Reunited – Chapter 36

I desperately need rescuing. I try to get up from the bed and pace several times, but I’m held by the restraints. After Osamu and his people visited me here a few hours ago, they left the door open. Every so often a guard walks by and checks to make sure I’m still here. Where else would I be going? I’m embarrassed, though, when a consort comes by to stare at me from the door. Don’t worry, ladies. I’m disgusting. I doubt I’ll be taking time away from your precious Osamu.

Gross. Passive, Sanaa. Dunes, deep blue sky.

But my passive strategy makes me think of Sakai and Jiro, and I try not to think of them, as much as I want to see them both right now. Last time I thought seriously of either of them, I thought they were dead. Now stupid Kazuo has gotten into my head, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re alive. If Jiro is alive, where is he?

The tears start, and no, no, no! No tears! Once I start, I’ll spiral down. I look down at them plopping onto the kimono, and they come harder and faster. I need to think of my options, not cry.

The door to the suite next to me opens with a creak, and the sounds of a raucous party float into my room — women laughing, a few men singing, glasses clinking. They’re having a right good time, and I’m sitting here on this bed alone. Maybe this is how the rest of my life will be, alone in this room while the sounds of life filter in from outside. I’m already lonely.

The revelry continues for half an hour before the hall grows quiet. Is everyone moving on? I catch movement at my door out of the corner of my eye, and Osamu strides in, his face red with drink.

Shit. I’m probably not as disgusting when he’s completely wasted.

He slams the door behind him and walks to me at the bed unsteadily. Without comment, he unbinds my feet and then points to me.

“Take off that robe.”

“Your grace, I can’t unless you undo my hands.”

He growls in frustration and unties the straps binding my hands together, leaves the tight leather cuffs on my wrists, and steps away from me to the foot of the bed. I take a deep breath and stand.

This is it. Think quick, Sanaa!

I disrobe and leave the kimono on the bed neatly.

“Come around here,” he slurs, wavering on the spot and pointing in front of him. Hmmm.

I walk around to the foot of the bed and stand. I don’t even bother to cover myself up.

“Listen here…” He blinks his eyes slowly, blink… blink. “I will never have sex with you.”

I raise my eyebrows at him.

“Look at you! You’re scrawny and weak. You look like a child. You’re not royalty. You’re nothing. I could squash you with both of my hands.”

He tries to bring his hands together but misses. A smile grows from my belly but I keep it away from my face.

“I like my women…rrrrrround.” He sweeps his hands around and stumbles. “Big. Fat. I like to dig my fingers into their sides and watch the skin stretch.”

Spit flies from his mouth with every syllable, and his lips flap. He points at me, and I cross my arms over my chest.

“You’re just like the other consorts. You don’t get me. The maids though…” He laughs and falls on one knee. “I fatten… them… up. Extra… chocolate… Round…” And then he passes out at my feet.

Boom!

For a moment, I’m paralyzed as the whole castle shakes around me.

“Sanaa!”

I pull my eyes from the crazy man at my feet. Kentaro stands at the door, dressed in black, his staff in his hands, a sword on his back. Kazenoho! And here I am, completely naked, my hands and feet wrapped in leather, and standing over unconscious Osamu.

“It’s not how it looks,” I tell him.

He swiftly shuts the door behind him and locks it. “I hope to the gods he didn’t hurt you.”

I run to him in three big strides and throw my arms around his neck. If this is a rescue attempt, if I’m not completely hallucinating, I’m so glad it’s Kentaro that found me like this and not Jiro. Jiro needs to never picture me like this. He wouldn’t be able to forget it.

“I figured this is where they’d keep you.” He squeezes me harder, and I have to fight the urge to push him off of me and escape. It’s Kentaro. It’s really him.

“I’m so glad to see you. This is a rescue, right? I wasn’t hallucinating that conversation I had with Kazuo?”

“I don’t know what spell you put him under, probably the same one you have me under…” He kisses my cheek hard, and I start to cry. “But he’s switched sides. He rode to Takayama two nights ago and gave us all the information we needed to break you out of here. We knew you’d end up here eventually. There’s no way you’d kill yourself.”

I peel myself from him, and he averts his eyes as I jump over Osamu’s body and reach for the kimono.

“Where’s Jiro?”

“He’s alive and waiting outside the castle walls for us. I volunteered to come in and get you. He’s been either overwrought or murderous. I was afraid he’d lose his mind if he found you in a state like this.” He follows me to the bedside as I dress and starts to work at the cuffs on my wrists. “Are you injured?”

