She woke up with the absolute certainty that there was someone in her home that wasnât invited and the awareness that she was completely alone with a stranger. Sitting up carefully and shifting out of bed knowing exactly which of her floorboards creaked and which did not, she listens as the unmistakable weight of a man walking past her locked room moves towards the master bedroom. Her parents old room, at the end of the hall that she never slept in. Grabbing her phone from under her pillow and turning it off, she slides it into the pocket of her pants. Moving carefully towards the window she always left slightly open and oiled she slides it open wide. Popping the screen out carefully like she had practiced a dozen times after an incident a couple years ago had brought a customer that refused to take no for an answer to her home at 4 AM. She sets it on her bed and throws a blanket over it, and climbs out onto the metal trellis that rests against her home covered in jasmine, closes the window behind her, and climbs down.Â
The second her bare feet touch the grass of her side garden, she runs.
Carefully unlatching the fence and sliding through a crack she doesnât hesitate to run three houses down where they have a raised porch and hides underneath it with spiderwebs. Only then does she take out her phone from her pocket and call the number that Hanzo had left her and made her swear to call if anything like this ever happened. Giving the necessary passwords, she keeps her voice quiet as her hands shake. Her eyes firmly on the street. A familiar, frustrated voice she immediately recognizes as Rodriguez sounding on the other side of the phone.
âSakura, for the last time-â
âThere is someone in my home. One man, maybe two. I got out through the second story window and I am at a neighbors. Send someone quick. Not the local police because they lie about their hours to go home early.â
Hearing a crack she stops talking and waits for a couple seconds, her voice becoming quieter.Â
âI am assuming you know why. Be fast.â (Hanzo, Modern)
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đ„|| The phone becomes a vessel of dread in Hanzo Hasashi's scarred palm, her voice - that trembling, defiant whisper - cutting through him like winter steel dragged across bone. His world, already a landscape of controlled violence and calculated precision, fractures entirely. The operational maps spread across his desk blur into meaningless lines. The tactical briefings dissolve into ash. There is only her voice, small and shaking, speaking from beneath some stranger's porch while spiders weave their patient webs around her terror.
His jaw locks with such force he tastes copper. The muscles of his throat work against words that refuse to form anything resembling calm, anything approaching the commander's detachment he has wielded like armor for months now. Every carefully constructed wall he has erected between them - every cancelled dinner, every ignored text, every deliberate silence designed to protect her from the darkness that follows him like a starving shadow - crumbles to nothing beneath the weight of three words; There is someone.
"Stay exactly where you are," he manages, and his voice emerges as gravel scraped across concrete, as thunder contained in a human chest. He is already moving, already gesturing sharply to his second-in-command with hand signals that need no translation. The room erupts into controlled chaos around him. "Do not move. Do not make a sound. Keep this line open."
His mind becomes a weapon turned inward, eviscerating him with surgical precision. This - this - is precisely what he had feared. What he had known with the bitter certainty of a man who has watched too many innocents burn. That his proximity to her, his selfish desire to exist in the warmth of her world where jasmine grows on trellises and the greatest danger should be burnt soufflés, would paint a target on her back in blood-red strokes. That men who hunt him - who study his patterns, exploit his weaknesses, turn his affections into ammunition - would eventually find the baker who smells of vanilla and cinnamon, whose laugh he has memorized like a prayer he no longer deserves to speak.
He had pushed her away to save her. And she is hiding beneath rotting wood while strangers violate her sanctuary anyway.
The rage that rises in him is ancient and absolute, a thing with teeth and claws that screams for release. His free hand grips the edge of the tactical table until his knuckles bleach white as bone, until the metal groans its protest. Rodriguez is beside him now, already pulling up her address on the digital display, calculating response times with the grim efficiency of a man who understands that seconds measure the distance between breathing and burial.
"I have units en route," Hanzo says, forcing each syllable through the grinding wheel of his fury. "Four minutes. Can you hear them? Are they still in the house?"
He hates himself for the questions, for making her think while fear floods her system with poison. He hates that she remembered his warnings, that she practiced escape routes like a soldier rather than a woman who creates beauty from flour and sugar. He hates that he knows - knows - this is his fault. That his enemies have grown bold enough, desperate enough, to reach for her because she is the one crack in his foundation they discovered despite his every precaution.
The tactical van's engine roars to life outside. He is already striding toward it, phone pressed so hard against his ear that pain blooms sharp and clarifying. His team moves around him like extensions of his will, weapons checked, vests secured, faces set in the hard masks of men trained to breach and eliminate.
"Listen to me, Sakura," he says, and her name on his tongue tastes like failure, like every goodbye he forced between them to keep her safe. "When my team arrives, they will identify themselves with the phrase 'jasmine tea.' Do not come out for anyone else. Do you understand? Not for anyone."
He swallows against the jagged glass lodged in his throat. The distance he maintained, the coldness he performed, the careful destruction of what grew between them - all of it rendered meaningless by the sound of her rapid breathing through the phone, by the knowledge that she is barefoot and terrified and alone because he was not arrogant enough to believe his protection would be sufficient, only arrogant enough to believe his absence would be salvation.
The van doors slam shut. The vehicle lurches into motion. And Hanzo Hasashi - commander, warrior, fool - listens to the woman he pushed away for her own protection trying not to breathe too loudly while strangers hunt through her home in the darkness, searching for whatever they came to take. đ„||
