"So," said his boss when he returned from sweeping the sidewalk outside the front door, "it isn't serious, huh?"

"Pardon?" said Tsuzuki. And why did it feel like, the way Saito was looking at him, he had something on his face.

But Saito said, "Your relationship! The one you keep claiming isn't really a relationship. You're not going to keep denying there's anything there, are you?"

Tsuzuki tipped his head as the heat rushed to his cheeks. He smiled sheepishly to himself, but his boss didn't have to know that it was mostly in relief.

"Well, I guess it's alright to say things have . . . changed," he said, not without some reluctance.

"Ah-ha!" Saito slapped his hands together and leveled an accusatory index finger at Tsuzuki. "I knew it. I have a way of telling these things. You don't think I can see it, but I can. You gotta learn to read people in a place like this. And your energy is definitely different than even just a few weeks ago."

Tsuzuki picked up a towel and started wiping the clean tumblers laid out to dry. "I didn't think I was that obvious."

"It's the way you've been moving about the place lately. A little lighter of step, smiling like an idiot all the time, but quieter than usual. Like you've got some secret you're desperate to hide."

Just one? Tsuzuki thought, but he kept it to himself. "We talked it out, and decided to be honest about our feelings. To accept there's some sort of connection between us." Not as romantic a connection as Saito was no doubt thinking, perhaps, and far more complicated, but a connection nonetheless.

"And you're still not going to tell me who this mystery woman is, I take it."

That, Tsuzuki told him, he would not. "Come on, Saito-san, you should know that by now."

His boss surrendered with palms outward, and agreed to drop the subject. But though he smiled at the man's jokes, it could not erase Tsuzuki's sense of foreboding. As though if Saito managed to guess Ukyou was this mystery woman, it would jeopardize everything Tsuzuki had been working these past months to build.

And what did you expect? he asked himself. Did you really think you could keep up this charade forever? Realistically, he knew this was a distraction. Coming to Ukyou was never meant to be the endgame, but a stepping stone in his search for Muraki. She was supposed to be his leverage, something he could trade in his quest to bring Muraki to justice.

But now, when he thought of her, and how they laughed together while they fixed dinner, pretending they were just two normal people untouched by their connection to Muraki, he didn't know how he could go through with it. He didn't know how he had ever thought he could, even back when they were perfect strangers.

And every time Saito brought her up, it only reminded him of the truth he could not outrun: He couldn't keep this up forever. For Ukyou's sake, it would be best if he left. And the sooner the better. He just didn't know yet how he was going to tell her.

"If it's all the same to you," he asked Mr. Saito in the most nonchalant voice he was able, "do you think I could trouble you for a night off?"

Saito had a good laugh at that. "What do you think?" When Tsuzuki seemed honestly unsure which way to take it, the old man clapped him on the shoulder. "Of course, you can, Hajime!" he said, using the name Tsuzuki had given when he put in for the job. "Did you really think I'd say no? You've been putting in so much time here I was wondering if I ought to start telling folks you were my son!"

Recognizing that as compliment as much as admonishment, Tsuzuki could only blush in response. "You really don't mind? Won't you be working the shop yourself?"

But his employer waved it off. "I managed just fine on my own for years. I was getting rather spoiled, having your young muscle to help out around the place. It'll be good for me to remember what that was like being an army of one." He cut Tsuzuki off before he could say anything else in apology or excuses: "You're young. You have to enjoy your youth and your girl while you've got them. Take it from me—and I won't hear another word about it."

"Kurosaki! Boy, are you a sight for sore eyes!"

Konoe spread his arms wide when Hisoka entered the room; but perhaps remembering his underling's sensitivity to touch—they hadn't been separated so long he would forget—he settled for taking Hisoka's hand in both of his, and shaking it heartily.

Even then, his concern and relief struck Hisoka like a sudden, strong wave. It made his eyes burn with unshed tears for a moment. Doubtless because his own feelings mirrored Konoe's so closely. He'd never felt toward his own father as he did his chief, though he knew enough to know this was how one was supposed to feel upon being reunited with family.

"You're okay?" he asked. "They weren't starving you wherever they were keeping you?"

"Believe me, starving would have been preferable to a slow death by kappa cooking," Konoe chuckled. "But not to worry. Being dead has its advantages. Having nothing to do but sit around all day long aggravated my back something awful, but that's about the worst of it."

"Now," the Count added to the end of that statement, as he entered the room behind Hisoka. "A human body can withstand any amount of physical torment. It's the psychological that's much harder to overcome."

