Page 46 of Dragon 7
"I can feel it in my bones."
"Your fucking bones?" I turned on him. "And what do you know about my mother's people?"
"A lot."
"How and why?"
"I think you would agree that we don't have much time for stories and answers. War is coming—"
"Yet death will come to you and everyone else if Hiro and Nyomi aren't okay."
"They're safe. They're with your mother's people—"
I stared at the side of his calm face, and the past rose up around me like smoke.
When I buried my mother and brother, the very next day Yoichi appeared at my gate. He carried the artifacts of her bloodline in two cloth bundles, one in each hand, and he laid them in my arms like a man returning something stolen.
Then he refused to leave.
Hiro threatened him.
Yoichi remained.
Hiro tried to kill him, more than once, and missed every time.
Reo plotted against Yoichi for weeks, and when the plots failed, Reo sat him in a chair and questioned him for ten straight hours.
Yoichi stared at the wall, outlasted every word of it, and never confirmed anything. He never denied anything either. He simply stayed at my side for years.
After he pulled me out of death twice, I made him a Fang and stopped asking the question I had never gotten an answer to.
Reo had a theory. He always did. He swore Yoichi was one of my mother's people, planted in my life by the bloodline I was never allowed to fully meet.
I had let it go.
Tonight, I would not. "How are you connected to my mother’s people?"
For a long moment, only the engine answered.
Then, Yoichi spoke. “Even you would agree that now is not the time with war on the way—”
“Are you or not?”
“Of course I am connected.”
“Are you my blood?”
“Yes.” And the way he said it, it seemed like that confession caused him a painful unease.
“How are you related to me?”
"Even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
"Try me." I sneered.
"You wouldn't know my parents." He took a bend without slowing. The cart leaned hard with the turn, and the tires bit gravel. "But we are directly related."
“How?”
