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It was just the cold. That’s what Rei told himself when he jerked awake, gasping for breath, the third night after the avalanche.
His pulse felt like a sledgehammer in his skull. It took a second to ground himself in the darkness of his bedroom: Hiro’s guitar, the cell phone on the nightstand, the lump of his Beretta under the pillow. Rei slumped back against the headboard and raked his bangs out of his face.
He’d kicked the blanket off in the middle of the night. That was why he’d dreamt he was back in the snow—digging and digging, plunging his hands in until he was white all the way up to his elbows. He hadn’t even noticed the wet snow bleeding through his gloves until he tried to sign the patient intake form at the hospital and couldn’t close his hand around the pen because his fingers were numb. Had to thaw them in the sink before he could perch on Shinichi’s hospital bed and fan out his hand for Old Maid without anyone noticing his shiver.
After six months, Rei had started to think he was ready for anything Shinichi threw at him. But it turned out there were no limits on the ways that kid could try to get himself killed—up to and including a natural disaster. Rei wasn’t making a list of his least favorite Shinichi memories, but if he were, the jolt of watching that little snowboard suspended for one horrible moment above the avalanche would definitely be near the top. Or the moment right after that, when the snow overtook him.
They had found him in time—barely. But that hadn’t done much to ease Rei’s adrenaline during the twenty-minute drive to the tiny regional hospital, the heat cranked and Shinichi tucked inside Rei’s coat while Akai tested how fast he could accelerate around icy curves on threadbare tires. But somehow, miraculously, Shinichi had come through with only minor scrapes. And if Rei had slumped back against Akai’s shoulder when the doctor gave them the all clear—well, that was just for his cover, playing the terrified parent. Not because his legs felt a little unsteady.
“It all worked out,” Shinichi had the gall to tell him, from his hospital bed—right before he stole the seven of diamonds out of Rei’s hand and left him with the Old Maid again.
“I am getting a subcutaneous tracking device implanted in your neck,” Rei told him.
Akai chuckled. “Not sure that’s legal yet.” But Rei didn’t care—he was a PSB agent, and he had connections.
Tucked up close to Shinichi in the creaky hospital cot, eating green onion potato chips out of the vending machine and keeping the kid awake as long as possible so the memory of tumbling over and over under the snow wasn’t the only thing in his head, Rei had been fine. But every night since, he’d had this dream. The mountain. The snow. The biting air sharp as a straight razor. And the clock ticking down in his head, as fifteen minutes became five, and then one, and then zero.
It was just a dream. A memory. But all his worst dreams were memories.
Rei knew what post-traumatic insomnia was. He’d had it a few times. But this wasn’t that. He was just having a little trouble sleeping—and if the nights he had trouble sleeping happened to coincide with nights when he dreamt about pulling Shinichi’s corpse out of the snow, his lips blue with cyanosis and his tiny limbs heavy and still, that was probably Akai’s fault for turning the thermostat down to subterranean temperatures before he slunk up to the attic or wherever he was hibernating.
Except for a persistent cold, Shinichi was fine, and it would be ridiculous for this to hit anyone harder than it hit him. So Rei was fine, too. He pressed his knuckles into his eyes—then he pulled on his sweatshirt and slipped down to the basement, and worked the heavy bag until the muscles in his shoulders felt like stretched rubber bands, so exhausted he was out the second he hit the pillow.
*
As a NOC, Rei had never spent much time at MPD headquarters. Amuro Tohru, on the other hand, was there at least once a week, always for the same reason.
The next morning, he took Shinichi over to Division 1 to give his statement. He’d given one to the local Kitanosawa police as well, but since Shinichi started the week by preventing a train explosion right in the middle of the downtown freeway, he had some questions to answer in Tokyo as well.
Shinichi asked him to wait outside while he talked to Megure—probably so he could fill in a few things without Rei finding out exactly how many times he’d almost gotten himself killed. So Rei let him go, and then leaned back against the wall across from the vending machines, eavesdropping via the bug he’d slipped under Shinichi’s collar. Shinichi had pulled that move on Kazami enough times—it was justified. Though all he’d learned so far was his kid had absolutely no compunction about lying to the chief inspector of the Homicide division.
“Amuro. It’s been a while.”
Rei straightened and slipped on his perfect customer-service smile, trying to look like he hadn’t been listening in on the interrogation through the tiny speaker wedged into his ear. “Detective Sato,” he greeted. He had Sato clocked as one of the more intelligent detectives in a somewhat lackluster division—though she was dating Takagi, so clearly one of them had made a lapse in judgment.
