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No sound woke Minami in the middle of the night. She couldn’t have said later what woke her, but it definitely wasn’t a sound. The house was deafeningly silent.
There was a light from her study, bothersome enough to draw her out from under the comforter. I didn’t leave that on. . . The thought came too late to even serve as a warning.
She stepped into the doorway and found him there, facing the painting above her drawing table. Even with the gourd strapped to his back, she thought for an instant he was a stranger. He was too tall, his posture too controlled, to be the same as the half-wild child in the portrait.
Then he turned, and Minami found herself staring into the same eyes she could never forget. Still shadowed with lack of sleep, still deadly, yet undeniably human. His eyes, his expression, were almost exactly how she remembered them when he had said he would return to kill her before his enemies could.
“Ai-kun. . . .”
He was directly in front of her, hands gripping her upper arms hard enough to bruise, before she could blink. He hissed in her ear, drawing out each word.
“That was. . . So. . . Foolish.”