Stone-Cold Fox (Black Dog)

by Hailey Edwards

  “You’re a godsdamned liar,” he growled. “I never laid a finger on Mai, and you know it.”

  “Your intent was clear in your eyes then as it is now.” He flashed his teeth. “That remains proof enough for me.”

  Realizing my hand still rested on his thigh, I squeezed it hard, begging for just a few moments longer.

  “There was a witness?” I pressed. “Someone saw me enter Ryuu’s home with Katsuo—which I must have done a thousand times before—and what? He decided that Ryuu was out to sully me without being inside the house to hear or see what was happening?” A thought occurred to me. “Did you have someone watching me?”

  Dad’s eye twitched. It was answer enough.

  “So your spy saw me go inside and head up to Ryuu’s room.” Which fit with Ryuu’s version of the story. “Did he observe any inappropriate behavior on Ryuu’s part before dashing off to report to you?”

  “There was no reason for a girl of your age to have been in a room with a boy like him.” The red creeping up Dad’s neck flushed purple. “It was unseemly. Your behavior was not befitting one of my daughters—a Hayashi—and therefore it must have been his doing.”

  “She tested me.” Ryuu spoke into the silence. “I passed.” He turned his head toward me, gaze hard and possessive. “She is my mate.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “The binding was done, and you robbed her—robbed us—of that.”

  “That is not possible. Mai was a girl of twelve. She did not know what she was doing.” He jabbed a finger at Ryuu. “You were older. You knew she was fascinated with you. You should have stopped her instead of letting her play out her fantasies.”

  “I was fascinated with him.” Hearing Dad admit it knocked me down another peg into this twisted alternate universe where I found myself. Nothing made sense to me anymore.

  Dad’s jaw was enveloped in the violet rash of throttled fury. “He was forbidden—the older brother of your best friend. You tested him as a game, because you were a child and unaware of the consequences.” His jaw quivered. “No one finds their mate with their first shiren.”

  I anchored my elbows on the table and covered my face with my hands. A heavy hand touched my shoulder, and I glanced at Ryuu, whose features should have been wreathed with triumph at being proven right, but instead he wore shared pain that I understood stemmed from grief over the future we had lost.

  I tested the weight of the words on my tongue. “I knew it was you.”

  His fingers sank into my hair. “You never had a doubt.”

  “I wish I remembered.” How many girls got it right on the first try? All this time, all these failures, all because I had been desperate to find what I had already claimed and lost. I braced myself to ask Dad, “Can the spell be reversed?”

  “No.” He sliced the air with his hand. “The witch is long dead, and it’s too dangerous for even one of his line to tamper with something as delicate as the mind, especially one altered while you were so young and your recollections malleable.”

  “I want the truth,” I told him in a little-girl voice close to breaking. “Please, Dad. Don’t you think I deserve to know that?”

  For several minutes, my dad stared at a cigarette burn on the tabletop. “It is possible that Ryuu’s recollections are accurate.”

  It was as close to an admission of guilt as I would ever hear from him, and it shattered the pillar upon which my father had sat during my entire life. Every kind word and gesture fell under scrutiny. I had gone into the Expo sure that I was Dad’s favorite, his little princess, and here I sat wondering if he had really loved me so much or if he felt so indebted to me that he had made atonement his life’s work where I was concerned.

  “Mr. Hayashi,” Ryuu began. “I didn’t agree to this meeting for the reasons you might expect.”

  My dad squared his jaw and waited. “Isn’t taking my daughter from me recompense enough?”

  For all the lost years, lost history, lost lives… No. Hayashi or not, I wasn’t worth that much.

  “What I want is for my skulk to be recognized by the National Kitsune Registry.” Ryuu tapped his knuckles on the table. “You can make that happen.”

  “When you marry my daughter,” Dad said carefully, “your skulk will be grandfathered in.”

  “I want this for my family, for my parents. I want them to be named reynard and vixen of the Tanabe skulk posthumously. I want our people to be granted all the rights afforded to NKR members. That includes financial and medical support, as well as a one-time gift of land given to us free and clear, as is custom for all newly established skulks.”