Sato chuckled, rolling a can of coffee in her hand. “I heard the trip to Kitanosawa got pretty exciting, huh?”
Rei wondered if his expression had gone a little crooked. “Well, it wouldn’t be a family vacation without a few murders and a natural disaster.”
The ski trip to Kitanosawa was supposed to be their first real vacation. Just a few days off—off from Poirot, and being Vermouth’s personal chauffeur, and getting yet another call to pick up his little detective at MPD, because Shinichi had solved a twelve-year-old bank heist but lost his phone when he slipped through a sewer grate. Rei was convinced Division 1 should be paying Shinichi a salary, or at least garnishing Detective Takagi’s wages until he started doing his own damn job. What he really wanted was a break from Akai—but if he couldn’t get that, then at least a break from Azusa, who’s friendly wheedling for romantic details about his first married Valentine’s Day was starting to exceed a PG rating.
(Rei already got enough of those questions from the neighborhood housewives’ walking group, who were bored and had absolutely no filter.)
In retrospect, Rei maybe should have looked into Kitanosawa a little more closely before agreeing to tag along on the kids’ ski trip. He heard the words lodge and ski resort and made certain assumptions about what that meant. But whatever expectations Rei had, he lost them about the same time he lost his appetite: the second they entered the only restaurant in town, a glorified high school cafeteria that served greasy pizza and a pasta primavera stacked with a pile of lentils so high Shinichi could drown in it. The radiator in their room took almost forty-five minutes to heat up, and if you wanted a bagel that wouldn’t break your teeth, you had to get to the continental breakfast at 4 a.m. and kill three other skiers for it.
Naturally, even in the middle of absolute nowhere, Shinichi got himself caught up in a cold-case-slash-jewelry-robbery-slash-political-assassination. But that was par for the course.
“Did you guys have some fun, before all the chaos started?” Sato asked.
Rei racked his brain for something that counted as an anecdote. “Conan and I enjoyed the ice rink.” That had probably been the trip highlight. Shinichi found out the ice rink served a dirty chai with so much espresso in it Rei was surprised he didn’t shoot straight into orbit, and Rei found out Akai couldn’t ice skate worth a damn. Which almost made up for the fact that he was the better skier, and had spent all morning rubbing it in Rei’s face.
Sato gave him a playful nudge. “And how about the new husband? Yumi says he’s a looker. Did you get any time alone?”
So much more than Rei wanted. While Shinichi served his time with the kids, Rei and Akai were supposed to be there as the happy couple, after all—and even if he could fake happy, he couldn’t fake couple if he ditched Akai on the chairlift.
“He always finds an excuse to steal me away,” he said.
Sato chuckled. “Lucky you.” Then her smile tilted, more serious. “We were all pretty worried, hearing about Conan’s accident.”
A shiver slid down Rei’s neck. Suddenly, he was freezing—were they heating this police station at all? Through the bug, he could hear Megure wrapping things up with a warning for Shinichi to be more careful, which he would definitely ignore. Rei straightened and pushed off the wall. “Well, I should probably—”
“It’s just incredible that you managed to find him in time,” Sato pushed on. “That must have been terrifying—digging through that avalanche, knowing you’ve only got a one-in-a-million shot of finding him before—”
“I should really go,” Rei said through his teeth.
Sato looked chagrined. “Oh. Right. Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
But Rei was already gone—pushing past her down the hallway, ready to break Shinichi out of the interrogation room no matter who he pissed off.
*
That night, Rei left his sweatshirt on, shoved the vent all the way open and told Akai to stop screwing with the thermostat. But he woke up ripping the blankets off, suffocating—the way Shinichi had been suffocating, trapped underneath the snow.
There’d been one day, his last year at the academy, when they ran a disaster response seminar, required for all cadets. Rei hadn’t paid much attention. He already knew what he wanted—an undercover posting in the PSB, higher octane and higher stakes.
Down on his knees in the snow, the wind stinging his raw cheeks, he couldn’t remember anything he was supposed to do. All he could remember was exactly what was happening to Shinichi: his blood vessels constricting in the cold, his breath going shallow, blood slowly thickening with the onset of hypothermia, hypoxia, shock. But none of that mattered. Because if it took longer than fifteen minutes to get to him, he’d already have asphyxiated.
