Bloodline

(Kenji's PoV)

—

In the end, I locked myself in another private room with Tsubame and the redhead. I even lost count of the time for all the sex we had in there.

But despite their moans and the immense pleasure they gave me, I still felt nothing, and I never knew what was missing.

And then, after we took a shower and got dressed, the evening was officially over. I called my family's private autist for the girls and me while I told the other guys to get lost.

Once the car had arrived, we all stepped in and drove to drop everyone off at their places one by one.

We didn't talk much because it was late and everyone was exhausted, so the 'trip' was filled with silence.

Then, after a while, our car dropped me at the front gate a little after three in the morning.

As soon as I stepped inside, I noticed the house was silent, as the staff had probably gone to their quarters hours ago.

The heavy front doors closed behind me with the specific expensive click of solid oak sealing itself against the night.

Then, after refusing to look at the immense void inside my house, I climbed the main staircase in the dark, unbuttoning my shirt as I walked, and by the time I reached my bedroom on the second floor, I had shed the outer layer entirely, leaving it in a rumpled trail across the polished floorboards.

I did not care. Someone would pick it up in the morning. Someone always picked things up in the morning. That was their job, right?

After looking back one last time, I closed my bedroom door behind me, and then I locked it.

I crossed to the walk-in closet, changed into a pair of loose, dark cotton pajama pants and a plain black t-shirt, and returned to the room, my footsteps entirely silent against the thick rug. I flipped on the small brass lamp on my writing desk. The rest of the room stayed in shadow.

Then, I sat down and saw that my desk was covered in paperwork.

Old paperwork. Yellowing, in some cases. A stack of files I had been assembling for months, slowly, quietly, through channels that could not be traced back to my name.

There were contracts, statements, photographs, and even signed declarations from staff members who had, over the years, been paid heavily to turn a blind eye and were now, one by one, beginning to think that a different kind of payment might be more useful.

There was even a private investigator's report from an agency in Yokohama that specialized in exactly this kind of work and asked no questions about the client's motivations.

At the center of the desk sat a small stack of old family photographs.

Photographs from the years before Akane had been legally erased from the family register.

Photographs of a small, thin girl with dark hair and enormous, watchful eyes standing behind me at various formal dinners, always slightly out of frame, always slightly angled away from the camera as if she had already learned that she was not supposed to take up space.

A photograph from her 12th birthday. She was blowing out the candles on a cake that the staff had baked because her mother had forgotten. I was sitting next to her in the picture with my hand resting on the back of her chair.

I tried my best to support her back then, but she already hated me. She even thought I wanted to make her fall.

Then, I moved my eyes to a photograph from a summer at the country house. She was sitting in the shade of a tree, a book open across her knees, and I was sitting beside her.

Neither of us was looking at the camera. Neither of us was smiling. But we were sitting close enough that our shoulders were touching. That was probably the only moment where we had a moment without fighting.

Her mother asked me to take that photo. I even remember her words.

"Please. Just this once. Can you do it for me, little one?" She asked, with a warm smile.

And I didn't refuse, because I couldn't.

I ran my thumb slowly along the edge of that photograph.

The bloodline had done its work on both of us, in different ways.

She had been shaped by his cruelty into a fortress, while I had been shaped by his approval into a mirror.

Neither of us had ever been given the chance to become anything other than what he had shaped us to be.

That was the particular, deliberate horror of what he had done to his own children: he had taken away our right to choose who we would become.

As I looked at Akane, a lot of memories started to flood.

When I was first introduced to this house, Akane and her mother didn't look at me the way I wanted them to. 

I've been raised as a half-orphan by tutors who were paid very handsomely to give me the best education possible, and before that moment, I've always known father as a kind and rich man who cared about his son. He was my only family, because he always told me that my real mother ran away the moment I was born.

So, when he told me he was about to introduce me to a new, real family, I was overjoyed and really hoped I could get along with everyone.

But... it didn't go well. I found out about the living hell Akane and her mother went through very soon, and from that moment, our father demanded that I be the best son possible and surpass that "useless female" in every aspect. 

And in the end, I couldn't even help Akane properly. Whenever I tried to get close to her, she always said: "It's all your fault." My father, on the other hand, always said: "You're everything I wanted, my precious son." 

'No... This is not the right time for those memories...' I thought, snapping back to reality.

I set the photograph aside and reached for the file at the top of the paperwork stack, but I did not open it. I already knew what was in it.

I ran my hand slowly through my hair, exhaled once through my nose, and let my gaze drift up to the dark window across the room, where the pale outline of the garden stretched out beyond the glass under the cold light of a half-moon.

"I'm almost there, old man," I whispered into the empty room. My voice came out low and steady, carrying none of the karaoke-room smirk, none of the athletic-club swagger, none of the performance I had been wearing for the last six hours. "Soon. Very soon. You're going to pay for every single filthy thing you've ever done in this house."