  An utter calm settled over my father. “Since you are unmated and unable to claim the title except through inheritance, I assume, as their eldest son, you wish to be named heir?”

  “I do.”

  The two of them were deciding something between themselves, but what they had agreed on I couldn’t put my finger on until a thin smile broke my father’s composure. It was the pointed grin of a satiated shark circling a wounded seal, content to let it bleed to death rather than expend the energy necessary to go in for the kill.

  “You do not wish to marry my daughter.” He unfastened the top button of his shirt. “You are pursuing this agreement in lieu of asking for her hand?”

  Ryuu’s fist clenched in my hair. “Yes.”

  The world pitched beneath me. I braced my palms on the table to stop the spinning. It didn’t help.

  “What are you doing?” Katsuo demanded, rounding the booth and fisting Ryuu’s shirt. “This is not what we agreed on.”

  Ryuu knocked his brother back and let his power saturate his words. “Wait for me at the truck.”

  Given as a direct order, Katsuo had no hope of refusing. He fought each step but still walked himself outside, leaving me alone with the two men deciding my future without once asking me what I wanted.

  Complexion returning to normal, Dad lost the arctic edge of his cold shoulder. “I can push the paperwork through within forty-eight hours.”

  “Let me out.” It took me a second to register I had spoken, and a few seconds longer for the men to notice me, but I wasn’t done yet. “Get your hands off me.” I shoved Ryuu. “Move. Get up. Let. Me. Out.”

  Dad rapped his knuckles on the table. “Mai, you will cease this improper behavior immediately.”

  “Or you’ll what?” I couldn’t bring myself to call him dad. “Wipe my memory of this conversation? Oh wait. You’ve already done that once. For all I know this is the third time we’ve had this talk this week.”

  From the corner of my eye, I watched as Dad’s face purpled to a shade that only naturally occurred in eggplants.

  Ryuu allowed me to push him away, let me stand and then captured me by the shoulders. “I did what you told me to do.” He pinned me while I squirmed. “I took a good look at who we both are, and we don’t fit.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe your father was right. Maybe we never did.”

  Swallowing glass would have hurt less than hearing him—my mate—side with my father. “I guess now we’ll never know, will we?” I executed a move I had learned during marshal academy, one that broke a much larger attacker’s grip on a smaller victim. Once freed, I stormed outside and left the men to pat each other on the back.

  A dusty yellow cab idled at the curb, and Thierry leaned against it, back on two legs. She opened her arms, and I walked into them. “How’d you know?”

  She twisted around and guided me inside the car before saying, “I heard the direction the conversation was headed and figured I would be prepared.”

  “You’re the best,” I told her, letting her hold me.

  “I know.” She squeezed me until my shoulder popped.

  I turned my face into her faded T-shirt and used her right boob as a handkerchief. “After all this, Ryuu didn’t want me. He gave me back to my father in exchange for a spot on the registry.”

  Ryuu had used me as a means to an end, which didn’t surprise me as much as the end result itself. He�
��d bartered me for all he ever wanted—power, land, recognition—but he had left me in the same situation as before the Expo. The persistent and maddening drive to find my mate beat at me even as I mourned his betrayal. Except now I knew who he was and that he didn’t want me. He had wanted only what my last name would provide him. What was I supposed to do? Settle? Find a nice guy and pretend I didn’t imagine he was Ryuu every time we kissed? Happiness might have been attainable had I never met Ryuu. I could have accepted another man had I not known the one meant for me. But I had met Ryuu, and I had known him for a little while, and no other kitsune would compare to him.

  A growl entered her voice. “Then he deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

  Idiot that I was, I offered a watery sigh. “Promise you won’t hurt him.”

  “I won’t have to.” Her cheek rested against the top of my head. “He’s carried the thought of you around all this time as some kind of harebrained scheme or backup plan or some other BS, but he had no idea what a remarkable woman you became. Now he’s seen you, spoken to you, touched you…and he’s lost you. Trust me when I say he’s going to regret the deal he made today for the rest of his life, and I hope it’s a long, miserable one.”

