Chapter 6

After

Nozumi rose with the sun, slipping from bed without disturbing Sueko and padding to her bag. In the washroom, she wound strips of white cloth over her wrists and around her waist, battening down her flaking, tender scales. Tourin's parched air seemed to be accelerating her molt, and she was eager to leave this place behind, hopeful that the hunt for Yukina would take her far from the desert.

Once dressed, she stepped into the hall and navigated to the nearest stairs. She climbed them, up, up, up, until she reached a heavy stone door. Leveraging all her strength, she shouldered it open and emerged into the burgeoning sunlight.

The roof of Urameshi's fortress was ringed with a stone balustrade, and Nozumi crossed to the parapet. She dared not look directly downward—the height was sure to turn her knees to jelly—but she soaked in the sight of the distant horizon. At this vantage, the world unfolded before her like a canvas map, its details drawn in ink by an exacting hand.

How many souls had seen the world this way?

She ran a hand over the balustrade, her fingertips finding every pore and divot in the sandstone. Closing her eyes, she let her head fall back, her hair dancing in the breeze. She drew each breath slowly, tasting the morning upon her tongue, soaking it in.

"Nozumi."

She jumped.

It had been thirty years since she'd heard her name on those lips, but she recognized it instantly. The way he always lingered on the last syllable, savoring it—treasuring it as if he might be saying it for the last time. She swallowed a knot in her throat shaped far too much like her heart and spun to face him.

Across the rooftop, Hiei stood in the doorway, one hand splayed against the stone. He was dressed simply. Black pants. Powder blue shirt. Belts her fingers could undo by muscle memory alone. Up his arm, a black dragon tattoo snaked, lifelike in its ferocity, and as he had the day before, he wore a white cloth across his forehead. Hiding the Jagan.

She took an involuntary step backward, and the balustrade cut into the small of her spine, reminding her there was nowhere to retreat. The once refreshing air turned bone dry on her tongue, but she cleared her throat, forcing herself to acknowledge him. "Hiei."

His nose crinkled for only half a second, the gesture here and gone in the space between heartbeats. But she saw it—the first crack in his mask since their eyes had met in the throne room yesterday—and suddenly, she could breathe again.

He was rattled, too. Off kilter. Unsure where to step.

Relief washed through her, heady and surprising. For nearly twelve hours, she'd seen his stare each time she'd closed her eyes. His crimson irises. Steadfast. Unblinking. She'd assumed that constancy came from self-assurance, but perhaps not. Perhaps he was as shocked as she was. If he were, it was the first time in thirty years they were on the same footing.

Emboldened, she crossed her arms across her chest. "I gather," she said, "that you didn't realize Urameshi had summoned me."

Another tiny flare of his nostrils.

But he avoided her implied question, countering flatly: "Hokushin summoned you. Not Yusuke." As if that made any difference. "And he made no mention of the newest tracker's name."

Right. Newest. Because they'd tried many before her. All of whom had failed. She was a last resort, not their first choice. But she wouldn't let him diminish her skill.

"I'm good at what I do," she said with point blank confidence. It wasn't a brag. Just a fact. "Ask any previous client of mine."

"I believe you," he answered, and she could feel the truth in it. Of course, he believed her. Even all these years later. After all, she hadn't been the one to betray his confidence, to leave him high and dry.

Nozumi chose her next words with care, plucking each with precision and laying them out before him. "Finding something—or someone—that is lost is not the same as finding someone who is gone. You should know that." You, of all people, should know that. "I don't know how many trackers you all have hired already, but if they've each failed… Perhaps they're meant to fail. Perhaps I am, too."

At last, he stepped fully onto the roof. The door thudded shut behind him.

"You must find her."

She huffed an exhausted laugh. "Why do none of you understand me? Am I misspeaking? Talking in tongues?" She dragged a hand through her hair, knotting her fingers between the strands and tugging until she could feel the pressure in her scalp.

"I understood you," he said, "but you don't seem to understand us. You're our last option. If you don't find her, there's no one left to ask."

"I can't craft miracles. I can't conjure her out of thin air."

He drew another step closer, shaking his head, one hand reaching out—as if to touch her. "I…" His voice cracked, and he jerked his head to the side, scowling into the gathering heatwaves. "I need you to find her."