A vague impression of dark, dank rooms, clinical surroundings, the smell of iodine and denatured alcohol and fear, flashed through Hisoka's mind before Konoe clamped down on this own thoughts.

"These files you want me to help you look over," Hisoka said while it was on his mind, "Tatsumi told me that's what your work involved—you think they have something to do with Tsuzuki? Are they the cases he worked?" And what would his partner think, he wondered, if he knew Hisoka was looking at his old work, from before Hisoka was even born? All the imperfections, the mistakes . . .

But Tsuzuki wasn't here to know.

"Not exactly." With resignation, Konoe went back to the couch he had been working at, though he did not sit. The coffee table in front of it was strewn with old case files, yellowed and faded with their age. "They're from Dr. Muraki's lifetime. Muraki Yukitaka, to be exact."

"Our Muraki's father?"

"Grandfather," said the Count, and based on the position of his gloves, Hisoka assumed he had crossed his arms over his chest. "And in case you were wondering: yes, he was just as twisted and evil as the grandson."

Hisoka forced a chuckle at that. "Which one of us is the empath, Count?"

He thought he caught a trace of a smile where the Count's lips and eyes would be, by the way his mask shifted. "I had the occasion to meet the man himself, in a manner of speaking, when he was brought here to stand trial for his deeds. His was the only life in more than two hundred years Lord Enma asked me to end before its natural time ran out. He had left quite a mass of dead bodies in his wake, all by himself—as you can see by the number of cases attributed to him." The Count shifted a hand to gesture to the coffee table.

"What you see is only a very small assortment," said Konoe.

"I would be lying if I told you that there wasn't a certain pleasure in snuffing his candle out. Of course, I don't want to give you the impression that it's normal procedure to take such measures. It isn't. Quite the contrary. Doing so went against the designs Enma and I put in place to protect the system of Judgment from abuses within, and it is no easy thing for us death-gods to break our own most sacred laws. But the man was doing our job for us, and all too well. He had to be stopped."

"From taking lives?" said Hisoka.

"No." The Count blinked. "Well, yes, he killed a great number of people, but if he were simply a mass murderer, we would not have broken our own rules as we did. No, Muraki Yukitaka's great crime was that he gave life back where it should have ended. He robbed us of souls that should have been judged at their natural end."

"Doesn't sound all that bad," Hisoka said only half sarcastically.

Konoe looked at him with sympathy. "You're not the only one who would see it that way. It's the human condition not to want to die. And it's a doctor's calling, to want to save patients from horrible diseases, and from dying when they have their whole lives ahead of them. It's a noble goal, and many in the government certainly thought Dr. Muraki was a noble person for pursuing it. They allowed him liberties and a blind eye, and in so doing, were able to say they were ignorant and therefore innocent of the atrocities he committed in the name of that goal.

"But the noble ambitions and the man were two different kettles of fish," he went on with a grave shake of his head. "Trust me, Kurosaki. I knew the man, and I'm not proud to say I worked for him for a time. Not voluntarily, but not entirely against my will either. There was very little compassion in the man, though he could be very . . . persuasive. Charismatic. He had a way of convincing you that no individual's life—or, perhaps I should say, no individual's death was a waste if it might someday help the human race as a whole. He was quite willing to sacrifice others in his pursuit of immortality. The fact that so many of them happened to be prisoners and poor laborers and other undesirables he figured no one would miss only made them that much easier to sacrifice."

"He was obsessed with creating some sort of superman," the Count cut in, which Konoe was happy to let him. "A new race of humans who would be genetically superior to the old. That would have . . . immunities that the current population of humanity does not. That would be able to regenerate from injury, age more slowly . . ."

"It sounds like he wanted to create someone like Tsuzuki," Hisoka said, feeling himself on the brink of a revelation, but not sure if he wanted to see the truth fully.

Konoe nodded gravely. "That's precisely what he was doing. I don't know if Tsuzuki ever told you, but he spent the last years of his life in a clinic headed by Muraki Yukitaka. Those years we now know were singularly responsible for Dr. Muraki's obsession with cheating death. While Tsuzuki was under his care, he tried to kill himself several times, but his flesh would heal itself before he could die of blood loss."

"This was before his death?" Hisoka found it hard to believe. "You mean, before he became a shinigami?" He always knew Tsuzuki healed more rapidly than their colleagues, but he had passed it off as a product of Tsuzuki's spiritual strength, or his seniority, enhancing the gifts that had been given his shinigami body, as one leveled up in a video game the more experience one gained. But if he had always been that way . . .

And here Hisoka had been so insistent that Tsuzuki was nothing but human. Now he wondered if it was just because that's what Tsuzuki had so desperately wanted to believe.

