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Chapter one

The Red Thread

Yoichi

🎧 Chapter 1 Soundtrack:

Pain.

It was such an ugly, human thing.

It gnawed into my flesh.

It chewed through muscle, scraped along bone, and settled deep inside my marrow as though it intended to live there.

Had I not been kitsune, I would have already been dead.

I’d fought in Japan’s biggest mafia war for my boss, known to the world as the Dragon.

Kenji Sato.

He had taken us to war against his own father, and somehow, all of it had begun because the Dragon had fallen in love with one clever African American woman.

Due to my curse binding me to his bloodline as his spiritual guardian, I had helped him fight that war. I had taken bullets through my chest, ripped men apart with claws and teeth, and spilled enough blood to stain several lifetimes.

Then, we had jumped on his father’s plane to finally defeat him and his men.

The battle had taken us to the sky, and one of my friends had fallen from the plane.

So, naturally, I had jumped after him.

Thousands of feet of open air had stretched beneath us. Wind battered my body as I shifted in the middle of the fall, bones breaking and reforming while my human shape expanded into fur, claws, fangs, and eight enormous tails.

I dove through the night, caught him before the earth could claim him, and wrapped my tails around his body.

He survived.

My kitsune form absorbed the brutal collision with the ground. Next came the breaking of bones, the tearing of flesh, and the violent splatter of my own blood across the earth.

That was how I had ended up here.

Broken.

Half-starved.

Too weak to hold a human form.

My ribs had shattered. My legs and arms too. One shoulder had partially healed out of place. Deep wounds carved through the fur along my side, and something had destroyed my throat badly enough that even my supernatural body had not repaired it yet.

I could breathe.

Barely.

I could swallow.

Painfully.

I could not speak.