Nozumi stilled, her fingers curling tight in the fabric at her biceps, clutching for something to ground her. In the time she'd known him, all the long nights and quiet days they'd spent together, she'd never seen him so vulnerable—so honest. Admitting to needing something? To needing someone? She would've sworn he wasn't capable of such a thing.

Yet there he stood.

She wet her lips, her gaze dropping to the toes of his black boots. She couldn't look at him, not now, not while she posed the query that needed asking. "Who is she to you?"

It was the wrong question.

His hackles went up, heat rippling in the air between them, and she didn't need to look at his face to know the hard lines and sharp angles it had assumed. She remembered those all too well. His tone, when he spoke, could have cut a lesser demon to the bone. "What business is that of yours?"

"None," she said, "except that I'm in possession of a pile of gold that I could live off for the rest of my life, so apparently it is precisely my business."

He glared at her, scorching her with his intensity, branding her with his roiling heat, but he said nothing more. Tension corded the muscles of his back as he turned heel, threw open the door, and receded into the tower, leaving her alone to watch the sunrise—just as he had so many times before.

Nozumi and Sueko met Urameshi and the others in the throne room, as bidden by Hokushin. They'd packed all their belongings, though the gold had proven too cumbersome and Hokushin had converted it into gemstones, which Nozumi tucked deep within her things.

She'd anticipated a long day's journey and had dressed accordingly, but she'd forgotten to account for the men whose company she now kept. How foolish of her.

Thrusting his hands in his pockets, Urameshi jerked his chin at her. "Alright. So where are we headed before you can get this show on the road?"

She frowned at him, parsing through his strange colloquialisms. "I need supplies," she said after a beat. "Materials to focus my efforts. There's a market in a village we passed on our way here. It should suffice."

Urameshi clapped his hands. "Uh huh. Coming right up."

A moment passed. Then another.

Nothing happened.

At Nozumi's side, Sueko shifted awkwardly, and from the corner of her eye, Nozumi watched her sister's tiny, birdlike movements as she looked from one demon to the next, skipping right over the human, writing him off as irrelevant.

But no—she was wrong to do so.

Because this human—Kuwabara—was not like most humans. Even Nozumi knew that.

By choice, she knew very little of Urameshi and his companions. When she'd first heard about them, over a decade ago, she'd been as curious as any demon. After the final Dark Tournament, rumors of an upstart team of humans and demons began trickling through the demon plane, and their names were everywhere, plastered on every lowlife's tongue.

Urameshi. Kurama. Kuwabara.

Hiei.

At first, she'd thought it might be a different Hiei. Surely the Hiei she'd known would never allow himself to get tangled up in Human World affairs. But then she heard about his Jagan eye, and she knew. It was him.

It had to be him.

From then on, she'd ignored the gossip. Blocked her ears. Left taverns where the rumors ran rampant. Willfully and exactingly, she cut stories of the Spirit Detective and his team from her life. Yet even still, after the first Demon World Tournament, it had been impossible not to glean tidbits. Urameshi's mazoku ancestry. Kurama's stint as Yomi's general. Hiei's role on the Border Patrol.

And the human's dimension sword.

"Uh, Kuwabara," Urameshi said. "Any second now."

The human startled, smacking a palm to his chest. The circles under his eyes were dark as dusk. "Hold up, we're waiting on me?"

Urameshi planted his hands on his hips. "I don't see anyone else who can open interdimensional rifts or whatever the hell it is your spirit sword does these days. But if you know of some other way to teleport, please let me in on the secret. I'm all ears."

"Er, right." The human scuffed his foot over the stone floor. "I, uh, need to know more about where we're going." He turned to Nozumi. "Could you get more specific? Please?"

He was so earnest, so willing to admit himself out of his depth, that she couldn't help the smile that curled her lips. By nature, demons were an arrogant lot, cocksure and egotistical. It was part of how they survived, part of how they clawed their way through day after day on the brutal expanses of the demon plane. Humans—or at least this human—apparently weren't so controlled by their pride.

Unfortunately, she didn't have much to offer him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not familiar with Tourin. I don't know the village's name."

He squeezed a broad palm against the back of his neck, sheepish. "I'm sure I don't either. But I don't need names. Direction would help. Distance, too."

"A day's travel east," she said, then amended, "At my pace. I'm not sure about yours."

"Uh, okay." He gnawed his lip, turning to Urameshi. "Do you know where she's talking about? All this land is yours, isn't it?"

