Death Before Dishonor Page 34

  “We will. We need to act quickly, though. No telling what the Momochi will do next.”

  Terry shook his head. “No—we don’t.”

  Yuri’s eyes became thin slits. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Yuri, you have to leave. You’ve defied Ninpo, and I don’t know how long I’ll be able to protect you from the more pious Shinobi.”

  “C’mon, Terry, you know that they won’t do shit.”

  “I can’t take that risk, little brother. Kintake ordered them to stay their weapons so that you could fight. And if we won, they were to let you leave. I can’t speak of your safety if you stay.”

  “I’m not scared of them. I never have been.”

  “Yuri, you wanted out. You’re out. You said that you were going to fight for me, and when it was over, you were going to move on. Do just that.”

  “I’m not going to leave you here to figure this shit out on your own.”

  “I’m a big boy, Yuri.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yuri, I need you to lead that team of Chunin out of Iga to get Saki back to Tokyo. You need to get him on the first flight back to the U.S. That is your number one priority. Then, of course, there’s Veronica.” Terry patted his brother’s good shoulder. “You have to get her back home and build that future you’ve always wanted.”

  “No point in even factoring that into the equation. That future is a pipe dream. This is who I am. She’s done with me. I told her who I was, and she is disgusted with me.”

  “Are you giving up?”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Terry sighed. “You know, Francesca wasn’t the easiest woman to love—at least that’s what Dad told me—but Pat never gave up. He gave everything he had to love our mother. We both were young when they passed, but I think I was old enough to learn the lessons they taught us. And I think you should do what Pat did.”

  “I suppose.” Yuri’s face was sour. “I can’t just leave here, though. What would our parents say if I left you behind?”

  “Yuri, you’re the culmination of the hopes and dreams of two headstrong, hardworking kids from Jersey City who loved each other more than words could express. You’re all they ever wanted in life. Don’t squander that dream here in Iga. Go make that dream a reality for them.”

  “Terry—”

  “I’ve got to figure where Hattori Hanzo has run off to. I have a lot of work to do. So go do right by Mom and Dad, and go do right by Veronica. I really do want a niece or nephew,” Terry said as he started back for the central hall. “I love you, little brother. Best of luck. Until we meet again.”

  “I love you too, Ciccone Sensei.”

  Terry threw up an acknowledging hand as he staggered back into the village center.

  Yuri looked over his shoulder at the terrain in between him and Tokyo. He exhaled steam.

  Chapter Eighteen: Divided They Fall

  The prudent Shinobi retreats when disadvantaged or overwhelmed. Leave the battlefield and strike where the enemy least expects.

  The Tenth Mandate, translated from Ninpo.

  The Ciccone Residence. National Harbor, Oxen Hill, Maryland. Today.

  Life didn’t return to normal when Yuri returned home. Yuri navigated each day without any real sense of direction, spending most of his time working out, getting Saki to his medical appointments, and sulking. He couldn’t get Veronica out of his mind. He wanted to talk to her so badly, but she refused his calls and communication.

  Yuri wasn’t sure what to do. He’d given up Ninpo for himself, sure, but Veronica was the prime mover. Now, with her ignoring him, Yuri wasn’t sure why he’d left Togakure Ryu. His defiance and rejection of the code had divorced him from the clan. The worst part was the separation from his brother. Yuri never realized how much he relied on his brother for support. Now was a time that he could use Terry’s counsel.

  Saki had been seeing a neurology specialist in Germantown for his paraplegia and had sunk into a terrible depression. His depression didn’t only affect him; it also affected Yuri. It made the atmosphere in their penthouse septic. So much so that Yuri had to leave often, leaving Saki’s care to his nurse. Saki was on the edge of suicide, his feeling of dishonor weighing him down heavily. Unlike Terry and Yuri, he had scarcely ever been beyond the Suzuka Mountains, and his new residence was a tremendous culture shock. Saki was not accustomed to the technology, and he didn’t speak English. He felt that he was burdening Yuri. It was a terrible feeling, and he was questioning why he hadn’t committed seppuku. He understood why the ancestor Shinobi had written the mandate. If he had followed it, he wouldn’t be choking on despair.