“No. Just tired, sick, and nauseous, and my hips hurt. Kentaro, I think I’m pregnant.”

“What?” He looks from me to Osamu, unconscious on the floor.

“No! Not him. He likes… big women.” I burst into an insane laugh, hysterical giggling. “Big, large, rrrrrrround women.” I cry through my laughter. What the hell happened to me? “The poor maids. I think I’m at least six weeks along, maybe.”

Kentaro closes his eyes for a brief moment. “We have to get you out of here. What about him?” He jerks his head at the floor, and I look over Kentaro’s shoulder at Kazenoho.

“I could kill him.”

Kentaro finishes picking at the knots on the cuffs and frees my wrists. My hands tingle as feeling returns to them, which is good, because I immediately reach for Kazenoho, and draw the sword straight from Kentaro’s back.

“Should I do it?”

I imagine myself, over my attacker, Kazenoho high above my head like a giant dagger, bringing it directly down into Osamu’s chest and watching the blood red blossoms pour out over the fancy carpets. That would be very satisfying. He did kidnap me. He did imprison me. He did plan on keeping me and making me breed with gods’ know who.

But he’s never going to get that chance because I’m leaving and I’m never coming back here. I should kill him. I want to lop his dick off and leave it on the bedside table, but…

“Maybe you should leave him for Jiro,” Kentaro suggests, and I know that’s the right decision. Osamu is Jiro’s kill for kidnapping his wife. Daisuke Fujiwara is mine for everything else.

“Fine. But his father just jumped to number one on my list with Risa directly after.”

Kentaro pales, fear, fear of me, crawling over his features, and rightfully so. I’m seething with the anger I’ve repressed since I was kidnapped by Kazuo.

I shrug off the kimono I just put on. “I need clothes. Something I can move in. No kimonos.”

Kentaro bends over and undresses Osamu. “These look big but there’s a belt.”

I pull Osamu’s shirt over my head and step into his pants, buckling them tight and rolling up the bottoms.

“Help?”

Kentaro kneels down and works on one of the leather cuffs on my ankle while I get the other one off.

“You need shoes, Sanaa. Here.” He goes to the dresser to rifle through the drawers, but I bolt forward and practically knock him out of the way to get my ring.

“My ring! Oh, thank the gods I can wear it again.”

Kentaro comes up empty handed. No shoes. I’ll have to be careful.

Boom!

Another explosion rocks the building, and I stumble, but the whole wing stays quiet.

“Come on, Sanaa. We’ve gotta go.” He hands me Kazenoho’s sheath, and I place it on my back but carry my sword. “That’s our Rokkaku army bombing the main building over the moat. You were right about Arata Sasaki, and if I thought Kazuo and I were under your spell, he’s even worse off than we are because he thinks you’re a god.”

Right. Jiro thought I’d be a deity after what we saw in the shrine. Maybe that’s what I need to win this war we’ve just started. I try to swallow the insanity of that situation and can’t. I don’t want to be a god.

“I have another way out.”

We creep up to the consort’s room next door. When I peek in, they are all unconscious either on the floor or the bed.

“What the hell happened?”

Kentaro smiles. “I drugged their saké for the evening. They’ll be out for hours.”

That explains Osamu’s behavior.

I laugh when I realize Risa is right inside the door next to Osamu’s wife. This is one crazy life they lead — wife and consorts partying together in one room and the man leaves to humiliate the girl next door. I wonder what he was planning on doing to me. Beat me? Starve me? Someday I’m going to bomb this palace into rubble and teach them all a good lesson. I leap in and relieve Risa of her satin slippers. “She won’t be needing these, not that they’re any better than bare feet.”

I turn to go but stop. It’s petty, but I’m going to screw with Risa.

“Come on, Sanaa.” Kentaro is impatient, his foot bouncing.

“Just a second.” Leaning over, I grab Risa’s bun, pull her hair loose, and with one swipe, cut off her hair at her head. Now she looks like me after I fought with Tadao. Serves the bitch right. I place her hair in her hand so when she wakes up, it’ll be the first thing she sees.

“There. I feel better now.”

“You have a streak of evil,” he says, smiling down at Risa. “But she deserves it. Never seen her say a nice thing to anyone.”

Kentaro leads me through hallway after hallway, and we encounter no one along the way. Everyone must have made their way out to defend the castle. “It’s just through here,” he says, pulling me towards a door in the middle of another hallway.