The house said nothing back.

Then, I organized the papers into their precise stacks, closed the folders, and slid them into the false-bottomed drawer beneath the desk. I turned the small key in the lock.

I put the key inside the spine of a hollowed-out book on the third shelf of the bookcase, and then turned off the desk lamp.

After that, I sat in the dark for a moment, my hands resting on my thighs.

Knock. Knock knock.

The sound was soft. Almost hesitant.

I lifted my head slowly toward the bedroom door.

"Kenji?" Akane's mother's voice came through the wood. "Are you still awake, sweetheart?"

I stayed still for a long moment, my eyes fixed on the dark grain of the door.

Then, quietly, I stood, walked across the rug on bare feet, and unlocked the door and pulled it open.

My 'mother' was standing on the other side in her silk robe, her long hair loose over her shoulders, her face soft with the small, distracted concern of a woman who had heard her son come home late and had waited until the house was fully asleep before coming to check on him.

Her eyes were still a little tired, and I could tell that she had been reading before she came upstairs. There was a faint mark of her reading glasses along the bridge of her nose.

She looked, in that specific moment, exactly like a mother.

I let a small, warm smile touch my mouth. A performance smile. The one I had been giving the moment I entered into this house.

"Finally, Mom. You're here," I said quietly. "I've been wanting to ask you something."

My mother blinked in surprise, her hand rising almost automatically to my face, her palm cupping my cheek with the specific, unconscious tenderness of a woman who had never really understood what she had raised.

"Sweetheart... that's unusual," she murmured, her thumb brushing lightly against my cheekbone. "In all these years we've almost never talked like this. What happened, my son? Is there something bothering you?"

I let her palm rest against my face for another second.

Then, quietly, I lifted my own hand and gently moved hers away from my cheek and set it back down at her side.

"I have some questions for you, mother," I said.

My voice had gone flat, and she noticed, because something behind her eyes flickered and her expression shifted into something more uncertain.

"About... what, my darling?" She asked, covering her mouth for an instant.

"You already know. It's about her," I said. "Akane."

After hearing her daughter's name, color drained from my mother's face in a single, clean pulse, and her lips parted.

For a long moment she said nothing. Her hand fluttered halfway toward her collarbone and then stopped, as if she had forgotten what she had been reaching for.

"And this time," I continued, my voice dropping into a lower, colder register, "you're going to answer me. Because here, in this house, in this room, in this exact moment — it's just you and me. No one else. No father downstairs. No staff in the hallway. No dinner table full of guests. Just us."

Her eyes immediately widened.

"Akane...?" she whispered. Her voice had lost its softness. It was thin now. Almost brittle. "Why...? Kenji, Akane isn't... Akane isn't here anymore... She decided to leave many years ago... She isn't part of the fam—"

Something in my chest snapped, and before I had consciously registered what I was doing, I had already turned away from her, taken one long step toward the wall beside the door, and driven my fist into the plaster with a hard, controlled impact that sent a fine spray of white dust into the dark air.

The sound was flat and dull.

My knuckles split, and a thin red line rose immediately along the second joint.

My mother let out a small, sharp sound behind me. Half a gasp, half something worse.

But I did not turn around.

I just stood there with my forehead nearly touching the wall, my fist still pressed against the small crater I had just made in the plaster, and I stared at the pale ridge of dust on my skin, and then at the crack in the wall spreading in a thin, hairline pattern away from my knuckles.

In that moment I felt, for one single terrible moment, my father's shape rise up inside my body like a shadow lengthening across the floor.

The specific tightening in my shoulders. The specific angle of my head. The specific way my breath had stayed perfectly even during the strike.

I had seen him do this exact motion in this exact house.

I kept staring at the crack in the plaster for a few instants, while my knuckles kept bleeding, quietly, onto the wall.

Behind me, my mother had gone completely silent.

I could hear her breathing. Small, shallow, careful. The breath of a woman who had learned, in this same house, what breathing was supposed to sound like when a man in her family lost control of himself in her presence.

In that moment, I closed my eyes and then lowered my fist, slowly, from the wall, before turning back around to face her.

My mother was standing exactly where I had left her, her back pressed against the doorframe, her hand halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide and glassy and old in a way I had never seen them whenever she talked to me.

She had gone entirely still. It was the stillness of a person who had learned, decades ago, that stillness was the only thing that ever helped.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

And something behind my sternum went very quiet.

"Talk," I said. "Please."

My voice had come out flatter than I had intended. Cleaner and colder, and I saw that my mother's mouth trembled.

She did not answer for a few minutes.

I stood there with my bleeding knuckles at my side, and the plaster dust on the floor between us, and the small hairline crack spreading through the wall beside the door, and the photograph of a little girl in her birthday dress locked inside the false-bottomed drawer behind me, and I waited, in the silence of the house, for my mother to finally, finally speak.

—

Author's note: Comments always make me happy.