I spent nearly an hour staring at my phone after X Reveals left.
His words refused to leave my head.
Bring Katsuro.
Not a request. Not a suggestion. A demand. Delivered with the particular confidence of soone who knew exactly how much weight those two words carried.
And sohow that frightened more than every threat that had co before it.
Because for the first ti since this nightmare began X Reveals was not interested in .
He wanted my grandfather.
Which ant whatever was really happening here had roots far deeper than anything I had managed to uncover. Deeper than Felix. Deeper than Malcolm. Deeper than everything I thought I understood about how this started.
Every answer kept pointing in the sa direction.
Japan.
Katsuro.
The life I had spent years building a careful distance from.
By the ti Ethan ca over that afternoon I had already made up my mind. A phone call would not be enough for what I needed to ask. This conversation had to happen face to face. Too many questions now. Too many things that refused to add up. And if my grandfather was hiding sothing I wanted to watch his expression when I asked him about it. Not hear his voice filtered through a telephone line where he could compose himself before the words reached .
That evening I told Ethan I needed to go to Japan for a while.
I kept the explanation vague. Family matters. Things that needed to be handled in person. The kind of answer I knew he would normally push back on.
He didn’t.
Sothing had been sitting in Ethan since the call about Felix. I had watched it settle into him quietly, a distraction that followed him through conversations and pulled his eyes sowhere distant when he thought I wasn’t looking. He was trying to work sothing out. Sothing he wasn’t ready to say out loud yet.
So when I told him I was leaving he just looked at for a mont.
"If that’s what you need," he said.
The guilt ca imdiately the way it always did.
I forced a smile. "It won’t be long."
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead.
"Just be careful."
I nodded and said nothing else because if I said anything else I was not sure what would co out.
The flight felt longer than usual.
Thirteen hours suspended sowhere between continents and ti zones while the rest of the cabin gradually surrendered to sleep around , heads resting against windows, blankets pulled up to their shoulders, the low hum of the engines settling into a constant background noise that never quite disappeared no matter how hard I tried to ignore it.
I slept for perhaps twenty minutes.
After that I gave up.
There are so thoughts too large to outrun, and mine had boarded the plane with .
Bring Katsuro.
The words lingered in my head with an almost physical weight
I closed my eyes.
Imdiately I regretted it.
Because the mories ca back.
---------
After Felix disappeared , Ethan and I beca close but at the sa ti campus had beco unbearable slowly.
Not all at once. These things never happened all at once.
First ca the whispers. The kind that stopped when I walked into a room and resud the mont I was far enough away. I told myself I was imagining it. Paranoia. Guilt making noise that wasn’t there.
Then the whispers beca sothing harder.
People who had sat near in lectures started choosing different seats. Conversations in the cafeteria thinned when I approached the table. Soone left a note in my mailbox at the residence hall that I read once and burned the sa night.
The worst part was not knowing who it was.
The not knowing ant everyone was suspect. Every glance that lasted a second too long. Every laugh from a group I was passing. Every conversation that paused when I ca around the corner.
I started arriving to lectures early and leaving imdiately after to avoid the in between spaces where people talked.
Started eating alone.
Started flinching at my own na.
One afternoon I walked into a lecture hall to find the word MURDERER written across my desk in black marker. Large. Deliberate. The letters pressed hard into the surface.
Nobody admitted to it.
Nobody needed to.
I sat in the hall for several minutes after everyone else had filed in around . I did not cry. I had already decided I was not going to cry in a public space where soone might see and feel satisfied by it.
I waited until I was back in my apartnt that night.
Then I called my grandfather.
I rember exactly where I was sitting. The window of my room looking out at the campus pathway below, the lights along it coming on one by one in the early dark.
"I can’t do this anymore," I said.
The silence on the other end of the line lasted long enough that I thought for a mont the connection had dropped.
Then Katsuro said simply:
"Co ho."
I refused.
Twice.
Three tis over the following weeks.
Until one morning I woke up and got as far as the door of my apartnt and could not make myself open it. Could not make myself walk out into another day of it. Could not find the version of myself that was capable of sitting in another lecture hall knowing what people were thinking when they looked at .
I booked the flight that afternoon.
Thinking Japan would be sowhere I could breathe again.
It was not that simple.
But it had given sothing I desperately needed at the ti.
Distance and most of all safety .
The seatbelt sign illuminated overhead.
I opened my eyes.
Outside the window the darkness was beginning to give way to morning.
Japan waited sowhere beyond the clouds.
And for the first ti since boarding the plane, I found myself wondering whether coming back here had been a mistake.
When the plane landed I moved through arrivals quickly.
