Page 110 of Brutal Union
The second his words land, I break into a run. I shove past the lunging of a guard and surge toward the stage. My heart pounds in my throat. I don’t care about the crowd. I don’t care about my plan going up in smoke before my eyes. I see only her—still and unflinching on that stage, the blood on her cheek now dried into a dark line that cuts down to her jaw.
But I don’t make it far.
Five men intercept me as if they were waiting for the signal. Suited, trained, and fast, they close around me before I reach the second step. Two grab my arms, another my chest. I drivemy elbow into one’s ribs and drop the fourth with a knee to the groin, but the fifth wraps an arm around my throat and pulls me back in a chokehold. I thrash against them, legs scraping the floor, vision spotting at the edges.
On the stage, Nadia doesn’t move.
Two men in white gloves ascend the stairs from either side, framing her like a ritual procession. They don’t touch her roughly. There’s almost a reverence in the way they guide her—like they know she’s royalty, even if she’s walking into a cage.
I shout her name, but it comes out strangled against the arm tightening around my throat.
My vision clears just long enough to see her turn her head, giving me one last look. She doesn’t cry. Doesn’t scream. Just looks at me with that maddening calm, the one that says she’s already accepted the cost.
That again she has made the choice to keep us apart, despite how much this must kill her. My father is right about one thing. She is a benevolent queen indeed.
27
SHO
Every timeI wake up in this hell hole the cold hits first, and despite it being a week since I was brought back here I just can’t get used to the feeling.
It’s the type of chill that creeps beneath the skin and settles deep in the joints, spreading through the spine like a warning. I open my eyes and stare up at the ceiling, the same cracked concrete I know better than I know my own reflection. The smell tells me before my sight confirms it—mold, rust, dried blood, and that sterile chemical tang of disinfectant, the kind they only use after someone bleeds too much.
A thick iron cuff is locked tight around my ankle, chained to a bolt set into the center of the floor. The chain is long enough to stretch the exact length and width of the perfectly squared room and not a centimeter more. I don’t bother pulling at it, because any attempt to escape will end with a bruised ankle at least and a broken leg at worst and that’s just from the tightness of the cuff. If someone catches me, I’ll be lucky to be able to breathe without fluid filling my lungs.
I push myself into a seated position, moving slowly as the ache of bruised muscle and dull exhaustion spreads through my back and ribs. The cot behind me is as hard as I remember—just a flat slab of metal welded to the floor with no padding, no blanket, and barely enough space to lie flat without my feet hanging over the edge.
My eyes land on the far wall. The light from the overhead fixture flickers in slow, irregular patterns, making the shadows stutter across the rough surface. There, tucked into the back corner just above the floor, are the carvings. Rows and rows of them—small notches grouped in fives, each cluster a set of days I lived through without light, food, or touch. I made those with my own fingernails, dragging them across the concrete until they split and bled. I was twelve the first time they put me in here. Bare-chested, covered in bruises, shivering through the night while my father’s voice came through the vents above, telling me this was how warriors were born.
My father calls this place “the hole.” Always said it wasn’t punishment, but tradition. A rite. A lesson in suffering all future leaders of the Yakuza needed
I haven’t seen this room in years, but nothing about it surprises me. My body remembers the weight of this place. My breath falls into the same measured rhythm I used to utilize to keep from panicking. In here, emotion was weakness. Noise was punished. You learned quickly how to keep still. How to feel nothing.
These last few days have pushed me close to that edge again. Every moment has been a test—keeping my voice calm, my body under control, my mind sharp enough to calculate three steps ahead even while the ground shifted under my feet. I’ve been pretending it doesn’t affect me. Laughing in faces that deserved knives. Walking into fire like it couldn’t burn me. But the truthis, I’ve been unraveling slowly. Not all at once. Not in ways anyone could see. Just enough that when Nadia turned herself over to them, I felt it break.
I let them bring me here. No kicking. No screaming. I didn’t have to be dragged. I walked through the door because if I hadn’t, I’d have done something worse. And because even now—especially now—she needs me. Not as a soldier. Not as a killer. But as someone who can survive this.
My thoughts drift to her without effort. I can still see the curve of her jaw as she turned her head that last time onstage. The blood drying along her cheek. That look in her eyes—sharp, defiant, but already accepting the cost of what she’d done. She’d made her move, and now I have to make mine.
I lean back against the wall, ignoring the sharp bite of cold against my skin. The carvings are still there, waiting like ghosts. I don’t count them. I already know the number. I lived every one of those days clawing at the dark. That boy is gone. What’s left is a man who remembers everything and forgets nothing.
The creak of the door from down the hall brings me to my feet.
Instinct overrides everything else. My legs move before my thoughts do, body pulling upright and tense, shoulders squared even before I’ve placed the sound. The chain around my ankle drags hard against the bolt in the floor, the sharp clink echoing around the narrow space like a warning bell. The light from the hall spills in first—dim, yellow, oily. Then a shadow crosses it, wide and heavy.
The figure steps into view, framed by the rusted bars of my cage, and I know exactly who I’m looking at the moment I see that scar.
The long, jagged line stretches from his left cheekbone to the edge of his jaw, a twisted pink ridge over sun-darkened skin. I remember putting it there, after a battle that was supposed to be to death, but he yelled for a forfeit. It’s only because of the dishonor of killing a man with no fight that he is still alive.
Hiragi Daichi grins the moment he sees recognition spark behind my eyes—his thick neck straining against the collar of a charcoal-black combat shirt, muscles packed tight beneath stretched fabric, the long scar I gave him years ago still carved deep into his cheek like a brand. His eyes are dark and small beneath a heavy brow, glittering with the satisfaction of old revenge, and a row of gold-capped teeth flashes behind his cracked lips as he leans into the bars, savoring every second.
“Well,” he says, voice thick and full of amusement, “if it isn’t the prodigal little prince himself.”
He steps right up to the bars and wraps both hands around them, leaning in like this is just a casual visit between old friends. The metal groans under the strain of his grip, knuckles scarred and slightly swollen—he’s still brawling for approval, it seems.
I don’t move. My gaze stays pinned to his face, not the brute frame or the new tattoos crawling up his neck. Just that scar. My scar. The one that’s still doing my talking for me.
“Didn’t recognize you without your leash,” I say, my back falling back against the wall, as I relax my fighting stance.“Last time I saw you, you were bleeding into the dirt.”