Rei scraped his fingers through his sweaty hair. He hated waking up like this. Maybe it was an occupational hazard, but he would take waking up face down in an alley, bruised and bloody, over a nightmare every time. In the alley, he was either dead or he wasn’t. In his nightmares, it was only other people who were dead.
But Shinichi was fine. He was safe, two doors over in a Nyquil haze. This was just axons firing—static and old memories crowding his head. So he’d handle it the way he always handled it: a long, hot shower until his skin was flushed and sore, and then an all-nighter catching up on his reports, listening through raw surveillance tapes until all the voices blurred.
Around three in the morning, on his way back from the library, Rei paused outside Shinichi’s room, listening to him coughing under the door. He had the fleeting thought of slipping in to lie next to him, to listen to him breathe. But there were some things no teenager would put up with, even one who currently needed a stepstool to reach the sink.
*
“Is everything okay?” Shinichi asked the next morning.
Rei knew he was out of it. He hadn’t even heard Shinichi come into the kitchen. The boy sat tucked up at the breakfast bar, a too-big Tokyo Spirits sweatshirt hanging off his shoulders and his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee Rei didn’t remember pouring. But he must have, because he was standing at the sink washing out the empty carafe.
Rei shook himself. “I should be asking you that,” he said. He slid one plate of peanut butter banana toast—Akai’s latest attempt at breakfast—in front of Shinichi and reached up to feel his forehead. “You’re still coughing like a coal miner. Maybe we should have Dr. Araide check you out again.”
Shinichi grimaced. “He’ll just tell you it’s a cold. Like he’s done the last three times.” He coughed into his sleeve again, though this one felt a little theatrical. “But maybe you call me in sick today? I don’t want to give anybody my cold.”
“I see.” Rei braced his elbows on the counter, smirking. “And I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that Kobayashi’s class is taking a field trip to the children’s museum today, the same day the new Scythe Raker mystery comes out?”
Shinichi’s grin said guilty as charged. “I’m sticking with biohazard containment.”
“Cheeky,” Rei accused. But there was no bite in it. Shinichi was years beyond the children’s museum—a little underdeveloped socially, but a grade school field trip wasn’t going to fix that. Besides, Rei had narrowly avoided volunteering for that field trip, and he wasn’t eager to get close enough for Kobayashi to ask him for a teeny-weeny favor.
And maybe he wasn’t ready to let Shinichi go.
“Guess we’ll have to make it a sick day,” Rei decided. “I’ll call Akai—as long as he’s out on his run, showing off for all the gawkers in the neighborhood, he can stop by that artisan bakery and grab breakfast. How does almond croissants and cinnamon hot chocolate sound?”
“Sure, but…he’ll stop by the bookstore too, right?” Shinichi asked. And then laughed, when Rei pinched his nose.
As he dug his cell phone out from under an invitation to the block party barbecue, Rei paused, glancing at the kid eating around the bananas on his toast. “You really don’t remember any of it, huh? No nightmares or anything?”
Shinichi shrugged. “Not really. I remember…tumbling in the snow. And there was one night I woke up feeling like my blankets were choking me. But that’s it.”
“Good,” Rei said, lightly mussing his hair. Then he stepped out into the hallway and leaned back against the wall, and took a second to steady his breathing before he dialed Akai.
He had to get a grip on this. Shinichi was such a brilliant, perceptive kid—but he was skittish, too, forever looking for proof he was more trouble than he was worth. Rei didn’t want to worry him, when Shinichi had somehow come out of the whole thing a little bewildered but otherwise free of another truckload of emotional trauma.
He was fine. He had it handled. He was just a little cold. Maybe a sick day was what he needed, too.
*
Sprawled out on the couch with Shinichi’s feet in his lap, Rei almost believed he’d kicked it. For the first time in days, he felt warm, probably because Akai had rounded up every blanket in the house and was methodically cocooning Shinichi inside of them. Shinichi didn’t seem to mind. Shinichi didn’t even seem to notice, tearing through his new book with inhuman speed. Rei was starting to understand why it was so easy for people to pick this kid up and carry him off. But though Shinichi missed it, Rei caught the moment Akai hesitated behind the couch, running his fingers affectionately through Shinichi’s mussy bedhead. Which Rei…didn’t hate.
It was nice to see Akai taking care of Shinichi. Rei, on the other hand, didn’t need taking care of, and he didn’t appreciate Akai accidentally throwing a few of those blankets over him too.