"Did Tsuzuki never tell you he was half demon?" Konoe said in a small voice.

Hisoka exchanged glances with the Count—as much as one could anyway. He knew that fact well enough, but not because he had trusted Tsuzuki when it came from his own mouth. "He tried to tell me, but I thought it was just guilt talking. He's not the only one who grew up being able to do things no one else could, thinking he was a monster. But just because that's what my parents told me I was doesn't make me any less human."

"You'll have to forgive me, Kurosaki," the Count said in a voice that was suddenly jovially apologetic, "I promised you refreshments and I see Watson has yet to bring you any. You must be parched. I trust you can get the boy up to speed, Konoe, while I duck out and see what seems to be the holdup?"

The Count may have left to give them room to discuss what he thought would be too difficult in his presence; but when he disappeared, the subject seemed to go with him. Nor was Hisoka eager to pick it up again in a hurry. It was enough to contemplate, knowing that Tsuzuki's claims that he wasn't entirely human had been truthful all along. Realizing that he didn't really care one way or another. And knowing that if Hisoka had been a bit more accepting of the truth when it was first told him, Tsuzuki may not have been so easily influenced by Muraki, and they might not be in their current predicament. It seemed no matter how much they promised to open up to each other, there would always be secrets between them; and between the secrets, their undoing.

Hisoka must not have been the only one who felt the need for a change of subject. "It's been far too long," Konoe said. "I want to know everything that's happened while I've been away."

"It's kind of a long story. And from what Tatsumi's told me, it doesn't sound like we'll have a whole lot of time to catch up."

"Tell me a little at a time, then, while we hit the books," Konoe suggested as he arranged the files on the table. "Trust me, after a few of these, you'll be screaming for a break."

It had been a few weeks since Imai's ex gave him the news that, after calling in many favors and overcoming vehement pushback, she had succeeded in putting out a warrant for Muraki Kazutaka's arrest. If he tried to leave by any sea- or airport in Japan, authorities were ordered to detain him until someone from the National Public Safety Commission could arrive. Of which Imai and Asai were now official police liaisons, much to the displeasure of their superiors back home in Kumamoto.

Unsealing the classified records on the Muraki family, however, had met with less success. Though Nan swore she was doing everything in her power to get it. There was enough red tape around the name to strangle an elephant. Or, perhaps more to the point, to put several members of the Diet and bureaucrats out of their jobs, and no one wanted to be the first to turn on his colleagues.

So this new lead out of Narita was as promising as any had been since they started working with the NPSC.

"They informed you already?" Nan said with an audible sigh of relief.

"Yeah, and we're on our way to the airport to meet you now," Imai said, sharing a quick glance with his partner before Asai turned his attention back to the road. "Have to admit, I was a little surprised to hear our doctor was trying to get into the country instead of out. It's enough to make one wonder where he's been and what he's been up to all this time."

"And that is something you can ask him when you see him. I'm more interested in why he'd come back. What did he leave here that he's so interested in now?"

"We'll make sure to ask him that too," Imai assured her. They had all the time in the world to get the full story.

Starting with Muraki's connection to the Livertaker case. Imai was certain they would get the evidence they needed to tie him to not just that crime, but a rash of them, all across the country and spanning decades. If he wasn't involved directly, then Muraki Kazutaka had some of the worst luck of anyone alive. And whatever his partner's feelings on the matter, Imai didn't believe in luck.

"Dr. Muraki," the NPSC officer sighed as he took a seat across the table from Zepar. "You've been a busy man."

The man was an open book before him, and though he tried not to let it show on his face, he radiated a perverse kind of excitement. Not sexual—Zepar was adept at identifying the nuances of that—but as though he believed some dream was soon to come true. Muraki Kazutaka would be a huge collar for him, despite that Zepar had allowed himself to be taken into custody at the airport without a struggle. The way the officer saw it, just being the one to slap on the cuffs might be enough of a claim to fame to make his career.

He did not realize how vulnerable he made himself, how loudly his ambitions screamed at Zepar. But then, few humans ever recognized the need for a mental firewall.

He matched the man's grin with one on Muraki's angelic features, and leaned forward. "All of which I hope you gentlemen can prove, or else this will be a very short conversation."

"We have witnesses that put you in Kumamoto at the same time as the so-called Livertaker murders. You took a job there as a school nurse, in fact, and at the very same school that two of the victims attended. As did the alleged murderer, I might add."

Zepar spread his hands. "Is that an accusation? Because, again, I hear nothing in any of that that points to my having committed a crime."

