CHAPTER 1
The Shattered Past
“A heart attack. That’s what they wrote on the report.
Kenji Kuroda, twenty-two years old, found cold in his apartment on a Tuesday morning.
No signs of struggle. No unusual substances. Cause of death: natural.
Natural.
Eiji read that word four times. Then he folded the paper, put it in his coat pocket, and booked the next flight to Fukuoka.”
— ? —
I. The Last Message
The call came at 2:47 in the morning.
Eiji Kuroda knew this not because he’d been jolted awake — he hadn’t been sleeping. He’d been at the narrow desk in his Osaka apartment watching rain drag itself down the window glass, a glass of whisky untouched beside him, a case file he’d already memorised spread open in front of him. The work never really stopped. He’d given up pretending it did around the same time he’d given up pretending a lot of things. He was twenty-four years old and already had the particular stillness of someone who had decided early that the world required careful watching.
Shiori Ishikawa. A name from a life he’d left behind. Or tried to.
“Eiji.”
Just his name. Something ragged underneath it like a cut not dressed properly.
“It’s Kenji. They’re saying it was his heart.”
“When?” His voice came from somewhere far down.
He stopped listening after the second sentence. Not cruelty — necessity. Because somewhere between ‘his heart’ and ‘Tuesday morning,’ something had closed quietly inside him, and behind it grief, shock, the devastation of losing the only person who had known him completely — all of it deferred.
What remained was clear, and cold, and very sharp.
Kenji was twenty-two years old. He ran every morning. He had the blood pressure of a bored house cat and the dietary discipline of a man who had once delivered a ten-minute lecture to Eiji about the structural integrity of a properly made onigiri. He did not have heart attacks.
— ? —
II. The Apartment
He arrived in Fukuoka on a grey Wednesday and went directly to the apartment in Hakata where Kenji had lived for two years. Not the police precinct. The apartment, because the apartment was where it had happened.
The building manager let him in without much argument. He had a way of standing in doorways that made extended resistance feel expensive.
Kenji’s jacket hung on the back of the chair by the window, because that was where Kenji always hung his jacket. It would be the last time it hung there.
Eiji moved through the space and let his attention go quiet in the way it did when he needed to hear everything a room was saying. He noticed the chemical smell cut under fabric softener. The underside of the armrest: a residue, faint, a discolouration of the wood, wrong in the way precise liars are wrong — not in what they say but in the texture of how they say it.
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He produced a vial and a swab. He was always meticulous.
Then he sat down in Kenji’s chair, pressed his forehead against his folded hands, and stayed very still for sixty-three seconds. Not praying. Just present in the space where someone he loved had spent his last hours.
I know, he thought. I know you didn’t just leave. I’m going to find out who decided you should.
He stood. Straightened his coat. Left.
— ? —
III. Six Years Prior
There was a version of Eiji Kuroda that used to laugh. Kenji had been primarily responsible for that version.
They were sixteen and eighteen on the roof of their grandmother’s house in Kitakyushu, a summer that felt like it would never end. Kenji had a can of melon soda. Eiji had a book he wasn’t reading.
“You think being serious makes you harder to hurt,” Kenji said, squinting at the low orange horizon. “It just means when something does hurt you, you have no practice at it.”
Eiji looked at his cousin — at the stubborn, earnest line of his jaw — and felt something in his chest he didn’t have a word for yet but would later recognise as the specific weight of loving someone you’re afraid to lose.
“You’re going to be insufferable when you’re older.”
“Probably. But I’ll be right.”
He had been. About most things. That was always the infuriating part.
— ? —
IV. The Call
He called Yui from a bench near the river. She picked up on the second ring.
“Still haven’t learned to call at a reasonable hour.”
The dry warmth of her voice moved through him like something he’d been holding his breath against. She was twenty-three and had already built a reputation in circles that preferred not to be named for reading situations faster than the people inside them.
He told her everything: the residue, the displaced chair, the three other death certificates he hadn’t found yet but was already certain existed. The name Akimitsu. And the message — four lines, sent at 11:42pm on a Saturday by a man who had apparently spent three days trying to solve his own assassination before reaching out.
“Read the message, Eiji.”
Eiji.
Something’s moving that shouldn’t be. Old names, old money, old grudges.
I think I’ve made myself inconvenient.
If you’re reading this late — I’m sorry. Take care of them.
“Now,” he said, and his voice was very calm in the way that very deep water is calm. “I find out who decided Kenji was inconvenient.”
“I’ll be on the evening train,” she said. “Don’t do anything irreversible until I get there.”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s not the reassurance I was looking for.”
“I know.”
He heard her moving — drawers, the quiet efficiency of a woman who packed light because she’d learned that things went sideways and light was better for running. He’d watched her pack once, a year ago, in a hotel room in Kobe after something had gone wrong and they’d had forty minutes. She’d been unhurried the whole time, and he’d stood in the doorway watching her hands move and thought: this is what competence looks like when it has nothing to prove.
He’d thought other things in that doorway. But those lived in a different drawer.
“I know,” he said. “So do I.”
— ? —
End of Chapter 1 — The Shattered Past