“Your aim’s abysmal today,” Rei muttered, shooting Akai a flat look as he spread the snowflake-blue fleece out over Rei’s lap and, at best, Shinichi’s left foot.
“Is it?” Akai said mildly. “Just thought it seemed cold in here.”
Rei couldn’t really argue with that. But he refused to pull the blanket closer until Akai left the room.
He thought he’d had his game face on. But Akai must have noticed something, because he’d been hovering all day, leaning back against the counter while Rei stirred the cinnamon hot chocolate and watching him with those cool, serious eyes. Rei had spent enough months deciphering his nonverbal cues to understand that silent, intense staring was Akai Shuichi for Do you want to talk about it? But Rei didn’t. All he wanted was to crunch up next to Shinichi with the flakiest chocolate croissant and tell himself it was over.
He stayed up late that night, sprawled out on the couch with his intelligence reports, trading out hot chocolate for a double shot of Akai’s whiskey. Bourbon—naturally. Just to get under his skin. But Rei didn’t have the energy to go digging through the Kudous’ alcohol cabinet for anything else.
He couldn’t stop thinking about something Dr. Araide had said, when Rei called him that afternoon, just to be sure. Araide agreed to bring him in for another chest CT in a week if he was still coughing like he had emphysema, and then said, right before he hung up, “I’m glad he’s not having any nightmares so far. If that changes, though, let me know and we’ll tackle it as soon as possible.”
Rei’s breath hitched, caught off guard. “Why the urgency?”
Dr. Araide hesitated before answering. “In your line of work, you might be familiar with the concept of neural plasticity. Essentially, nightmares are learned behaviors. The initial nightmare is your brain processing the traumatic event, but if you keep having it, you’re converting it into a learned behavior by strengthening the neural pathways that connect stimuli with that response. Every time you have a nightmare, it’s easier to have it again.”
Rei dropped his head back against the wall. “So, how would you help him? If he was…struggling with that?”
“I’d have to evaluate him and make a treatment plan,” Araide said, losing Rei’s interest by the second. “At the very least, we’d get him somebody to talk to. The most important thing is that he’s not losing sleep. Let me know if you do notice anything,” he added. “It can be hard to handle alone.”
Rei hung up with a bitter smile, thinking of all the things he’d handled alone.
And yet, he hadn’t been alone on the mountain. He’d been standing right next to Akai, for the nothing that was worth—close enough to grab him by the collar when he shouted, What do we do? Do we just dig? And those green eyes stared back at him, just as wild and confused as his. Rei vaguely remembered yelling You’re useless and shoving him away—which was maybe a little unfair, he couldn’t expect sniper training to cover avalanche rescue. But honestly, what was the point of Akai, of all his skills and his expertise, if in this one moment he had nothing Rei didn’t have?
That was how he’d ended up on his knees in the snow. Clutching his cell and hitting redial over and over, trying Conan’s phone, Shinichi’s phone, praying something would connect. But it wouldn’t even dial, nothing on his screen but a blinking antenna. Rei forgot about Akai for fourteen agonizing minutes, until he looked up from his knees at one minute left to find Akai doing nothing, just standing there, and a great rip tide of fury rose up in him—and then vanished, when Akai said I have one bar.
“Another late night?”
Rei looked up from the couch. He wasn’t surprised to find Akai watching him from the living room doorway in a dark long-sleeve T-shirt and loose-fitting sweatpants, his forearm braced against the doorframe. Lurking as usual. It was honestly a miracle Akai hadn’t been dragged before the HOA committee yet for felony skulking, and Rei suspected it was only because Okiya Subaru had a lot of fans in the neighborhood. Probably for that maneuver he pulled every time they went running at the park, pulling up his shirt to wipe his face and coincidentally showing off his abs.
Sometimes Rei forgot Akai had been a honeypot. Other times, it just dripped off of him.
Akai moved in to rest his hands on the back of the couch, those sharp eyes studying Rei’s face. “Can’t sleep?” he asked—annoyingly perceptive, as usual.
“It’s work,” Rei insisted, flipping his tablet to the next page. “Some of us still have real jobs. Three of them, actually.” The barb must have missed, though, because Akai just chuckled.
“I’ll keep you company,” he said. And then had the gall to drop onto the couch right next to him and wrap his hand around Rei’s, and steal a swallow of bourbon out of his glass.