There was nothing humorous in the officer's cool grin. "It certainly is convenient, though, don't you think? You're a physician, Doctor. What were you doing playing school nurse for a Catholic high school? For that matter, why, if your practice is here in Tokyo, have you spent so much time over the last several years in Kyushu?"

"I have patients all over the country, Officer. Patients in important positions who find it inconvenient to travel for a checkup. So I take myself to them. Is that really so unusual? And as for my time in Kumamoto, a colleague of mine works at that school. He was taking a much-needed vacation and asked if I would fill in for him. I said I would. I didn't for one minute think it was beneath me, as your tone seems to imply."

The officer had no immediate reply. Which meant that thus far Zepar's performance had been successful. "You can check my story if you like," he said with a tone of infinite patience. He was certain the alibi had already been checked and rechecked. "Take your time. It's not like I have anywhere to be."

And as if to reinforce that point, he raised the cup of water the officer had set down before him at the start of the interview to his lips, and drained its contents. He knew it had been set there in the hopes that Muraki would leave a DNA sample. What the NPSC couldn't know was that it would not reveal Muraki's DNA when tested, let alone anything resembling a human genome. Neither he nor Muraki had anything to lose by Zepar allowing himself to fall for the ruse.

Sure enough, when the officer got up, he took the emptied cup with him.

But when he opened the door, another man was standing in the way with briefcase in hand. The newcomer wasted no time telling the officer, "Before you ask him another word, I demand to speak to my client in private."

Great, Zepar was cursing on the inside, lawyers. He rather liked them when they were dead—so much fun to play with—but alive was another matter, a case of the shoe being on the other foot, and it didn't fit well. He hadn't prepared himself for this.

But he said, disguising his displeasure, "You got here fast."

The attorney handed the officer his card. Which must have checked out. Frustration evident, the officer charged off with the cup, leaving Zepar alone with the newcomer.

Whom he knew next to nothing about. "I don't need an attorney," he told the man as he set his briefcase on the table and settled down across from Zepar.

"Mr. Oda thinks you do." Little information to go on, but Zepar grabbed the end of that thread, followed it back to its source. Oda . . . Oda . . . "Just because you seem to miraculously make it out of every tight spot doesn't mean those who associate with you share the same luck. I'm here to make sure you don't let slip more than you can afford."

"Ah, yes." Zepar brightened. There it was. One Mr. Oda Takahiro, a senior member of the Diet. One who, by his attorney's sense of it, had many fingers in many pies, not all of which were appropriate for a man of his standing to have his proverbial fingers in. "We wouldn't want anything to point back to our mutual councillor friend, now, would we? Certainly not just before elections."

Now this, the devil thought, could get interesting. Here he had thought he would just have to play Muraki long and convincingly enough for the authorities to give the real doctor time to accomplish what he needed to. He hadn't expected a treasure trove of information to come straight to him. What else was Dr. Muraki tangled up in, Zepar wanted to know, that his master hadn't thought he had a need to know?

Having made jump after jump after jump tailing Kurosaki here, a little catnap was starting to sound real good to K. But she had to stay alert. She'd nearly lost the boy somewhere around Fukuoka as it was. The only saving grace was that he didn't seem to know she was nearby. As soon as he felt confident the Peacekeeping agents who were also following him had fallen behind, he teleported to his destination.

K hurried to hide herself in the azaleas when she emerged after him back in Meifu, and recognized the Castle of Candles. She did not dare to come out of her hiding place until Kurosaki disappeared inside the mansion. If she'd only known this was where Kurosaki intended to end up, she lamented, she could have taken the underground route. There were powerful protections around the above-ground portion of the complex, and they seemed to have only been quadrupled recently.

And though K could see the fields and trip lines that would alert anyone inside to arriving guests—or intruders—and therefore could avoid them, she wouldn't be able to pass through those walls as she was used to doing. She needed to find an open door or window if she wanted to sneak in, and find out what Kurosaki and the Count were up to.

But first she had better check in.

Konoe's guilt was vast and exhausting, and only seemed to exacerbate Hisoka's own. Though determined at the outset to give his powers of empathy a fair effort, Hisoka had to put the wall back up between their minds after only a few minutes, his head pounding with the effort. But even worse: his chest ached with a self-loathing that he knew would help neither of them in their efforts if they persisted in dwelling in it. It wasn't so long ago he had thought he preferred nonexistence to the weight of his own guilt over failing Tsuzuki; in light of that, it wasn't prudent to add Konoe's on top of it.

"This is getting us nowhere," Hisoka hissed. "Sorry. It's just . . . Maybe this wasn't a good idea to begin with."