  Yuri did what he could to support his old friend, but his struggle with Veronica didn’t leave him much energy. He constantly thought of ways to get through to her—some mundane and some drastic. She was ignoring the mundane, however, and he was considering the drastic.

  ***

  Work was relentless. Veronica just didn’t have much time for Veronica since she’d come back from Japan. Relentless work was good for one thing: smothering depression. But depression was like a houseguest that overstayed his welcome and waited for the depressed to return home. Her houseguest kept her up late nights and bothered her when she was working in the courtroom.

  Admittedly, she was just as confused as she was hurt and depressed. How had she ended up in this situation? She’d always wanted that movie-esque, fairytale-type relationship—what girl didn’t?—but she hadn’t bargained on a man who lied to cover up his killing.

  She had always known that there was something that Yuri wasn’t telling her, but she could never have predicted that he was an assassin. Yuri didn’t look like a killer, not at all. She always expected an assassin to look dangerous, to be smooth, suave, manipulative, and physically perfect. Yuri was none of the above. He wasn’t tall, he wasn’t dark, he didn’t look at all dangerous, and he was too quiet to be smooth. But to find out that the arms that she had been falling into for comfort had been used to take lives messed with her head. It scared her.

  Yuri made several attempts to contact her. He called her, sent her emails, came to her home, and came by her job. She refused to speak to him. She was paranoid. What happened if he became desperate? Would he hurt her—kill her? What if he felt that she knew too much? What if she was a loose end he needed to tie up? Who could she tell? Who would believe her? But there was the part of her that questioned whether she was overreacting. If Yuri had been a soldier, would she be able to accept him then? It was stressful to think about, and she used work to try to mute it.

  It was hard to mute the thoughts of the man she loved.

  “No, Mom, I don’t have time. I’m right in the middle of a case,” Veronica said, pushing through the door into the lightless parlor of her condominium. She grunted, dropping two handfuls of bags on the floor, and made for the nearest lamp. “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t get your hopes up. I talked—”

  “Can we talk?” asked a disembodied—yet familiar—voice from the darkness.

  Veronica yelped, knocking over the lamp and practically jumping onto the side table. “Yuri?” She saw movement near a window on the far side.

  “I’m sorry for startling you.”

  “No, I’m fine, Mom,” she said into the phone, her mother suddenly alarmed. “My shadow startled me. I’ll call you back. No, Mom, I have to go. I’ll call you back.” Veronica felt around for the lamp and turned it on when she found it. “How’d you get in here?”

  “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want answers to.”

  She looked up, and he was barely an arm’s length away—and she yelped again.

  As if she wasn’t already a bit creeped out to find Yuri in her locked apartment with an armed security system, he was dressed in all black, wearing an odd harness with a plethora of straps. Wait, why didn’t the alarm system beep when she came through the door?

  “I would like to know how a prowler gets into my home.”
<
br />   “I’m no prowler,” Yuri deadpanned.

  “Well then, what are you? Because it looks like you broke into my house.”

  His icy stare searched her. “Just a man that’s in love with you.”

  Her eyes filled instantly with tears and suspicion. “You love me so much that you lie to me?”

  “Veronica, I didn’t come to argue with you. I didn’t come to convince you to accept the terrible things I’ve done, either. I came because I love you. I came because I can’t bear the thought of being without you.” He paused, trying to keep his emotions together. “I can’t breathe without you. Can you see my pain?”

  “Your pain?” she scoffed. “Please, Yuri, tell me about your pain.”

  For the first time, she saw vulnerability in Yuri’s eyes. He didn’t seem so hardened, so unreachable. It was terribly disorienting.