“You’re lucky I left my gun upstairs,” Rei grumbled. Still, he didn’t push him off—because Akai’s hand was warm, and so was his shoulder, and all week he’d just been so cold. He grimaced at the amber bottle. “I hate your whiskey. Consider buying something that doesn’t burn the roof off your mouth.”
“Oh?” Akai’s eyes were bright, teasing. “But I like that in a bourbon.”
Rei was at the wrong angle to crush his instep, but he gave it his best shot.
*
It was just the silence. That’s what was killing him, Rei decided the next night, pressing his bloody thumb against his mouth.
He’d fallen asleep over his files, the desk lamp on and his laptop cursor blinking angrily in the middle of a blank page. Maybe he’d hit the 90-proof bourbon a little hard—but the house was too quiet, Akai out on mission and Shinichi heading to bed early, still coughing, knocking back a double just like Rei. Though admittedly his was Robitussen.
Rei jerked awake in the dead hours of the night, straining for any tiny scrap of sound. His elbow hit the empty whiskey glass. Rei fumbled for it and it banged into the lamp, chipping the rim. The sharp edge caught the crease of his thumb.
“Damn it.” Rei’s eyes were still bleary, the whiskey buzzing in his head, but he could see a thin line of blood welling up on the backside of the knuckle. Pain sizzled under the skin. He sucked it clean, wrapped it tight in a tissue. Then he sank down on the floor and put his back against the bed, staring unseeing at the wall.
Maybe it was too late. Maybe he’d already worn this permanent groove in his brain, like a dead-end road he had to drive over and over.
In the dream, he dug for hours, his arms and fingers locked up from the cold. Straining to hear the phone ringing—to hear Shinichi’s heartbeat, growing softer and weaker under the snow. But there was nothing. No wind. No crunch of snow under his knees. Just the gasp of his breath crawling down his throat. And then the scrape of his fingertips against a child’s ski jacket, when he finally found the body.
After the rooftop—after Hiro—Rei’s insomnia had stretched on so long he wondered if it would ever stop. He gasped awake every night at three in the morning—and even over the car horns and the thumping music and the people shouting obscenities at each other on the sidewalk outside his barren studio apartment, he swore he could hear the silence where that one heart was supposed to be beating. A hole in the world.
Or maybe the hole was just in him.
Rei dropped his head back against the mattress. He had the fleeting thought that he couldn’t take this—finding this person he needed and then losing him over and over again. He knew better than to put so much of his heart in one person. And he’d done it anyway.
The bleeding had stopped. Too tired and drunk to think better of it, Rei threw his sweatshirt on and slipped out into the dark hall, made his way silently to Shinichi’s room. Then he slid down against the door and closed his eyes, his cheek pressed to the icy wood. He could hear Shinichi coughing in his sleep—but coughing meant he was breathing, his lungs were heaving, his heart was beating. Right now, Rei would take that.
He’d make sure to disappear before Shinichi got up in the morning, before anyone saw him and he had to explain this. But maybe here, he could at least get some sleep.
“Rei?”
Rei’s eyes snapped open.
Akai stood looking down at him, his eyes dark with concern. He looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower—his skin was flushed under his T-shirt, his black hair damp and tousled like he’d barely toweled it off. He must have just gotten home, stumbled across Rei on the way to bed.
Rei blinked up at him, too exhausted to think of a plausible lie.
“His heart’s stopped.” He swallowed, the words too thick in his throat. “That’s what I dream about. I dig him out of the snow, and press my ear to his chest, and…there’s nothing. He’s gone.” He raked his messy bangs out of his face. “But it’s fine. I’ll handle it. It’s nothing I haven’t gotten through before.”
Akai was silent for a long time. Rei couldn’t tell what he was thinking—probably that Rei was pathetic, because someone in their line of work shouldn’t be this easy to shake. But when Akai spoke, his voice was soft, just a low murmur as he reached down and caught Rei’s hand.
“Come with me.”
Rei hated the thought of leaning on Akai, even a little. But he was so tired. And Akai had seen so many of the weak and ugly parts of him already. Honestly, what was one more?
Akai hauled him up and pulled him into his bedroom. Rei had been in here before, obviously—but it felt different, in the middle of the night, Akai close against his back as he shut the door. Suddenly Rei was remembering anonymous bodies in the wine cellars of smoky bars—the way he used to deal with nights like this sometimes, when he couldn’t take being alone. Something he didn’t necessarily need to remember, with Akai’s breath on the back of his neck.
He got a jolt as Akai stripped off his T-shirt, his damp skin gleaming in the low light. Rei’s mouth went a little dry.
