The night after our rooftop conversation, I couldn't sleep.
My mind drifted, uninvited, into the dark corridors of memory — to a night long buried beneath silence and survival.
I was nine.
The house smelled of rain and old wood. I remember my mother humming softly in the kitchen. My father reading in the living room, his brow furrowed, as always. It was peaceful — deceptively so.
And then came the sound. A soft creak. A door closing.
I didn't understand it at the time — the way my father's head snapped up, the way my mother suddenly stopped humming. There was a look in their eyes I had never seen before: fear. Real, raw fear.
They told me to hide. I didn't argue. I crawled into the cabinet under the stairs, heart pounding, small and powerless. From there, I heard everything — the crash of glass, the low voices, and then… silence.
And then a sound I would never forget.
Two quick shots.
I remember biting my hand to stop myself from screaming.
Footsteps passed by. A shadow paused right in front of the cabinet, and for a moment, I thought I would die too. But they didn't open it. They walked away, and left me in that silence.
I don't remember how long I stayed there.
Hours, maybe. Until morning came.
And then… he appeared.
An old man in a dark coat, with sharp eyes and a cane. He didn't speak right away. He simply looked at me, then at the bodies. I expected pity. I got none.
"You'll come with me," he said. "You don't have time to grieve. You need to learn how to survive."
His name was Fouji.
He was my grandfather — my father's father. A man they'd never spoken of.
That night, I lost my childhood. And from that moment on, I was no longer a boy. I was a weapon being shaped.
Fouji raised me in the shadows. He taught me how to read people, how to think beyond emotions, how to manipulate, disappear, observe. While others my age played in parks, I studied psychology, body language, silence.
And yet, even with all that training — with all that ice in my blood — nothing prepared me for her.
Yuuzuki.
The one thing I could never calculate.