Urameshi snorted. "I don't know shit. How 'bout you, Hokushin?"

Nodding, the Rokurokubi rattled off a list of options, ticking them off on his slender fingers one by one, but it took only a glance at the human's face to know Kuwabara was lost, gleaning nothing from the barrage of information tossed at his feet. A frown furrowed itself ever deeper across his forehead, his teeth turning his lip white with pressure, and it was an urge to help him that drove Nozumi to her knees, her bag slung open before her. It took a few moments of careful maneuvering to free a book from the haversack's depths without spilling her undergarments across the sandstone floor, but at last, it came free, the worn leather supple against her dry fingertips.

"Hold on," she said. "I'll show you."

Hokushin tapered off, a note of disappointment tinging the last village name he murmured, and Nozumi got the distinct sense that his failure to be of service weighed on him like a regretful sin. In the ensuing silence, the rustling of the pages between her fingers drew all eyes to her, but it was only as she found an appropriate map and stood to show it to the human that she realized what she'd done.

The atlas in her hands was nearly thirty years old. Once, it had been brand new, a gift left upon her windowsill. A peace offering.

An apology.

She did not look at Hiei as she drew even with Kuwabara and held out the atlas. Nor did she look at him as she traced a finger over the map of Raizen's castle and its nearest territory, drawing a path to the village she and Sueko had passed through on their journey here. Still she did not look at him as Kuwabara squawked excitedly, proclaiming he knew the area from a training session months ago, and slashed his hand through the air, a golden sword rending a tear into space itself.

And she did not look at Hiei as she packed the book away, stuffing it back into the depths of her bag, back into the dark, cavernous deep where she hid the pain she had never let go of, not even after thirty years.

She'd forgotten the origins of her atlas, of her most beloved possession. She had made herself forget, purging that memory by force of will alone. It had been too dear to her to give up, too precious to toss away like so much nothing—despite being cast aside herself.

But though she never glanced at Hiei, she knew he had not forgotten. The heat of his gaze was too intense, too certain. He'd recognized the book, its supple leather, its well-worn pages, and if he hadn't known the truth of her heart before, he certainly must now.

As did she.

She'd known since this morning, since their encounter on the rooftop.

No matter what she'd told Sueko, Nozumi didn't hate Hiei. She could never hate Hiei. Too much lay between them for that.

All she could hope—with all her aching heart—was that she'd never love him again.

Attempting to bargain while surrounded by living legends proved about as fruitful as attempting to stay dry in the midst of the Riverlands' infamous summer storms.

At every stall and shop in the bustling market, the merchants took one look at Urameshi and his ilk and raised their prices threefold. Never had Nozumi's coin purse thinned so quickly when buying little more than mushrooms and herbs. She'd not yet even attempted to purchase the opals she'd need to concentrate her energy, and already she had no more than a dozen coins left at her disposal. In her pack, tucked carefully away, a score of Urameshi's precious gemstones proclaimed her anything but poor, but she'd never dare pull such jewels out here.

Vexed, she stepped away from the fifth storefront and waded through the crowd, the men trailing behind her and Sueko, drawing far more notice than she'd like.

"They're gouging you," Sueko muttered.

"You think I haven't noticed." Ducking beneath a threadbare awning, Nozumi sorted through the plants she'd acquired. "That's the last of it, though. Other than the opals."

Sueko squinted out at the market. "Does anyone here have what you need? I haven't spotted anything promising."

Nozumi knelt, tucking the bag of herbs into a pocket of her haversack. "There was a jeweler on the outskirts of town. Cross your fingers we'll have luck."

"I'm more worried about our coin than our luck."

Me, too. But Nozumi didn't say that. She only sighed and stood, then turned to the men standing half a dozen steps away. "We promise not to run with your payment if you trust us to make our last stop alone."

Urameshi tensed, eyes narrowing. "Yeah, no thanks. We're coming with you."

Grasping for patience, Nozumi kept her tone gentle—and whisper soft. "Please. Your presence is driving their prices through the roof. Unless you'd like to kill every demon in this town, I'd rather not reveal what's in this bag." She knocked her knuckles against the bottom of her pack, where they'd all watched her tuck away their payment. "I assure you, the folks here would throw away their lives—and certainly mine—for a chance at the wealth they could steal from me."

Urameshi rolled his eyes. "These pipsqueaks don't scare us."

