, and let out a small breath into the mist.

“Rai wanted us to go to dinner tonight,” I murmur, and Kento stops dead in his tracks.

The sudden halt tugs at my arm. I stumble half a step, turning around to look at him with an arched eyebrow. He is staring down at me through the drizzle. “Why do you keep doing that?” he asks.

I blink. “Doing what?”

“Calling everyone by the wrong names,” Kento says, his voice completely dry. “You call Dimitri Dima. You call Rei Rai. You call Marco Mario. You call Alexei Lex.”

I let out an undignified scoff, rolling my eyes dramatically. “It’s not the wrong name,” I say, giving our joined hands a little tug. “I just like having my own nicknames for people. It establishes proprietary ownership. Unless I don’t like them, in which case they don’t get a name at all.”

Kento’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t let it go. “I never had one,” he points out.

I stare at him, letting a wicked smirk pull at the corner of my mouth. “You did,” I say airily. “It was Parasite. I had you saved under that in my phone for eight months.”

Kento’s entire face falls. It is, without question, the most absurd expression I have ever seen on a man like him. The lethal heir looks like a thoroughly drenched puppy that has just watched its favorite bone get kicked into a puddle.

He looks away toward the dark treeline, his lower lip pushing out just a fraction of a millimeter in what can only be described as a repressed pout.

“I want a better one,” he mutters into the drizzle. “I don’t like that one.”

A breathless laugh spills out of my throat. He is ridiculous. And looking at him now, he looks exactly like the boy I had found bleeding years ago.

He hadn’t changed at all. He had just grown bigger. I drop my chin, then I let go of his single hand, take two steps forward, and stop directly in front of him.

“You have one,” I say softly.

Kento blinks, the sulking defensiveness in his posture faltering. He looks down at me, his eyes searching mine through the veil of rain. “Yeah? What is it?”

I let the smile settle on my mouth, stripped clean of every ounce of mockery.

“My knight.”

Kento goes completely motionless. The rain comes down harder, washing over his forehead, but he doesn’t blink. His pupils dilate until the dark swallows the light. “What did you say?” His voice is a rough rasp against the sound of the storm.

I reach out and wrap my fingers around both of his wrists, sliding my palms down until my hands cover his, holding him tight.

“My knight,” I repeat, louder this time.

A shudder runs through Kento’s broad shoulders. “You remember?” he whispers, and the disbelief in his voice threatens to tear me in half. “You remember that?”

“I do. I remember. And… I’m sorry.”

Kento shakes his head, bewildered. “Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry I forgot for so long,” I whisper. “My mind blocks things. When the house turned into a slaughterhouse after my mother died, my brain just started shutting doors. I only kept the traumatic memories… the ones that taught me how to survive. You can call it self-sabotage, I guess.”

Come to think of it, almost everything I remember from my childhood is awful. It’s strange, isn’t it? How my mind held on to every cruel thing that happened to me but let so much of the good slip away. For the longest time, I thought that was all there had been. Just one miserable memory bleeding into another, until I couldn’t remember ever being a happy little boy.

But lately, something has been changing.

The first memory came rushing back when Kento fell off that cliff. I don’t know what it was about watching him fall that tore open a part of my mind I’d kept shut for so long, but suddenly I was remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years. And since then, more have been returning. It wasn’t all bad.