Chapter 3: Marked
You'd heard of the Hei the way everyone in the jujutsu world had heard of them: in lowered voices. The Zen'in clan's elite unit. The best sorcerers of the most powerful family in Japan, chosen for loyalty, sent only for the jobs the clan couldn't trust to anyone else.
Toji told you what he knew while he worked, and he worked very fast. He pulled weapons out of the curse's mouth one after another and laid them across your workbench: a short sword, a pair of tonfa, a long staff of segmented red wood joined by chains, the Inverted Spear. He shoved your heavy display cabinet across the back door. He turned off every light in the shop.
"How many?" you asked.
"Two, maybe three. If it's who I think, Ogi and Jinichi." He didn't look up. "Ogi's fire. Fast and mean. Jinichi's a brute. Both of them used to kick me round the training yard when I was nothing." A beat. "Then I got big."
"You're going to fight them."
"I'm going to break them." He picked up the staff of red wood and tested its weight, and you felt it from across the room: another special grade, humming with cursed energy, sharp and wild as a blade. "Playful Cloud," he said, seeing your look. "Doesn't do anything clever. Just hits real hard."
"And me?"
He finally looked at you. In the dark his eyes were almost black.
"Upstairs," he said. "Lock the door. Put every ward you've got on it. I don't care what you hear." He came to you across the dark shop in two strides, and took your face in one big hand, and his voice went very low. "You read me, sweetheart. You know what I'm about to do. Don't come down and watch it."
You put your hand over his on your cheek.
"Come back up," you said. "After."
Something cracked open in his face and closed again. "Yeah," Toji said. "Yeah, I'll come back up."
You didn't watch. But you heard it.
You sat on the floor of your bedroom with your back to the door and every ward you knew layered on it, and you heard the front window of your grandfather's shop explode inward. You heard a man's voice shout, "Toji! Come out, you mongrel," with the arrogance of a man who'd known him back when he was nobody and never updated the file. You felt the heat of cursed fire through the floorboards and smelled smoke.
Then you heard Toji laugh.
It went on less than a minute. Something heavy hit the wall below you hard enough to shake the shelves. Somebody screamed, short and shocked. There was a series of cracks like a bat on a baseball, very fast. And then a silence, and then Toji's voice, carrying up through the floor, flat and quiet and utterly without mercy.
"Go home," he said. "Tell Naobito the antique dealer's under my protection now. Tell him I'll know if anyone so much as walks past her shop. Tell him if he sends anyone else, anyone, I won't wait for them to come here." A pause. "I'll come home. And I'll bring the spear."
A scuffle. Someone dragging someone else. The back of a car door, a long way down the street. Then nothing.
You were downstairs before you'd decided to move.
The shop was wrecked. Glass all over the floor, the display cases smashed, a long scorch mark blackening the wall where your grandfather's calligraphy scroll used to hang. Toji was standing in the middle of it with Playful Cloud propped against his shoulder, breathing hard. There was blood on his face, a lot of it, from a long gash through his eyebrow. His T-shirt was burned half off. His knuckles were split.
He turned when he heard you on the stairs, and his face, for one second, was the face of a man who had been bracing for you to run.
You didn't run. You crossed the broken glass and put your arms around his waist and pressed your face into his burned, bloodied chest.
He didn't move. Then, slowly, like he'd forgotten how, his arms came up and closed around you, and the staff clattered to the floor, and he held on.
You cleaned the cut on his eyebrow in your bathroom while he sat on the edge of the bath. He healed fast, faster than anyone you'd ever seen; by the time you'd finished, the gash had already closed to a raw red line. He didn't flinch once at the antiseptic. He watched you the whole time.
"Your shop," he said.
"It's glass. Glass can be replaced."
"Your grandfather's scroll..."
"He'd have liked you," you said, and you meant it, and you watched it land on him like a blow. "He hated the Zen'in. He'd have given you a discount."
Toji caught your wrist. He held it, gently, the cotton swab still in your fingers, and looked up at you from the edge of the bath with an expression you'd never seen on him before. Raw. Open. You didn't need to read him. It was all there.