Of course, they didn't. There wasn't a soul for a thousand leagues who posed a threat to even one of these men, let alone the four of them together. But Nozumi wasn't worried about Urameshi. She wasn't even worried about herself.

She just didn't want hundreds to die because a handful of merchants were too greedy for their own good.

She hated begging, hating kissing his dirty, blood-soaked boots, but she said again, "Please. I have one purchase left. We'll meet you in twenty minutes in the clearing where Kuwabara's portal let us out. I swear it."

"Nope," Urameshi said. "Not happening."

Sueko huffed. "Fine. I'll stay with you. Let Nozumi go alone."

The offer startled Nozumi as much as it did Urameshi. She turned to her sister, an argument already rising on her tongue, but the human beat her to it. "Wait, aren't you her muscle? Doesn't she need you?"

Nozumi almost laughed. Had Sueko's illusions truly passed inspection? Even by the standards of this human and his miraculous spirit sense?

Before she could work out the right response, Kuwabara added, "Why don't I come with you? I doubt any of these demons know who I am, especially if I'm not with them—" he jerked a thumb at his friends, and Urameshi stuck out his tongue childishly "—so it shouldn't mess up your ability to bargain."

Nozumi wasn't so sure about that. After all, a human wandering Demon World was bizarre enough that merchants might try to hose them on the mere chance that the human might be wealthy, but of all of them, Kuwabara was the one whose company she minded least, and so she nodded. "Fine. Sueko stays with you," she said to Urameshi. "Kuwabara comes with me. We'll meet where we arrived."

Urameshi exchanged a look, first with Kuwabara, then with Kurama and Hiei, but after a beat, he shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Sure. Whatever. Come on then. Let's get the hell out of dodge."

In moments, their group had split in two. Urameshi swaggered down the main thoroughfare, headed for the village's primary gate, Sueko at his side, Kurama and Hiei two steps behind them. Nozumi stared after them, tearing herself away only when she discovered Hiei looking back at her, his crimson gaze molten over his shoulder.

"So," Kuwabara said, "where to?"

She offered him a beleaguered smile, tension she hadn't been aware of at last unspooling in her chest. "As you must have gathered, I'm not the strongest of my kind. For this kind of tracking, I need a conduit for my energy. Opals tend to work well for tracking people. I'm hoping we can buy some off a jeweler, that way," she said, pointing ahead.

His brows rose. "Huh."

She cocked her head at him, arching a brow of her own.

"That's a new one for me, that's all," he said. "But I guess it's not so weird. Hiei has channeled his energy through his sword before, and that was pretty effective. And now that I think of it, I started that way, too. You just prefer… rocks."

Despite herself, she laughed. "I made no claims of grandeur."

"True." Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he kicked a stone across the worn path as they turned off the street and down an alley. Ahead, the sign for the jeweler hung from hooks over the door of a rundown shop. "So, uh, will it work? Once you have everything you need, will you be able to track Yukina?"

No. For the thousandth time, no.

She stopped in the doorway of the shop, her hand on the knob. He was a tall man, though maybe not by human standards. She had no means of knowing. But he wasn't imposing. Despite his broad shoulders and the handful of inches he had on her, his frame held no promise of threat. Instead, he struck her as the sort who gave the perfect hugs—all encompassing, a smidgeon bone-crushing, full of kindness and unmetered love.

The sort of hug her brother Hideo had mastered. All those years ago.

Kuwabara wasn't looking at her. His shadowed, red-rimmed gaze was far away, staring to a horizon she couldn't see. Had she looked like this once? In the wake of Hiei's disappearance? In the days after he'd evaporated like so much ether, like smoke between her fingers, lost to her forever?

She knew the answer.

Yes.

Resoundingly yes.

"Kuwabara?"

He shook himself free of the morass that had gripped him. "Yeah?"

"I will do all that I can to find her. I swear it. But I can't promise you more than that." Her grip tightened on the jeweler's doorknob. "This is the last time I answer that question, okay? I will do my best—and I know you don't know me. I know my word doesn't mean anything to you. But it's all I can give, so please accept it. Trust me, and I will try to bring her back to you."

Eyes watery, he blinked. Once. Twice.

Then: "Okay." To her surprise, he stuck out his pinky finger. "Promise accepted."

She stared at his extended finger, its pad calloused and rough. "I… What do you want me to do with that exactly?" she asked, gesturing at his hand.