A car arranged by my grandfather’s people was already waiting at the kerb. The driver bowed without speaking, loaded my bag and pulled out into the early morning traffic without being asked for a destination.
He already knew where we were going.
We always did here.
The drive to Mizuhara took the better part of two hours. The city gave way to expressway and the expressway gave way to narrower roads and those gave way to the kind of landscape that had no interest in being hurried through. Dense forest on both sides. Mountains sitting beyond the treeline in pale layers of blue and grey. Small villages appearing briefly between long stretches of nothing.
I watched it all pass outside the window.
The farther we traveled from the city the more mories ca back. Not in any organised way. Just in pieces. The sll of cedar in the morning. The sound of the wind chi outside my old room. My grandfather covered in soone else’s blood ...I never asked whose.
By the ti the estate walls ca into view the evening had begun settling over the countryside in long amber strips between the trees.
The compound looked exactly as it always looked.
High walls. Security caras at every angle catching everything without announcing themselves. n stationed at intervals throughout the grounds in positions that managed to appear casual and were anything but. Most people passing this place on the road outside saw a wealthy old man’s property.
I had never been most people.
I knew what this estate was.
A fortress. A seat. A place where decisions were made that other people felt for years without ever knowing the origin.
The car rolled to a stop inside the gate.
I stepped out.
He was already there.
Katsuro sat beneath the covered veranda overlooking the garden, a porcelain cup of tea at his elbow and the particular stillness he carried everywhere, the kind that was not calm exactly but control so complete it resembled calm from the outside.
When he saw coming across the garden a faint smile touched the corners of his mouth.
"Himari."
His voice carried easily through the still air.
"Yoku kaette kita."( "Welco back." "I’m glad you’ve returned.")
I smiled and bowed
"Tadaima, Ojii-san."( " I’m ho , grandpa)
And then I walked forward and embraced him.
"Okaeri (お帰り)"( welco back) he hugged back smiling ..
I pulled back and looked at him.
"We need to talk."
The smile did not disappear entirely. It just shifted. Changed into sothing asured and watchful in the way his expressions always changed when he was calculating.
He studied for a long mont.
Then he nodded toward the main house.
"Later." His tone left no space for negotiation. "Go wash. Rest first."
I thought about arguing.
I Didn’t.
Because I knew my grandfather. When Katsuro decided the order of things, pushing back only delayed everything and resolved nothing. He would talk when he was ready and not a mont before.
The house slled of cedar and old timber the way it always had.
Polished wooden beams across the ceiling. Paper shoji screens dividing the rooms. Tatami mats under my feet. The quiet creak of the building settling into the evening around .
Nothing had changed.
A servant carried my bag upstairs while I made my way to my old room. I slid the shoji door open and stood for a mont in the entrance.
Frozen in ti, that room. The futon folded neatly in the corner. The low writing desk by the window. The bookshelf with the sa novels I had left behind years ago with my place still marked in one of them by a receipt from a campus coffee shop. The wind chi outside the window turning slowly in the breeze.
I sat on the edge of the tatami floor and let the quiet co over .
A gentle knock at the shoji door pulled back.
It slid open. A young servant stood outside in a simple kimono and bowed deeply.
"O-furo ga junbi dekimashita." (お風呂が準備できました)
(" Your bath is ready.")
I stood.
"Arigatou."
She bowed again and slipped away down the corridor without a sound.
The bath helped.
Not much.
Just enough to wash away the exhaustion of the flight.
By the ti I returned to my room, the estate had settled into the kind of silence unique to places that had existed for generations, where every hallway seed to carry echoes of conversations held decades before you were born.
The corridor was empty.
Ard guards moving outside .
Everything felt exactly as I rembered.
I slid the shoji door open.
And stopped.
The room wasn’t empty.
For a mont all I saw was darkness.
Then a shape slowly erged from it.
Soone sat near the window beside the low writing desk, motionless and silent, the faint silver glow of moonlight filtering through the paper screens behind him.
My pulse stumbled.
Not because I recognized him.
Because for one brief irrational second I thought of rabbit masks.
And how he ca into my house the other day and scared .
Then the figure spoke.
"Himari."
The tension left imdiately.
"Ojii- san ?"
My grandfather remained seated.
A porcelain cup rested beside him.
Steam no longer rose from the tea.
Which ant he had been waiting for so ti.
I stepped into the room and closed the door behind .
Neither of us spoke.
The silence wasn’t uncomfortable.
It never had been between us.
Katsuro had always possessed an unusual talent for allowing silence to do the work most people filled with words.
Eventually he lifted the teacup and took a slow sip.
"I imagine," he said at last, "you’ve co a very long way to ask about X Reveals.".....
( to be continued..if you are loving this story so far support with golden tickets )
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