Had he looked at me at the dinner table and seen what I could not show?
Had he watched me eat, laugh, and raise my sake cup and known—the way only Hiro ever knew—that underneath all of it his brother was suffocating?
He would never say so. His true intentions would always be a mystery.
He would never sit beside me and ask if I was okay either.
Never offer comfort.
But if he were worried about me, he would simply appear, loud, ridiculous, and completely impossible to remove.
He would fill the room with noise until the grief had nowhere left to stand.
You always know.
I looked back at the ceiling.
The buried feeling had not disappeared. It was still there, below the sternum where I kept it. But it had loosened enough that I could breathe without counting the breaths.
Hiro had done that.
Nyomi had done that.
Between the two of them—this woman who fed my soldiers and this brother who refused to leave—I had been pulled, increment by increment, back toward the surface.
Hiro broke the comfortable silence. "This is so out of character for Kenji. I've never seen him act this way withanywoman. Not even when we were teens."
I frowned. "Act like what?"
“The possessiveness and the flexing.”
“I was not flexing. I was stretching.”
"Both pecs jumped? In sequence?" Hiro chuckled.
Nyomi shrugged. "I'm fine with him flexing or stretching."
You'll get a better view later.
"I bet you are." Hiro took the bottle from her and sat up. "Just know thatyouare the only one to make the Dragon flex like a ridiculous idiot."
She looked up at me and blushed. "I like that information."
"He's got it bad for you." Hiro took a long swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Before you, I thought Kenji was a heartless asshole with women."
"What?" I pulled Nyomi slightly closer. "Why would you think that?"
"When you fucked a woman, you didn't care who had her? Me. The Claws. The Fangs. You treated women like they were fucking hors d'oeuvres at a party."
I shrugged. "Just because I was fucking them, didn’t mean they weremywomen. They could be with who they wanted."
"Yet tonight." Hiro reached over and offered me the bottle.
I took it. "What about tonight?"
"Tonight, you were losing your mind with the Claws hugging Nyomi."
"Baby." My Tiger looked back at me. "I know you weren't tripping over that. Right?"