His answering laugh echoed down the alley. "Oh, right. It's a Human World thing. A pinky promise." He hooked his little fingers together and shook them, then stuck his digit back out to her again.

"Ah, got it," she said, though in truth it made no sense to her at all.

He chuckled again and elbowed her good-naturedly. "Come on. Pinky promise, and I swear, I'll never ask you if you'll find Yukina again."

Bemused and entirely unsure how this baffling man had fallen in with the likes of Urameshi and Hiei, she wrapped her pinky around his. As he shook her entire arm with entirely too much vigor, she repeated what he'd said before.

"Promise accepted."

Nozumi spent the afternoon preparing for the next day's dawn.

Tomorrow, she'd wake before sunrise, brew a tea that extended the reach of her powers, and let herself sink within an opal, spreading her awareness ever outward in tandem with the sun's rising, searching for any sign of Yukina. But first, she had to prepare. Step by step. One ritual after another.

She and Sueko had survived off her tracking skills for over a decade, scraping by on the whims of demons desperate to find what they'd lost. Family heirlooms. Beloved artifacts. Powerful weapons. It had never paid handsomely—no job had ever rivaled even the mere summons fee Hokushin had offered—but it had been steady and consistent, and they'd developed a rhythm with each other the years.

Sueko's deft, quick fingers were better than Nozumi's, whose left hand had been weak for nearly two decades now, her fine motor control forever lost thanks to a scar that slashed across her palm. So it was Sueko who stripped herb leaves from their stems and handed them off to Nozumi to dry above a low smoldering fire. She hummed as she worked, a lilting melody that rose and fell like a pattering heartbeat. Nozumi recognized the tune, an old love song the shamisen player at their family's inn had often played, and the ache of homesickness it stirred in her chest was as welcome as it was painful.

Across the clearing they'd laid claim to, the men sat about. Periodically, their voices rose, the easy banter of old friendship rearing its head, but without fail, their good spirits petered, silence falling over them as they remembered why they were here, their collective grief too heavy to be staved off for long.

Only once the last of the herbs had fully dried and Sueko had finished packing them into small sachets did Nozumi move to join them. Sueko drifted at her side, and together, they settled upon a fallen log. Kurama shifted, widening the men's circle so they might fit within it.

Nozumi fiddled with the opal necklace she and Kuwabara had purchased. It had taken all her haggling skills to get its cost down to ten gold pieces, but she'd managed it, and now she had five stones to work with. Five attempts at finding Kuwabara's lost love.

"I'd like to talk about Yukina," she said, gaze ostensibly on the necklace as she fit the edge of a knife beneath one of the prongs holding the first opal and worked to leverage it loose.

At once, whatever peace had managed to settle over them evaporated. Watching through the wisps of her bangs, Nozumi witnessed her words ripple across the clearing. Urameshi went stiff, his hands curling into fists atop his knees. Across from him, Kurama stilled, motionless as a statue, only stray strands of his long hair daring to dance upon the breeze. Kuwabara drew in a ragged breath, his fiancé's name striking him like a blade. And Hiei… Nozumi didn't miss the furrow that carved across his brow nor his vice-like grip on his katana's hilt.

Yukina mattered to all of them. That much was painfully clear.

But why?

If Nozumi were to stand a chance at tracking her, she needed to understand more. The specifics. Even if she had to drag it out of each of them by force.

"How did you all meet?" she asked.

"Why?" Urameshi snapped. "What's it matter to you?"

She managed a mirthless smile. "I track bonds, not things or people. The connection between a person and their belonging—or another person. So if you want me to stand a chance at doing this, then I need to know everything you can bear to tell me."

A moment's silence gripped the clearing, and Nozumi was certain they'd pepper her with questions, demand to know what nonsense she was prattling on about. Tracking bonds? She could all too easily imagine Urameshi's derision at the absurdity of that notion. But no interrogation came. Instead, Kuwabara cleared his throat.

"We rescued her," he said, the words tumbling forth in a jumble. "Yusuke and me. And Hiei. It was one of Yusuke's first cases as Spirit Detective, and I… well, I saw the mission debrief from Koenma, and I knew Yukina and I were meant to be together. I just knew. So I went, too." He paused, eyes skittering to Hiei, then back to Nozumi. "I don't know why the shrimp showed up, but he did, and I'm glad he did, because we needed him."