  As wounded as Ryuu had left me, I hoped she was right.

  Chapter 10

  Three weeks passed before sweater weather arrived and I could hide my body under layers of fabric. Ryuu had given me all the excuse I needed to binge on as much ice cream as I could stuff in my face without it coming back up again. Some might argue that frozen dairy product can’t spackle the fractures of a broken heart. I offer up for their inspection Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby, which Thierry had altered in the hopes I might not snarf the third whole tub this week. She had used a permanent marker to change Hubby to Kitsune, but I had sweaters to hide the food baby I was growing, so all in all her campaign was for naught.

  Stomach aching, I forced myself to swallow one last chocolatey peanut-buttery bite before crossing the room to the kitchen to discard the evidence and rinse my mouth out with water. I seriously needed a new coping mechanism. One that wouldn’t leave me wearing sweatpants for the next three months instead of the skinny jeans and knee-high boots I’d bought in preparation for pumpkin spice season.

  I flopped back on the couch and kicked my feet up on the coffee table. When the doorbell rang, I was tempted to ignore it. Okay, I did ignore it. But after ten minutes I took the hint it must be important and went to greet the bell-ringer.

  An elegant woman touched with strands of gray in her jet-black hair smiled serenely up at me. Her raw silk pantsuit matched the warm brown of her eyes, and not a strand of hair was out of place in her coif.

  “Momma.” I sucked in my gut and pasted on a smile. “How nice to see you.”

  “You have not visited for almost a month.” She reached up and cupped my cheek in her palm. “I have missed you, daughter.”

  “Come inside,” I said, remembering my manners. “I’m sorry it’s a mess. If I’d known you were coming, I would have picked up.”

  Graceful as the Kyoto-style dancer she had once been, Mom glided into the apartment on dainty feet and managed to hold on to her neutral expression, minus the twitch in her eye when she spotted the can of soda without a coaster. “Your father—”

  I held up my hand. “No.”

  She cupped her hands in front of her. “You cannot carve him from your life.”

  “You know what he did.” And yes, a double standard was happening. I wouldn’t have let Dad cross the threshold, but he was a force of nature. Mom was just the lovely tree bent by his gale-force winds. “You understand why I can’t forgive him. Not now.” Maybe not ever.

  “May I?” She indicated the seat I had vacated.

  “Of course.” Resigned, I joined her on the faded brocade sofa. “Why did you come all the way out here?”

  Our modest apartment was as far from home as I could get without leaving the Wink zip code. That wasn’t by coincidence.

  She fought to balance on the sinking cushion. “Do I need a reason to visit my youngest daughter?”

  “Mom.” I sighed. “I’m busy right now.” Ice cream didn’t eat itself. “If you’re here to broker some kind of peace between me and Dad, forget it. I’m not interested.”

  “You must understand that every decision your father makes stems from his love for us.” She shifted her weight. “Gorou’s worst crime is wanting better for his family than he had himself.”

  “No,” I disagreed. “The worst crime wasn’t the wanting but the actions taken to secure his dreams.”

  An understated nod. “Did young Tanabe speak of his father during your time together?”

  “No.” The wounds had been too fresh for him to expose. “His parents haven’t been gone long. The skulk didn’t talk about them at all.”

  “That is a shame,” she lamented. “The Tanabes were good people, and Saburo Tanabe was your father’s closest friend for many years. They grew up together, made their way through the world shoulder-to-shoulder.”

  I drew my legs under me. “If that’s true, then why did he object to my pairing with Ryuu?”

  “Saburo was content. His life was full with his wife and children. His position in our skulk gave him prestige and allowed him to provide for his family. He was at peace.” A sigh that I had heard a thousand times whenever the topic of my father’s greed rose parted her lips. “But Gorou has a hunger gnawing in his gut. Even with all that he has accomplished, his many beautiful daughters and his prosperous skulk, he cannot rest. His soul yearns for that which is ever beyond the reach of his fingertips. It is his way. It is the way of many powerful and visionary men, and I accept those drives as being a part of him.”

