Back in the seventies, Tsuyoshi had been a different man. Money, respect, the kind of fear that felt like admiration he’d known all of it. The suits pressed sharp as blades, the scent of tobacco and lacquered wood, the nights that ended with laughter and blood in equal measure. He had traded some of it for age, and some of it had been taken from him outright. What remained was quiet, and quiet could be cruel.

No more cracking a few jaws and sharp glares, no more collecting protection fees like a common thug. He was older now. Trusted by his oyabun, head of a family that wasn’t bound by blood.

He hadn’t expected anyone that night. The wind carried its usual chill through the pine boards, the kind that settled into his joints. A rare vacation in the states, a place where his men knew better than to bother him, When the keypad began to chirp outside, he thought, for a moment, that it maybe work had come to him. But then came the sound of hesitation. A pause. A breath.

Not an assassin.

He opened the door.

The figure on the porch looked small against the dark. Thin coat, road dust clinging to the hems. The kind of tired that lived deeper than the eyes. And-ah. The face. Familiar, faintly.

It took him longer than he’d admit to piece it together.

A grandchild. One of the few he’d ever met. He remembered a different version: shorter, louder, clutching at some toy or sweet during one of those half-hearted visits before that family finally severed itself clean.

Now they stood there, grown, but not grown well. Underweight, sharp around the edges, like someone who’d been living off caffeine and nerves.

Tsuyoshi said nothing at first. The old instincts urged caution, calculation. But something else, quieter, older, pressed through.

They had his eyes.

He stepped aside, holding the door open. “You look like hell,” he said at last, his voice roughened by years of smoke and silence. “Come in.”