  “I’ve been hiding from you, and it hurts. I’ve wanted to open up to you, be the real me, but I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

  He shrugged. “Both. I’m an emotional person, Veronica. I’ve always been hot-tempered, passionate, and intense. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. But I hide it. Intense emotions were frowned upon where I grew up, so I became good at hiding them.”

  “But why, Yuri? Why hide from me? Why hide it from anybody?”

  “You have to understand the way I was raised.”

  She cut the air with her hand. “I don’t know anything about the way you were raised.”

  “Veronica, I know you’re angry and hurt—”

  She put an acrimonious hand in the air. “Angry and hurt don’t even begin to explain how I feel, Yuri.”

  Yuri didn’t have a reply; he just watched her.

  In the caustic silence, Veronica replaced the lamp and sat down on the ottoman, placing her face in her hands. How had it come to this? How had she ended up in this situation—in this drama? Revelations like this only happened in the movies.

  “You better talk while you have the opportunity, Yuri. Because this is more than you deserve.”

  Yuri swallowed hard. “I was raised under a code called Ninpo—it’s really more like a religion than a code. Ninpo demands silence and deception. It demands adherence to its mandates, and failure to do so is punishable by death and death only. I couldn’t tell you, not just for my safety, but yours as well.”

  “So, if you told me, were a bunch of people just going to show up and kill me?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” He approached her and sat on the corner of the ottoman opposite her. “More to the point, I believed in Ninpo the same way you believe in Christianity.”

  Her response was ice. “Christianity doesn’t compel me to murder others.”

  “I could argue that, but again, that’s not why I’m here.”

  “So, Ninpo makes you a ninja or something?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “In a manner of speaking, is Terry a ninja too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he going to kill me now that you’ve told me?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know, if Ninpo demands silence or death?”

  Yuri rubbed the side of his head. “Because Terry remained in Japan. And before I left, he told me that he wanted me to walk away from Ninpo and pursue the woman I love.”

  “If he told you to kill me, you would do that too, wouldn’t you?” she snapped.

  “That hurts, Veronica.”

  “Well, good,” she spat, whipping her head in his direction. “You deserve to hurt a little, considering the people you’ve killed.”

  Yuri shook his head. “I’ve lived this way since I was a child. I’ve never known anything different…until I met you. You showed me that there’s life beyond Ninpo. It’s the same type of life my parents had, and it’s the same type of life that they would’ve wanted for me if they were still alive.”

  “So, that’s it? Am I your one hope for a normal life? Trade killing for me?”

  Yuri didn’t reply immediately; he swished his answer around in his mouth for a moment. “You’re my one hope at true, unconditional love. I’ve wanted to give Ninpo up for years; I just didn’t know how. You’ve shown me that I can be without it.”

  “And you’ll give it all up if I love you in return, huh? Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I just know that I don’t want to be part of Ninpo anymore. I’ve followed it faithfully—defiantly—since I was seven years old, and now I want to do something else; I want to be something else. I don’t want to be bound to a code.”

  “Can you be something else, Yuri?”

  “My father told me I could be anything I set my heart to,” Yuri said, his determined demeanor returning instantly. “It probably sounds cliché, but his death doesn’t allow me to take life for granted. Well, I want to be with you, Veronica. I’ve never known love until you. Tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

  Her eyes were misty, but her face was sharp. “I don’t.”

  “You’re lying.”

  A tear ran down her face. “No, I’m not. I can’t love someone who lies to me.”

  “Veronica, I’ve been conducting espionage for the better part of a decade. I read people well, and I can see it in your face that you’re not being honest.”

  A tear ran down the other side. “I don’t want to be honest with you, Yuri. It hurts too much.” She sniffed, trying to hold back more tears. “I miss you terribly, but what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel? You come to me covered in blood with your arm practically cut off. Then you matter-of-factly tell me you’re an assassin, when, all this time, you’ve had me convinced that you were a foreign writer.” Tears began streaming down her face. “What am I supposed to do, huh? Just say, Fuck it. Lie to me. It’ll be cool? Am I not allowed a little dignity?”