"I should be the one apologizing. That must have been some dark stuff."

"Yeah." Not necessarily in the way Konoe was thinking, however. "Too dark to see anything clearly. All I got was impressions. Emotions, not information. Sometimes that's enough to get the gist, but if the feeling is too strong, I can't focus clearly enough to read actual thoughts—"

"Sometimes I forget that," Konoe sighed.

And he was happy to leave it at that. What details he had supplied Hisoka so far about his life had painted a vivid enough picture. Hisoka already felt like some superior-underling taboo had been breached in the reveal. Wasn't it Konoe's job to know everything about Hisoka, rather than the other way around? Then again, if Summons wanted to survive this office rivalry, maybe they would have to get used to doing away with things like secrets and privacy.

They took a break to recover, mentally and physically, and Hisoka filled his old chief in on Summons' latest troubles with the Peacekeeping department.

"Typical Todoroki," Konoe groused as he paced the room, massaging his lower back. "He's had it out for Tatsumi from the day they met. Nothing Tatsumi did; just his type. Enjoys baiting him, and Tatsumi is too proud to let it go. But the truth is Todoroki'd never think to pull half the shit he is if I were still at Summons.

"You know, I thought when he died that'd be the last I ever had to hear of him. Imagine my delight when I found out we'd be sharing an afterlife together."

From the davenport, Hisoka said, "You knew Todoroki in life?"

"We were in the war together," Konoe said in a manner that said he was loath to get too deep into details. "I went into the NDF when the fighting was over, then the police force; he decided to go down with the ship. Would rather commit seppuku than live to see his nation in what he thought was a state of disgrace: unconditional surrender."

"There's no shame in surviving," Hisoka said, remembering his lessons with Rikugou.

But all Konoe would say on that matter was "It was a different generation. Anyway, in case you were ever wondering why I look older than him when the records say it's really the other way around, now you know."

"If you knew him, then you served together?"

It was exactly what Konoe hadn't wanted to discuss, but Hisoka only got an impression of that after the question was out. "Not exactly. We weren't in the same unit. But we were brought on to the same top secret project. Muraki's to be exact."

"The superman," Hisoka said, understanding without the need for more information.

"Yeah."

"Chief, you realize the more you look around, the more shinigami there are in this place with a connection to at least one of the Murakis? How many more could have positions in Human Resources or Groundskeeping, or even Judgment, that we don't know about?"

Konoe sighed as he dropped back down next to Hisoka. "I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that, kid." And, reluctantly, he reached for a new file.

That was when something in the one Hisoka was reading caught the empath's eye. "Wait a minute . . ." And he reached for the stack he had already gone through.

"You find something?"

"Maybe. It's one of the names listed in connection to the case. I think I've seen it before." He flipped through the files until the name jumped out at him again. "Here. Sakuraiji. A Dr. Sakuraiji. His name comes up in a few of these files."

A cursory look through his own stack and Konoe confirmed, "More than just a few. But I don't know how much help that's going to be. Sakuraiji was a colleague of Yukitaka's. They started working together after the war, but their working relationship ended in the mid-'sixties. I'm not sure why. It might have been Sakuraiji just had a change of heart, grew a conscience. He started his own pharmaceutical company. Probably didn't want his connection to the Murakis to compromise his business."

"Any idea what the two of them were working on all those years together?"

"No," said Konoe, at first like it was a simple answer. But then he gave it some thought. "But now that you mention it, I want to find out."

"It might be important. Relevant to our search for Tsuzuki even."

"It might be in the transcripts from his Judgment," Konoe agreed. "Only thing is, that's not going to be easy to get. Those files have got to be heavily protected. And with me supposed to be holed up in King Enma's secret prison, and Summons under heavy scrutiny—"

"Leave it to me. I know a guy," Hisoka assured him.

But the fact that Sakuraiji was already dead did put a bit of a snag in Hisoka's plan. That made one fewer possible lead they could interview. "So, if Dr. Sakuraiji's no longer with us, what happened to his company?"

"I've got dinner!" Ukyou shouted when she came in the door that evening.

And Tsuzuki hurried from the kitchen to relieve her of the various bags she was struggling to bring in with her. "I just opened the wine. Is that . . . is that Thai I smell? Fried rice with pineapple, and . . . panang?" The aroma drifting from the bags was intoxicating.

Seeing how his burgundy eyes lit up, Ukyou smiled, and nodded.

"I could hug you!" he said, fit to bursting like a little boy off to the zoo; but he didn't as she was in the process of removing her shoes. "How did you know Thai was my favorite? Well, alright, one of my favorites. . . ."

