私はあなたに何かを伝える必要がある

Shin froze.

She watched hopelessly as the muscles in his body locked, eyes widening as they stared down at her. She couldn't read anything there, the wall she was so used to seeing now slamming in place to conceal his thoughts and emotions. She had no idea how she was forcing herself not to cry, and she bit her quivering lip to keep from bursting at the seams.

"What..." he licked his lips, hands tightening unconsciously on her shoulders. "What did you say?"

She gulped, breathing heavily, dropping her eyes to stare at his chest. She wished she could lay her head there and listen to his heartbeat, try to discern what he was thinking from that.

"It's – it's why I hate it when people touch me – when anyone but you touches me." She closed her eyes as she tried to block out the sound of her voice repeating those damning words, but she couldn't say them again. "He...he..."

She opened her eyes when she felt a tremor, but it wasn't from her. It was coming from Shin, from his hands gripping her shoulders. Her mouth fell open at the simmering rage in the depths of eyes gone blood red, a line of deepest blue outlining the red like a limbal ring.

She didn't think she had ever seen him look like this. Not when he faced down the Onihitokuchi. Not when she wanted to leave because she feared what her memories would make her body do after she attacked him in the forest. Not when he faced Kagetora at the festival in Kyoto. Not even when Shinigami had control of their body, and not once with Kagetora during their training, the angriest she'd ever seen him until now.

Is he angry? Is he angry I wasn't strong enough to fight Akira off?

"Are you saying," his voice trembled with devastating rage, and his hands on her shoulders were almost painful. "Someone did that to you? And you didn't want it?"

The thought, the very idea that she could ever have wanted it, was like a slap to the face with a metal chair wielded by a hurricane of violent rejection.

She shook her head vehemently. "No! I didn't – I never wanted it. I never ever asked for it." She reached up and gripped his wrists in her hands, imploring him to understand her side. "Please, Shin, you have to believe me." Her breath hiccuped. "I didn't – I never wanted it to happen."

Something terrifying in Shin snapped at her words.

She jumped back when he spun around and, before she could blink, punched the tree behind him. His hand went straight through the wood right up to his elbow, wood creaking as it bent and shattered. The bark of the tree broke away around his arm, and splinters of woodchips were embedded in his skin. He yanked his arm out with a low snarl, and she yelped when she saw slivers of red painting his arm, the skin at his knuckles ripped and bloody.

"Shin – Shin stop, stop, your arm – "

That wasn't enough for him. He ignored her, lips pulling over his teeth. She stared at his canines, the points longer than normal. He was Shin, but in this moment of unadulterated fury, he was Shinigami as well, the two more visibly joined together in this dark moment than she'd seen since Ukabarenairei.

With rage radiating from him in brutal waves, a growl reverberating through him, he reached up and ripped off the sturdy tree branch they'd sat in as easily as he would if the tree was made of paper.

The wood groaned when it tore apart from its main body, and her heart clenched tight as her eyes widened on him. She gaped wordlessly, hardly able to believe he possessed such strength she'd never seen before as he hefted the branch in his arms. A second later, he launched the heavy limb into the air, sending it hurtling thirty feet away. It crashed through the undergrowth, rolling and breaking apart the thicket surrounding them. The ground shook under her feet from the impact.

She looked down, eyes huge, at the fallen leaves that shook from the vibration. She'd always known Shin was one of the stronger Hengen, possibly even the strongest she'd ever met. But she never realized it was to this extent.

She flinched when he rounded and stalked back to her. She knew he wouldn't hurt her, but her body was ingrained with the fight-or-flight instinct instilled from thousands of years of experience, an instinct that dictated any woman fear an angry man, any human fear the red eyes of the inhuman.

He saw it, and stilled a foot from her. A strange look flashed through his eyes. He was visibly trembling, barely able to restrain the storm building to an apex inside him at what she'd just told him.

He clenched his jaw so tight she worried he'd break it. "Are you afraid of me?"

She shook her head. Her voice was firm where it hadn't been before, because she needed him to see it was the truth. "No." She was afraid of what he thought of her.

"Tell me where he is." His voice was a guttural growl, a complete turnaround from what she was used to.

"W – what?" she asked.

She was thrown out of sorts by his reaction. He just tore a huge tree branch and sent it flying, and she didn't doubt for a second he could very well snap the tree itself in half when he was in this state. She didn't know if he was angry at her or not. Didn't he blame her for not fighting back hard enough? Why wasn't he shouting at her? Why did she see pain in his eyes for her?

He lowered his head as he took another step to her, and this time she didn't move away, standing her ground. "Where is he? Akira." He ground the name out like it was dirt.

"Why?" she asked, stomach curdling at the thought of why she'd been sent for torture after what Akira did to her. After what she did to him.

He shook his head roughly, lips curling over his teeth. He looked savage, and perfectly capable of ripping someone to pieces. He might actually be able to do something like that.

"So I can kill the fucking bastard who dared lay a hand on you when you didn't want it."

She stared blankly at him.

...what?