  The fact she hadn’t counted herself among his assets didn’t surprise me. Mom was modest. She wouldn’t assign value to herself. She would view it as vanity. But we all knew Dad would never have made the inroads toward achieving his goals without her by his side to maintain the balance of all his acquisitions.

  “You’re saying Dad felt like Mr. Tanabe lacked ambition, that he viewed his contentment as a sign of inferiority.” I considered her. “Dad stood to gain nothing from our union since the Tanabes belonged to our skulk and their loyalties and finances were already twined with his.”

  “Just so.”

  “What happened?” Guilt that I had pitted two old friends against one another whittled at my conscience. “Did Dad force him to leave?”

  “Not then, no.” She crossed her legs in an effort to stay upright on the smooshy couch. “Your father informed Saburo of the match and denounced Ryuu as a suitable mate for you. Saburo was hurt. They had been as brothers, and this was a chance to bind their families together in a formal union. Yet your father as much as told him that his son—and by extension Saburo himself—was not good enough for a daughter of the Hayashi.”

  The picture became clearer. “Dad thought Mr. Tanabe would accept his word as law and sweep the shiren under the rug, but he refused. Didn’t he?”

  “Saburo was a traditionalist. Your father embraces tradition only when it suits him. He believed it was his right as reynard to hand-pick his daughters’ mates to strengthen and enrich our skulk by association.” Her head bowed. “Saburo accused your father of tampering with fate, of playing at being one of the gods. In his anger, Saburo called your father greedy and manipulative in front of the entire skulk.” She uncrossed her legs and scooted forward. “Insults that could have been forgiven in private had to be punished in public. That was when your father decided to exile the Tanabe skulk to soothe his personal shame and punish Saburo for not being the friend Gorou thought he should be.”

  My father the hypocrite. A true friend was valuable because they told you the truth when no one else would. Punish them for that, and what you wanted wasn’t friendship, it was obeisance. “None of this matters now.”

  “Your past helped shape who you are. It matters.” A dimple marked her chin, the closest Mom ever c
ame to frowning. “You care for the boy?”

  “Ryuu is not a boy anymore.” Not that I remembered the boy he had been. “I chose him. Fate chose him for me. Without that bond, what do I have left to offer a mate?”

  “You are a bold, strong female with purpose. A mate does not define you.” A soft chuckle escaped her. “You are thinking I, of all people, have no right to make such a claim when all I am is your father’s wife.” Her smile blossomed. “I am his wife, but I am also a mother and a grandmother. I am a friend. I am the vixen of a large clan who depends upon me to care for them. I am many things that are linked to your father by a fine thread, but they are my things, and I cherish them.”

  “You’re a strong female too.” Or else she wouldn’t be sitting here now when I was certain Dad had forbidden her intervention. “It must run in the family.”

  Her eyes brightened at the compliment, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might care what I thought of her as a person and not just as my mother. “What will you do now, daughter?”

  Buy stock in Ben & Jerry’s? “Move on with my life.” I rolled my chin over my kneecap. “Ryuu doesn’t want me.”

  She tilted her head the way a curious bird might. “How can you be certain?”

  “He traded me for a spot on the registry.” The words felt cut from the fabric of my soul. “Everything his father and family endured was pointless. His son didn’t want me anyway. The Tanabes would have been better off staying with our skulk and pretending nothing had happened between Ryuu and me. His parents might still be alive if not for me.”

  “Blame tends to settle on the shoulders of those who welcome it rather than those who have earned it. You are not responsible for anyone’s choices or actions but your own.” Giving up on getting comfortable, Mom stood. “Were you present throughout the entire negotiation?”

  “No.” I had listened to all I could stomach then left while I still had an ounce of pride intact. “I’m sure he promised to stay away from me. He probably gets a bonus if he agreed to forget my name.”