Ukyou laughed. "Tsuzuki, have you ever met a food you didn't like?"

Then he noticed the bag bulging with the unmistakable outline of a cake box. Ukyou hardly thought it possible, but his eyes widened further. "What's this?"

"A secret," she told him cryptically. "Don't open it till after dinner. I want it to be a surprise."

With that, he all but bounced back to the kitchen to unload it all, and Ukyou heard the rattling of plates being taken down and set on the table as she took off her coat. Relieved of its burden, and that of work and the grocery bags, only one remained. But though she went to join Tsuzuki in the kitchen smiling and looking forward to the evening, the dread still lingered, like a kettle set on the back burner. Sooner or later, she knew it would start to boil, and she wouldn't be able to ignore it any longer.

Before the results of the blood test, getting a DNA sample from Tsuzuki had seemed like no big thing. She could take his used glass before he had a chance to wash it, or pluck a few hairs while he slept before she left in the morning.

But now a nebulous but growing fear had entered her mind. If his DNA somehow matched that of Subject-X—and that still seemed almost too impossible to believe, though she doubted she had made a mistake with her blood sample—then for all their talks these last several days, she truly did not know him. Her smiles struggled to stay on her lips when he joked with her, and she found herself backing away when he got too close, quite without any conscious effort on her part. She only hoped that it did not show so much as to arouse his curiosity. She was not yet ready to confront him about his identity, though she knew she would have to. And soon, rather than later.

But until then, she needed proof.

The copies of Muraki Yukitaka's files she had received from Kazutaka only chased what doubts she tried to cling to further away. There was no photograph to attend them, but the physical characteristics of the patient were listed. Height, weight, age, even mentions of some of his mannerisms that seemed to match Tsuzuki. More than that, the crimson-purple eyes, which were too rare, virtually unheard of, to be coincidental.

He could be that man's grandson, or even great-grandson, Ukyou told herself. Without a sample of his DNA, she couldn't be sure how Tsuzuki was related to Subject-X.

But Kazutaka knew. He must have known who this man was and how he was related when he turned his grandfather's work over to her to be continued. And that's why Tsuzuki wants to kill him.

It didn't make sense. There were still too many holes in the story for her to fill in by herself—and she had allowed them to remain for too long, out of love for Kazutaka and all that came with that. But very soon, whether she got them from him or not, the answers would be clear. She had a plan. And until she knew the truth one way or the other, she would try her best to refrain from judgment, and enjoy what time she had with Tsuzuki on his own merits.

And enjoy herself she did. Somehow it was easy to let her guard drop, now that the pathways of communication had been cleared of the barricades that had blocked them for so long. They talked of whatever came to mind—anecdotes from their respective workplaces, lines from old movies, observations on life in general—and laughed. Tsuzuki kept refilling his wine glass, and Ukyou forgot all about the cake box sitting on the table beside her.

At last they had both eaten their fill and seemed to run out of neutral topics, and in the ensuing uncomfortable silence, Tsuzuki said, "Well, look at us. This is almost a proper date."

Ukyou had some difficulty swallowing her sip of wine; but she smiled, and Tsuzuki must have taken her trouble as an aborted laugh.

"Sorry," he back-pedaled. "I have a talent for making a good thing really, really awkward—"

"No," Ukyou waved it off, "you're right. It is like a date. And you're hardly alone. I haven't been on anything even remotely resembling a date in so long, I forgot what it was like."

Tsuzuki snorted. "I, um, think I might have you beat there."

"Oh? Is this a competition?" Ukyou sat up straighter. "Alright, Tsuzuki. I haven't been on a proper date in seventeen years."

She meant to punctuate that statement with a sort of "Beat that!" challenge, but at the mention of it, all of a sudden it seemed the wine was no longer doing its job, and a wave of melancholy set in.

"Okay," Tsuzuki said, not catching it right away, "that will be hard to beat. . . . What exactly do we mean by 'date'? 'Cause, I mean, if we're going to count Dutch treat . . ."

Then her change of mood must have shown on her face, because he sobered. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up. It was with him, wasn't it?"

"Kazutaka? Yes. Him and a dear friend, of both of ours." She hadn't wanted to ever dredge that memory back into the light; but now that it had surfaced, she didn't think she could make it go away again by refusing to talk about it.

"We were studying at university at the time, and decided we'd go to the summer festival together, the three of us. We had a fantastic evening . . . until we were leaving, and I discovered I'd left my fan behind. It was just one of those cheap-o ones you can get from a festival vendor, not something that was really worth anything, but he'd bought it for me, and I stubbornly insisted on going back for it. By myself. I knew where I'd left it, it would only take a minute. . . ."