“Akai?”
“It’s better this way,” Akai said. “Easier to ground yourself.” Then he dropped into his bed and held the blanket up, his green eyes soft and steady in the dark. “Rei. Come here.”
That wasn’t a fair way to say his name, Rei thought, lying there against the mussed sheets looking like that. But at least Akai had left his sweatpants on. So this was just—a sleepover. Like falling asleep on Akai’s shoulder on the couch, except in his bed.
Rei hesitated. But he already lived with Akai, trained with him, co-parented with him, and fought over garage space with him. Was it that big a leap to sleep with him?
Wait. No. Rei wasn’t sleeping with him. Just next to him. That wasn’t in any way the same thing.
Before he could overthink it, Rei threw off his sweatshirt, though he left his T-shirt on. He usually slept in just his boxers, but he wasn’t crawling shirtless into Akai’s bed, even if the other man apparently had no problem with that. Akai shifted to make room for him, and Rei tucked his face into the pillow, suddenly regretting his decision to throw out all of Akai’s old motel-reject bargain shampoo. He smelled like vanilla and sandalwood and whiskey and warm skin. Less than six inches apart, it was a little…distracting.
Akai stretched an arm out. “Come here. Put your head on my chest.”
Rei flushed. “Don’t flatter yourself that I care whether you’re alive,” he muttered. Then stopped breathing as Akai caught his head and pulled it down to his chest, ear flush against his skin. Rei’s breath hitched. He could hear Akai’s heartbeat under his cheek, the heat of him so close in the dark.
Akai exhaled and Rei felt it down to his toes. “You’re not there,” Akai said. “You’re here. With me.”
Who would want to be here with you. That’s what Rei was supposed to say. But he couldn’t get the words out.
He expected to lie there for hours. But sleep came so easy, easier than it had in years. It wasn’t Akai. It was just the sound. And the heat. And the sensation of another body pressed to his. The whisper of fingers raking through his hair. He dreamed of the avalanche, but the dream evaporated, erased by that strong and steady heartbeat.
*
The next morning, Rei stood over the coffee machine, tamping down espresso shots and foaming milk through the whistling spout. He hadn’t bothered with anything but drip coffee in a few days. But for some reason, today, he felt like putting in the effort.
“You look better,” Shinichi told him, tucked up at the breakfast bar with a proper slice of French toast.
Rei crushed down whatever expression was trying to crawl across his face. “I finally got some sleep,” he said mildly. At least Shinichi had no idea why. “You, on the other hand, are still working on hacking up a lung. I don’t suppose Sherry has any ideas?” He’d heard Shinichi on the phone with the Organization’s missing scientist that morning.
Shinichi perked up, his eyes bright. “Actually, I kind of have something exciting—or, maybe not. Maybe it’s not exciting. I mean, we don’t have to do it at all if—”
Rei reached across the counter and gave him an aggressive hair-mussing, cutting him off with a squawk. He chuckled. “Out with it, Shinichi.”
Akai chose that moment to slouch into the kitchen. Rei tensed. He hadn’t stuck around to wake up next to Akai—they weren’t doing that—but he wasn’t exactly sure how to communicate telepathically over Shinichi’s head that he was…sort of…grateful. And also never wanted to talk about it.
He assumed Akai would have some smug little jab. But all he said, as he took the stool next to Shinichi’s, was, “Coffee?” And then glanced up, eyebrow raised, as Rei slid him a cappuccino with extra foam, his standing order at the coffee shop down the street.
Rei rolled his eyes. “Don’t read into it,” he warned, shaking the French toast spatula at him. “I just couldn’t take a cup of your American-brand battery acid this morning.”
Akai chuckled, his lips twitching into a smile. “What’s the big news, kid?” he asked, stealing a breakfast potato off Shinichi’s plate.
Shinichi was practically glowing. “Haibara wants to experiment with a new version of the Apotoxin antidote. It always seems to hit me especially strongly when my immune system’s already compromised, so…she’s going to let me try it. Tomorrow.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to be Shinichi for a few days—for real.”
Rei caught his breath. Their first time with Shinichi—as he was supposed to be.
He could see Shinichi searching his face, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip like he was waiting for something. Rei had no idea what he was worried about. He was here—right here—breathing and alive. And that was all Rei needed, at any size.
He leaned forward and wiped a little mocha foam off Shinichi’s nose. “Can’t wait.”