“How are you not getting lost? This place is a maze.”

“I memorized the route. Arata has blueprints of the entire palace. We thought they would keep you with the other consorts because it’s the one area that’s restricted.” He opens the door and underneath a storage box is a hatch he pulls open. “In you go.”

I descend down a metal ladder into a dark, dank tunnel that stretches in both directions for hundreds of meters.

“This way.” Kentaro starts to run, and holding up Osamu’s pants, I run along with him. “This castle has at least five kilometers worth of tunnels underneath that are a secret to the general public. They sneak people in and out through them without using the front gate. I don’t know who we’ll run into down here, but this tunnel goes right under the moat and out onto a street where Usagi is waiting for us.”

“Is everyone alive? Mariko, Beni, Mark?”

“Yes. When they came to kidnap you from the house, they drugged everyone else and just took you.” That’s what Kazuo said. I’m glad he wasn’t lying. “Sakai and Jiro showed up the next day after allying with Arata Sasaki and found the entire estate in a panic. We’re working now out of Sasaki’s town in the mountains, Takayama. My father is there.” He growls under his breath.

“Minamoto and Taira conspiring together against me…” I slow down, overcome with the weight of the biggest betrayal I never saw coming. Kentaro is so loyal. How could his father have done this?

He slows down too and grabs my hand. “Never again.”

We make two turns, but soft voices ahead of the third bend slow us down. Listening in, they speak the same Japanese everyone here uses so they aren’t friends. Kentaro peeks around the corner, presses his back against the wall, and holds up two fingers to me. I draw Kazenoho, gesture for Kentaro to go in high, and I’ll come in low.

Kentaro is a devil in disguise. His face breaks out into a wide, evil grin, and he screams and charges in, frightening the two guards and catching them unprepared. He knocks the first one in the head before he can draw his sword. I jump in and cut straight up, right into the other man’s abdomen. I wrench Kazenoho out and slice the other one across the chest.

I love adrenaline. It’s the only thing keeping me upright at this point. Once the men are on the ground, a wave of nausea soaks me from my head to my toes, and I snap my hand out at the wall to keep from keeling over.

“Sanaa! Are you okay? Do you need help walking?”

I breathe deep through my nose, the dark, wet brick walls blurring before I blink them back into place. “Let’s keep running. They didn’t feed me much, and it makes the nausea worse.”

We leave the dead guards where they are and run another ten minutes before coming to a metal ladder much like the one we came down. Above us is a manhole and through the holes are the shadows of people standing around it. Kentaro climbs up and bangs on the manhole several times with his staff. A crowbar slips into the crack, the cover lifts, and Usagi’s smiling face shines down on me.

I ascend the ladder onto the street and straight into Usagi’s hug. Relief fills the space hollowed out by my kidnapping. I’m back with loved ones.

It’s nighttime. Light from two moons and a street lamp cast an eerie glow over my bruised and red wrists wrapped around Usagi’s neck. I don’t let him go. I can barely stand up anymore.

“Are you all right?” he asks. “I’ve been so worried.”

Before I can respond, another explosion rocks the castle, and the ground under us sways like an earthquake. We’re knocked sideways, and Kentaro steadies us both before we fall over. Capital citizens left in the streets scream and streak past us, but most of the windows surrounding me are dark. The sky over to my left past the tops of the buildings glows soft orange and smoke curls into the sky, fingers scraping the stars to dust.

“We have another ten blocks to go before we reach Jiro and Sakai, and Fujiwara soldiers are in the streets, not to mention Taira men.”

Yes, my list after Daisuke Fujiwara includes Tomio Miura, and I’m thinking Sachi and Emiko are not far behind. Actually, my list is at least six or seven people long at this point. I have a lot of murder on my mind.

Another wave of nausea knocks my head back, and it’s so strong I feel faint and start to sweat. Clutching my abdomen, I bend over and empty my stomach onto the street away from Usagi and Kentaro. Usagi freezes in place, but Kentaro leaps forward and holds my hair back.

“Gods, Sanaa. You’ll have nothing left in you soon.”

“I need to eat, drink, and sleep for days once this is over or I’ll never make it.”

Wiping away my spit with the back of my hand, I slowly straighten up. A warm, soft wind blows up the street carrying with it white cherry blossom petals and the sharp smell of burning wood. Spring is supposed to be lovely, but it’s wretched instead.

“Let’s go.” Usagi pushes me forward by the small of my back, and Kentaro follows watching our rear. “We should get out of this section of town.”