One prong and then another lifted free of the opal as Nozumi probed the men further, and over the next few hours, she learned all she could of Yukina, the gentle apparition who'd gotten captured—and tortured—by a Human World thug for her valuable tears. Nozumi had never heard of the Koorime or their frigid floating island, but each new line of questioning she followed revealed fresh details, fleshing out a picture of kind, loving girl who'd escaped her cold upbringing in hopes of finding a brother she'd never known. They told her of the Dark Tournament—Kuwabara proudly declaring how the power of his and Yukina's love had fueled him—and of the life she'd made for herself at the temple of a human psychic. In more recent years, she'd found a new home, one she'd carved out at Kuwabara's side, living amongst humans she'd come to love.

It was lovely life, they described. Beautiful in its simplicity.

The sort of existence Nozumi might've sold her soul for.

When the story was done, she changed the angle of her questioning, no longer digging into their history, but rather into their present. To the emotional connection each of them shared with Yukina.

Kuwabara's love was writ into his every word, his every movement. It carved itself into his laugh lines. It smudged itself like coal in the shadows beneath his eyes. It hummed in the deep notes of his voice. He lived and breathed his love with every fiber of his person, wholly and without remorse.

Urameshi and Kurama were less blatant.

The mazoku softened—ever so slightly—when he spoke of Yukina, though Nozumi noticed that much of his warmth was directed at Kuwabara, as if it was his love for the man that in turn created his love for the girl. He talked of how freely she entrusted herself to her friends, how not even the tortures she'd endured could break her faith in the goodness of others, and he laughed as he described her cooking. In his words, "it's vile stuff, but you choke down every bite."

Kurama's voice was like crushed velvet, soft and cool, as he described Yukina's love for nature. In that, they appeared to be kindred spirits. He described the garden he'd helped her start, first mere herbs, later full fruiting plants, and Nozumi suspected he could've talked for hours about the green thumb she'd developed. Apparently, a life far from the Koorime's frozen island had served her well.

A lovely life. A lovely family.

As the last opal clinked free of the now warped, broken chain, and tumbled into Nozumi's palm, she drew a steadying breath. Then, deliberate and calm, she set aside her knife and turned to Hiei, facing him square on, determined to do all she could to make tomorrow's attempt at tracking Yukina a success. "And you? When did you come to care for her?"

Not once had Hiei contributed to Yukina's story. If Nozumi hadn't known better, she'd have guessed he didn't know the apparition at all. But she did know better. Just that morning, Hiei had confronted her upon Urameshi's rooftop and made his demands. You must find her. And unlike Urameshi, his concern had not stemmed from a bond with Kuwabara. It had been his own, blazing like a bonfire behind his crimson eyes—consuming him from the inside out.

Now, though, he spoke not a word.

Her left hand tightened around the necklace chain. The warped prongs bit into her scar, prodding deep into the tender flesh. "Help me help you," she said, though what she wanted to say was, Let me help you.

Wordless, he stood. Gravel crunched beneath his heels as he turned and strode for the tree line.

She lurched upright.

"Hiei."

He ignored her.

"Damn it," she hissed, tossing the ruined necklace to the dirt. "Who is she to you?"

But in a blur of black fabric, he was gone. Lost to the trees.

Urameshi sighed. Rubbed his knuckles against his eyes. Flopped backward into the dirt. "Don't bother. Hiei's not big on sharing."

A thousand rebuttals rose on Nozumi's tongue. Who was Urameshi to think he knew Hiei better than her? They'd not forged a life together. They'd not saved each other. They'd not—

Except they had.

Hiei had chosen these people. They were his comrades. Perhaps his family. For a decade now, his name had been synonymous with theirs. Damn near every soul in Demon World knew it.

And running? Bolting from what he dared not admit? That was Hiei to his core. It told her far more about his bond with Yukina than words ever could. After all, how often had he run from Nozumi, fled from what had grown between them?

He didn't need to say it. He didn't need to confirm what she already knew.

He loved Yukina. Just as Kuwabara did.

With all his wretched heart.

AN: Apparently, I can't write a Hiei/OC story without the OC and Kuwabara bonding. It happened in Once We've Fallen, and it's happened again here. Whoops! (But also, not whoops. I'll never apologize for time spent with Kuwabara.)

Thank you to the folks who reviewed last chapter! I love hearing from you so much!