Funny how the details of that evening, which truly had been so wonderful, the last time she and Kazutaka and Oriya could ever say they had been happy and carefree together, the three of them, were a blur. Like a dream whose memory she desperately clung to. Yet what happened after that happiness was abruptly shattered remained in sharp detail.

"Most of the people had left the park by then. But there were these three men—they'd had too much to drink, were boasting to each other and looking for trouble. It was dark, and late, and as far as they knew I was alone, and didn't look like I'd fight back—"

"I'm sorry," Tsuzuki said, lowering his eyes, as if to say she didn't have to go on.

But Ukyou shook her head. "They didn't . . . do anything. I mean, they tried to pull me with them—nothing came of it but the attempt, the intent—that was enough. Luckily my friends had followed me. They stopped it before it could go any farther. But Kazutaka . . ."

The look on his face she would never forget. Of the two, Oriya had been the most ardent in avenging her, grabbing one of the men by the shirt and punching him repeatedly in the face until he finally managed to break free and stumble after his fleeing friends.

Yet, it was Kazutaka, something in his eyes that hadn't been there before. The only weapon at hand that night had been his apartment key, but he'd managed to stab one of her attackers in the gut with it. Not deep enough for the wound to be fatal, but if he hadn't had a thought about being caught, it could have been. He had been angry enough to kill, if he'd wanted to.

Ukyou straightened, fighting down a shudder that threatened to give her away. "That was the first time I had some idea of what he was capable of," she admitted, while both of them stared at the table and empty plates between them. "I never thought for a moment he would try to harm me—I still don't—but I think I knew then that there was a darkness inside him. This great well of anger, like some monster that needed to be fed, that he tried so hard to keep caged up. Something in his nature. That he didn't want me to know was there. That's why it didn't surprise me as much as it should have when it came out, the things he had done."

She could not have known how it felt to Tsuzuki to hear those words, as if it were he she was speaking of, and not only Muraki. Would she condemn him if she only knew, he wondered, or find the same compassion within her to excuse his responsibility for all of it? But the odds of that must have been so minute.

"Why did you tell me that story?" It must have been difficult for her—Tsuzuki couldn't imagine how it could have been easy—and he hardly seemed the type to deserve the trust and long acquaintance the telling of it required.

Ukyou sighed, shrugged. "Because I never told anyone, I guess. The only other people I'd even want to know about it were there, so we never needed to talk about it. Maybe I just had to get it off my chest, after all these years. The memory of it . . . it changed me. I felt like a prisoner to it for so long."

Shrinking away from strange men, looking over her shoulder at the sound of any group of young men laughing together, even on a crowded train platform. Sometimes even summer festivals, which she could not find it in her to blame, had the power to tie anxious knots in her belly, if she wandered too far from the safety of the noise and crowds. She'd lived in fear of a man's touch for so long. Oriya, with patience, had found his way through to her again, but Kazutaka, who must have known he alone had access all along, had never tried. As if he knew then that she had caught a glimpse of his other self, his truer self, and should have rejected him for it.

"But there's something about you, Tsuzuki, maybe the way you remind me of him, before what happened that night . . . I don't know. I feel like I can be myself with you. I can be the person I want to be. Honest. And know somehow that you won't judge me for it."

Tsuzuki's cheeks colored faintly, but there was something extremely sad in his smile. Even that was oddly magnetic. From the moment she first met him, Ukyou realized, there had been something pathetic about Tsuzuki, something that called out to the instinct inside her to soothe, to protect. To cling to for protection herself. He was like one of the rabbits in her cages, and it broke her heart to see him suffering, even when she had just been recounting her own suffering.

But, like with the rabbits in their cages, she had an objective to fulfill. And reminding herself of that, she pushed the past to the back of the closet of her mind again, and passed off the tangled confusion of emotion that would not surrender as easily as a product of her new hormonal reality, even if the rational part of her knew this was a poor excuse.

"But enough of that. I promised you a surprise—though I ate a lot more than I expected to—"

"There's always room for dessert!" said Tsuzuki, who was used to shutting off his feelings like turning off a light when he went into a different room. He reached across the table and pulled the cake box toward him. His arms encircled it like he intended to keep what was inside all to himself. "Let's see what we have here."

But the childish exuberance fell when he opened the lid. "A Christmas cake?"