She abruptly realized that she was wrong. She'd taken his reaction the wrong way. Probably not for the first time, if she thought about it. He wasn't angry at her. He wasn't angry at her for not fighting hard enough to stop it from happening. He was angry at the man who'd done it.

Her lips twitched emptily, a whisper of that Pai slithering inside her. "He's already dead."

Slivers of his anger filtered away just a bit at that. He didn't look satisfied in the least that it wasn't him who killed Akira, but he looked like the fact that the man was dead would suffice to placate him.

She wondered if that was something that they could match at. This angry side of Shin that was willing to kill and had, and the broken girl inside her who had killed before, a part of her she wasn't sure was buried deep enough.

"How?" he asked.

Hate me.

"I...I killed him."

Please don't.

His brows came down, confusion replacing the anger. "What do you mean?"

She dropped her eyes from his, looking down at her hands. She tightened them to fists, uncurled her fingers and stared at the lines crisscrossing over her palm. She wondered what they said about her life. She wondered if they hinted at what she'd been through, confirmed that her memories weren't nightmares.

She resisted the urge to laugh at herself. Even now, after everything that happened to prove it was all real, she was still trying so desperately to deny it.

Gulping, she looked up at him and lifted her hand. It was trembling, but not from the shaking she got because she was dying. Every part of her screamed to keep her secrets in, to hide them from the light of day, to let them skulk in the shadows of night, drowning her.

She was afraid of saying too much.

She was afraid of giving herself over to him completely.

She was afraid that she was setting herself up for a fall that would inevitably shatter her to pieces.

But when she saw the look in Shin's eyes, she knew she couldn't hold on to them anymore. Not from the moment she'd said, I want you, out loud. She'd sealed her own fate with those words.

"Can you still touch me," her voice trembled as she spoke. "Knowing that I'm not innocent?"

Shin looked at her inscrutably. Even though she wanted to turn around and run away, run away from the power he had to destroy her with a single word, she remained unmoving. Her hand hovered in the space between them. She watched his eyes, the blue flickering around the edges of the red. The wall she hated was there, blocking her from making out anything of his thoughts.

Unable to take the heavy silence anymore, she shut her eyes and lowered her head so that her chin rested against her collarbone. She kept her hand where it was, and her ears strained for any sound from him. After what seemed like eternity crammed into a few seconds, she heard the crunch of leaves under his feet. She lifted her head just in time to see Shin reach out and lace his fingers through hers, gripping her hand tight in his, not looking away from her even for a moment.

She stared up at him, then at their intertwined hands. Shin wiped the tears wetting her cheek with his thumb. Her heart clenched tight at the tenderness in his eyes, the gentle way he held her when a moment ago he almost ripped a tree right out of its roots solidly buried in the ground.

Without words, he was telling her that he still loved her, still recognized her for everything she was, and that her flaws didn't changed that.

No treasure in the world could mean more to her.

She looked down at her feet. She knew what she needed to do now. If he was going to accept her, he had to know everything about her. He had to know everything she knew. She couldn't keep parts of herself set apart, splitting herself into bits and only let him see what she wanted him to. He wouldn't accept that, she knew. She would kill herself trying to do it, she knew.

He had to know everything about her. Not just what Akira had done to her – she could see him holding himself back from asking her how something like that could have happened, what was her life like that she was around a man like that. She couldn't hold her past back anymore. She needed to tell him everything.

She couldn't just tell him one part and leave everything else blank. She needed to tell it all.

You were right to fear meeting Aihara, Kuniumi said mildly. She sounded so far away. Pai wondered if she was really there at all, or if she was just imagining what Kuniumi would say in this moment. Her words opened the floodgate that's led to all this.

She was right. Pai wasn't being allowed to hold on to her murderous secrets with a death grip anymore. She no longer had that choice.

"The hand you're holding," she started slowly. She swallowed as she lifted her other hand, fingers splayed. "These hands have blood on them. Ayakashi and human blood."

His eyebrows lowered as he regarded her silently, no more reaction flickering in him than that.

"I am a killer, Shin. My hands are stained with the blood of everyone I've hurt. Will you still hold my hand, knowing that?"

Shin responded by tightening his hand around hers, and before she could say a word, he pulled her to him, enveloping her in his arms. She tensed for a mere second before she relaxed into him, closing her eyes and burying her face in the folds of his shirt as she locked her wrists together behind him.

"Tell me, Pai. Tell me, because," he whispered in her hair, cradling the back of her head in one hand as he shut his eyes and tried to control the urge he had to pick her up and simply take her to somewhere where their pasts couldn't waltz into their lives and bludgeon everything to bloody pieces. "All I ever wanted, all I ever needed, is here, in my arms. I will fight to my dying breath to keep you, and I will never let you go, not unless you want me to."

I don't want you to go. Please don't leave me.

She pressed her nose to his shirt, breathing in his scent as she tried to rally herself up enough to get the words out. The words that would either make or break them, together. The words she'd been running away from for months, ever since that fateful day when Kuniumi first appeared and brought the trickling blood of her memories with her.

"There's more I need to tell you."