Akira’s POV I registered three things in quick succession.
One: I was being held.
Two: the person holding me was the stranger from the ramen shop, who I had spent six days telling myself I was not thinking about and who was currently demonstrating that the not-thinking had been entirely one-sided.
Three: his face was buried in the crook of my neck.
I shoved him away quickly.
Both hands, full force, the kind of push that had no technique in it and did not need any because technique was for situations that required finesse and this was not one of those situations.
He moved back exactly as far as my strength pushed him, which was not far, which was its own infuriating piece of information, and then he simply stood there looking at me with that expression I already recognized from the ramen shop.
I was not entertaining him.
I was furious.
Livid even.
“Who told you where I live?” “Good morning,” that was it.
Was he freaking stupid.
“That is not an answer.” “It’s a greeting.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.” I stared at him.
He was dressed differently than the last time, no suit.
Something more casual that still managed to look like a deliberate choice rather than an absence of effort, and he was standing in my training yard, which was a generous name for the patched square of ground behind the building where I had been working on footwork for the past hour, and he looked entirely comfortable standing in it.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I was in the area.” “You were in the area…” I looked at him.
“You were in the area and you decided to come through the gate and watch me train without saying anything.” “You didn’t notice me for four minutes,” he said.
“I didn’t want to interrupt.” “Four…” I stopped.
The fact that he had been standing there for four minutes without my noticing was a separate problem and I was going to deal with it separately.
“Who told you where I live?” Something in his expression did the thing it had done in the ramen shop, the fractional shift that I was beginning to understand was the closest he got to an unguarded reaction.
“She’s protective.
Your mother that is.” “She gave you our address?” “After I helped with the lunch service.” He paused.
“Again.” I opened my mouth and closed it.
My mother had let this man serve tables in her shop a second time and then handed him my address, which meant she had made a decision about him that she had not consulted me on.
“She had no right…” “She had the address,” he said.
“She exercised it.” “That is not the same thing.” “Isn’t it?” He said it with the same pleasantness he applied to everything, the tone that had no aggression in it and somehow landed harder than aggression would have, and I turned away from him and picked up the dagger from where it had fallen when he startled me.
I was not going to think too hard about this, yelped.
I had yelped.
In front of him.
I pointed the dagger at the training post and tried to reconstruct the sequence I had been working on before the interruption.
“Your grip is wrong,” he said.
Forcing me to stop.
“The index finger,” he said, from somewhere behind me and slightly to the left, closer than he had been, which meant he had moved and I had not known about it.
“You’re holding it like a kitchen knife.
The blade work you’re trying to do requires the grip to sit further back, toward the heel of the hand.” I turned around slowly.
He was standing four feet away with his hands in his pockets, the picture of someone who had offered a casual observation and had no particular investment in what was done with it.
“How do you know what blade work I’m trying to do,” I said.
“I watched you for four minutes.” “And?” “And your footwork is functional but your upper body isn’t following it.
You’re moving your feet correctly and then bracing your torso like you’re expecting impact rather than initiating it.” He tilted his head slightly.
“It’s why the goblin put you in a hospital.
And why the wolf did what it did.” The air went out of the yard.
I looked at him.
“How do you know about the wolf.” Nothing in his expression changed.
“Guild records are accessible to hunters above a certain rank.” “What rank are you?” Why was everything about this guy suspicious?
The not-quite-smile returned, settled in, made itself at home.
“High enough.” I thought about the white suit.
The way the customers in the ramen shop had responded to him, not with recognition exactly but with the specific quality of attention people gave things they could feel the weight of without being able to name it.
The way he had moved through five hours of table service with the efficiency of someone who applied precision to everything they did and had simply redirected it.
The way he had been standing in my training yard for four minutes and I had not registered his presence until he was already in it.
I thought about Vanessa’s words in the hospital.
‘The gap between where you are and where that dagger requires you to be.’ I thought about forty-five strength out of five hundred.
“You came here to tell me my technique is wrong,” I said.
“I came here because I wanted to,” he said.
“The technique assessment was incidental.” “That’s not an answer either.” “It’s the most accurate one.” I looked at him for a long moment.
He looked back with that direct unhurried quality, a ghost of a smile resting on his face.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked.
It came out genuine rather than rhetorical, which I hadn’t entirely intended, but there it was.
He considered the question with apparent seriousness.
“Several things, depending on who you ask.” “I’m asking.” “Then the list is shorter.” The not-quite-smile shifted into something that had more of an edge to it.
“I find certain things interesting.
I follow up on them.” “I’m a certain thing.” “You’re an interesting one.” I didn’t have an immediate response to that.
He was not flattering me.
He was making an observation the way you make observations about things you have examined and arrived at a conclusion about.
Being examined and concluded about by someone I didn’t have a name for was not a situation I had infrastructure for.
“Your name,” I said.
“You said next time.” “I did.” “This is next time.” He looked at me.
The edge in the not-quite-smile sharpened slightly, and underneath it was something I was getting better at reading, the quality of someone who was interested, genuinely, in what was in front of them.
“Kael,” he answered.
Just the one name.
I looked at him.
At the casual clothes that were still a deliberate decision and the face that could cause problems and the hands that were still in his pockets, entirely at ease in a training yard he had no business being in, having come here because he wanted to, which was apparently sufficient justification.
“Kael,” I repeated.
“Yes.” “You came to my home.
You got my address from my mother.
You stood in my yard for four minutes watching me train.
And now you’re standing there telling me my grip is wrong.” “Your grip is wrong,” he confirmed.
“The index finger…” “I heard you the first time.” “Then adjust it.” I stared at him.
The thing that was forming between us had no name yet.
I could feel the shape of it without being able to call it anything, the push and the pull of it, the way his calm made my edges sharper and the way my edges seemed, inexplicably, to produce in him something closer to genuine engagement than anything else in the yard was managing.
It was not comfortable.
It was also not something I wanted to end, which was its own problem.
I adjusted my grip.
Shifted the index finger back toward the heel of the hand, the way he had described, and felt immediately the change in the balance of the blade, the way it sat differently, the way the weight redistributed into something that felt less like bracing and more like readiness.
I would never say anything about it.
And apparently he did not say anything about it either.
But when I turned back to the training post and ran the sequence again, he was still there, and he was watching, and the yard was quiet around both of us in the specific way of a silence that has something in it and knows it.
I told myself not to think about what that something was.
But I was getting worse at that particular discipline with each passing hour.