𝐈𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐞.
❤︎︎❤︎︎❤︎︎❤︎︎❤︎︎❤︎︎
Living on Yakuza territory was never supposed to be her story.
But debts don't forgive.
And neither do the men who collect them.
She was a loyalist to the rules until...
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𝓩𝓪𝔂𝓷𝓪 ✿Age 22 ✿
Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder.
Whoever came up with that lie clearly never had to live it. It makes you deranged and unhinged. It turns your thoughts into chaos and your imagination into a crime scene.
If someone had told me a few hours before the Yakuza showed up for me and my mother that I'd one day promise myself to a man and actually mean it, I would have smiled politely, taken their hand, and led them straight to a psychiatrist.
Now I think I need one for myself.
One day I'm hugging my pillow and missing his voice like a lunatic. The next, I'm fully convinced he's in Tokyo with a secret wife, two bilingual toddlers, and an alpaca named Hiroshi.
Then he calls and says one decent thing and suddenly I'm back in love like none of those delusions ever existed.
But all that humiliation was finally coming to an end because he was coming back tonight. After four years of slow-burning madness and long-distance delusion, I'd finally see him again.
You'd think I'd know how to feel after waiting this long but I was blank. Probably because our communication had turned into a tragic game of ghost and echo for the past year.
He said leaving Tokyo was making things tense with the men there and he had to stay neck-deep in Yakuza work. That, and the time difference, which I blamed for the dozens of unanswered messages.
It was almost closing time at the café, not that anyone came in anymore. Martin still kept it running out of sheer spite and defiance.
He'd stopped paying the monthly "tithes" to the Yakuza a year ago. They clapped back by opening a prettier café across the street and threatening the locals with suspiciously polite warnings.
All the other part-timers had quit except me, obviously. But I suspected Martin only kept this place open because he knew it was the only place I still had access to a piano.
But all of that was about to change soon. Martin was starting to rack up debts, and I'd seen enough overdue notices tucked behind folders while snooping during my cleaning shifts to know he was in trouble.
I could already picture what losing this place would do to him. And I wasn't going to let that happen. This café had given me more peace than my own bed ever had. I was going to ask Ren for help, I didn't care how pathetic it would look for me.
"Do you think we should have let her go alone?" Soraya asked, placing the milkshake on the table. "That creepster outside gave me the shivers."
She was talking about a tourist we met yesterday. Soraya had saved her from getting pickpocketed and tried to scare her off with a few Yakuza horror stories. She was barely affected and even told Soraya off which was very impressive.