"Shiu calls them marks," he said. "The targets. 'Got a mark in Shinjuku. Got a mark in Osaka.' I took you as a mark. Two nights ago." His thumb moved over the inside of your wrist, over your pulse. "I've walked away from every single one I didn't kill. Never looked back once. Didn't even remember their faces."
You waited. You let him find it.
"I don't want to walk away," Toji said. "I'm gonna be bad at it. I'm gonna lose money on the boats and eat all your food and I'm never gonna say the right thing. But I don't want to walk away from you."
You put the swab down. You stepped between his knees and took his face in both your hands, very carefully, avoiding the new scar.
"Then don't," you said, and kissed him.
It was different this time. Slower. He let you lead, which you understood instinctively was a thing he had never done in his life. You peeled the ruined T-shirt off his shoulders and kissed every scar you could find, the old pale ones and the fresh red line through his brow, while he sat on the edge of your bed with his hands fisted in the sheets, his chest heaving, letting you.
"You can touch me," you told him.
"If I touch you right now," he said through his teeth, "I'm not gonna be gentle."
"I didn't ask you to be gentle." You straddled his lap and pulled your shirt over your head. "I asked you to come back up. You did. Now touch me."
He made a sound that was almost a growl and his hands were on you, everywhere, rough and greedy and shaking, sliding up your back, gripping your hips, dragging you down against him so you could feel how hard he was through the thin black trousers. He kissed you like a man coming up for air. You rocked against him and he swore into your mouth.
"Yes?" he asked, rough, his hands at the waistband of your jeans. Even now. Even like this.
"Yes. God, Toji, yes."
You got rid of the rest of your clothes in a mess of limbs and hurry, and then you were sinking down onto him, slow, taking him in inch by inch while he held your hips and watched with his jaw clenched and his eyes black. When you were fully seated in his lap, your foreheads together, you both stopped breathing for a second.
"Look at you," he said, barely audible. "Look at you."
You moved. You rode him slow at first, rising and falling in his lap, his hands on your hips guiding you, then harder, faster, as he started to thrust up to meet you. He buried his face against your breasts and took a nipple in his mouth and sucked until you cried out. He wrapped one arm around your waist and the other hand slid between your bodies, and his thumb found your clit and pressed there, circling in time with every stroke, until you were sobbing his name.
"Come for me," he said against your throat. "Come on, sweetheart. I've got you. Let go."
You did. It hit you hard enough to blank out the world, your whole body clenching around him, and he held you through it, rocking you on him, murmuring something rough and wordless into your hair. Then he flipped you onto your back in one movement and drove into you hard and deep, three, four, five times, chasing it, and came with a broken groan, his whole weight pressing you into the mattress, his hand gripping yours on the pillow so tight it hurt.
Dawn came up grey over Kagurazaka. Somewhere down the street, the tofu maker next door was rolling up his shutter and swearing at the glass on the pavement.
You lay with your head on Toji's chest and your hand flat over his heart. Under your palm there was nothing for your technique to find. No cursed energy, no history, no whispers. Just warmth, and a heartbeat, slowing.
"Still can't read me?" he said into your hair.
"No."
"Bother you?"
You thought about it. A whole life of touching things and knowing everything they'd done before you could even ask. And here was the one man in the world who had to tell you himself, in pieces and out of order, whether he wanted to or not.
"No," you said. "I like it. I get to find out."
He was quiet for a moment. Then his hand covered yours on his chest, and pressed it there, flat over his heart.
"Then here's something," Toji said. "No charge."
You waited.
"Never asked anyone to keep me before," he said roughly. "I'm asking."
You turned your face up and kissed the scar at the corner of his mouth.
"Yes," you said. "I'll keep you."
Downstairs, on the counter of your wrecked shop, there was a thick manila envelope you hadn't noticed when you'd come down. You found it later that morning, after he'd gone out for glass and breakfast and returned with both and also a betting slip. Fifteen million yen in used notes. The Zen'in's advance. He hadn't given it back after all.
On it, in his messy, careless hand, he'd written: For the window. Client's paying.