Now it was Ukyou's turn to grin. She was rather proud of everything that had gone into getting that cake. "I know it's out of season, but I know this bakery that will make a cake for any occasion you ask." She laughed. "Even a Christmas cake in April. Though I think they thought I was a little looney at first. But you were just saying the other day how it was this fond memory you had with your brothers, and I missed the chance to get you one at Christmas . . ."

She trailed off, however, as Tsuzuki visibly struggled to blink back the tears that had sprung to his eyes. She could not have known how much just the sight of that little round cake, with its sugar snowflakes and cheerful "Merry X-Mas" in red piping took him right back to the first Christmas he had celebrated at the office with Hisoka as his partner.

How the kid had grumbled that he didn't care for sweet things right before one of Watari's trick crackers, from which badly drawn penguins temporarily brought to life came leaping out, sent everyone but Hisoka into a fit of laughter. But when Tsuzuki was about to nudge him and ask if he was alright—holidays could be the toughest on new shinigami, even such a commercial holiday as Christmas—he noticed that the problem wasn't that Hisoka wasn't enjoying himself. He was out of place, uncomfortable being as loud or outgoing as Watari and Tsuzuki and even Chief Konoe, but glad to be there. To be included, and welcome. And he ate his whole slice of cake. Tsuzuki remembered being disappointed, but also not disappointed, the kid hadn't left any for him to finish off.

And he remembered how he had found a new money clip inside his desk drawer the next morning, decorated simply with a tiny red stick-on bow. "I didn't know if presents were something you all normally did," Hisoka had explained with a shrug, as if he hadn't just spent good money and time picking the gift out. "I didn't see you exchanging any last night, but I'd already bought it, just in case, so you can use it if you want to. Or not. I just figured, maybe Mr. Tatsumi won't get on you so much about going over budget if you have something to keep your money tidy. . . ."

He had never told Hisoka that he had that money clip on him every day after that, until he lost it in the chaos of Kyoto. Or, for that matter, that he still had the five-sen bow, stuffed somewhere at the back of his desk drawer with a bottle of Johnny Walker and the other mementos from coworkers and cases long passed on that he just couldn't bear to throw away. The money clip, however, had always been on his person. It seemed like an inconsequential thing, really, hardly deserving of attention, yet it pained him every time he thought about it that it was gone, as though in losing it he had failed Hisoka somehow.

But then, it was in little things like that that love resided. The ordinary, everyday things. The things that built up until they were as tall as the sky.

I should never have gone.

It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed Tsuzuki's mind, that he shouldn't have run from Meifu, from his duties, but the truth had never sunk in before like it did now. He had made the wrong decision, coming here. Thinking he could go off on some poorly-thought-out vendetta all on his own, and take advantage of someone as undeserving of it as Ukyou in the process. And he couldn't amend this mistake with offers of sweets and whining and promises, even if he somehow survived Enma's wrath. Those Christmas cakes with Hisoka and the rest of his coworkers in the conference room would forever more be a thing of the past. He would never get the chance to laugh and just be with them like that again because of what he had done. What Muraki had done, telling him a truth he was better off never knowing. And he mourned what he had thrown away.

But he would not let Ukyou see it.

"This is just amazing," he said instead, turning to her, and feeling the smile return to hide the ache in his chest. "Really. But you shouldn't have done this just for me."

"Nonsense." Ukyou's voice was full of reassurance; but she was not an empath, and couldn't know how he meant what he said, how he regretted sharing that particular memory with her knowing this was the result. "We all deserve to be treated now and then, don't we? Take it as a thank you, for putting up with me for so long. I know I haven't made it easy for you to be here."

"Really, I should be thanking you," Tsuzuki started, as the truth was he should not have stayed so long; but Ukyou would hear none of it.

"Um, I hope you like cherry filling. I forgot to specify, and they must have figured, with the trees in bloom . . ."

"Are you kidding? I love it all." And even though eating something sweet was the last thing Tsuzuki wanted to do at that moment, he knew he would drown his grief in it all the more vigorously.

Ukyou rose. "Let me get you a knife before you dig into it with your hands," she teased.

But the smile dropped from her own lips the moment her back was turned. Her heart hammered in her chest as she realized the moment was upon her. It would be over in a heartbeat, but only if she pulled this off with precision and reacted convincingly. It had to appear spontaneous. But though she wielded a scalpel like another appendage, a kitchen knife was another matter entirely. She would only have one go at this. It had to be right.

As she crossed to the kitchen cabinets, she fingered the handkerchief in her trouser pocket to make sure it was still there, ready when she needed it. Her hand wanted to shake so badly, but she willed it to remain steady. At least just for a few moments longer.