  He felt horrible, like scum, but the honest fact was: “I had no other choice. By breaking the silence, I’ve dishonored myself in the eyes of my clan. To them, I’m no better than the criminals that you prosecute. I gave up the life I knew the moment I brought you to the village. I’ve banished myself from the only life I’ve ever known.”

  “So, what happens now?”

  “I—I really don’t know.”

  “What’d you hope to accomplish by coming here?” she asked, wiping her face—a futile endeavor.

  Yuri touched her hand. “I hoped to ask for your forgiveness. I hoped to ask that you continue to love me. I hoped to ask that you’ll still be my lady. I love you, Veronica, more than I can put into words. Please, don’t give up on me. Please.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you haven’t given up on me. Say we can go forward.”

  She sniffled and brushed rogue locks of hair from her salt-stained face. “I don’t want you to lie to me, Yuri. You have to be honest with me.”

  His tender touch became a devoted grip. “I will.”

  “You’ll have to earn my trust again.”

  “I’ll do that, too.”

  “It won’t happen overnight.”

  “I have the rest of my life to prove it to you—to prove that I’m worth loving.”

  Chapter Nineteen: Fanning The Flames

  The Peninsula Hotel. Tokyo, Japan. Today.

  Akiko was filled with anxiety—not because she was alone in enemy territory, but rather because she felt the entire weight of the Fujibayashi on her shoulders. Her heart gonged like a church bell as she tiptoed down the plush carpeted hallway toward the moment she would prove her worth to the clan. She had been unable to prove her worth when her father had forbidden her from fighting in the ritual combat, but tonight she would make up for it with a vengeance.

  Two days ago, Terry had approached her during morning chores. “Akiko,” he’d said, “Hattori Hanzo contacted my satellite phone. He requests that you meet with him at the Izumo Ryu temple.” The temple was an hour’s walk north of Togakure Ryu. She was elated to know t
hat her father was okay. While she was used to him being away from Togakure Ryu for long stretches of time, the events of the ritual combat caused her to fear for her father’s life. Terry, however, did not share her elation. While he was relieved to hear from Kintake finally, he was suspicious. He wasn’t going to let Akiko go alone, despite Kintake’s instructions. Something told him that it was a Momochi trap—they, possibly, were trying to use Akiko as a means of retaliating against Kintake for their loss despite their treachery.

  Terry departed with Akiko shortly after noon, leaving the elder council to place the finishing touches on their retaliatory plans.

  Terry and Akiko were early to Izumo Ryu, staking it out for the better part of an hour, before entering the temple. There, they waited for nearly three hours; Kintake never showed. If they hadn’t been originally concerned for Kintake before, they were after never receiving him at the temple; and Terry intended to order the elder council to plan a search for the Shinobi-no-mono once Terry had returned to Togakure Ryu.

  Terry and Akiko hustled back. As they ascended a butte nearing Togakure Ryu, they were confounded by two phantasmal columns cutting the gibbous moon into pieces the same way curtains cut a window. They pondered them individually as they climbed, noting that the columns moved like curtains in the wind. Then it hit them: those were columns of smoke. Terry and Akiko quickened their pace to the top, through the adjacent saddle, and then hustled up the next incline. Their fears were truly realized when they crested the final northern ridge to see towers of black smoke rising out of the skeletal canopy of Togakure Ryu and fire devouring five hundred years of history.

  Terry and Akiko sprinted down the slope as fast as their legs would take them, their desperation erasing the stabbing pain of exertion. They hustled through the periphery, screaming to their clansmen, calling every name they knew. Inside a wintered garden was the answer to their calls: the body of a Chunin lying in a heap, surrounded by a horseshoe of darkened snow.