He chuckled under his breath. “Playing it made the neighbourhood cats squall until I learned how to tune it. I threw myself into everything there was to know about strings and bridges and bows. I devoured music books then songs on the radio, classics, melodies. I imprinted each tune to memory, and once I’d mastered everything a teacher had to teach, I created my own music. I blended. I evolved. I gave everything of myself to be the best.”
He sat tall as if bracing himself for the bad. “Around the time when I’d mastered the cello enough to be noticed for my talent—to receive invitations to concerts, competitions, and awards—my mind once again turned for other tasks it could dominate. I didn’t play to be noticed. I played to be cured. And knowing people wanted to compete against me—to see if they could better me, beat me—took away the freedom I found.”
He inhaled, his voice turning heavy. “My OCD isn’t a compulsion to do something repetitively. It’s a compulsion to do something until I conquer it. Not just conquer it but to be the best, the only, the mecca. I have to know it inside out. I have to absorb and control and own every minute.”
He gave me a pointed look. “Are you getting it now, Pimlico?”
Slowly, pieces fell into place. He’d told me before that my mind was his ultimate goal, not my body. That he wanted everything from me. My past, my thoughts, my secrets. He’d told me he needed to master me.
I thought he’d been dramatizing his needs. That it was just a turn of phrase.
I was so wrong.
I shuddered to think of him playing me as aggressively as he did his cello. For him to know my every thought and tear every hidden fear from me. To know me better than I knew myself.
How could one master another? How could I give him that sort of access to everything that fundamentally made me me? Was that even possible?
Elder pushed ahead, forcing himself to reveal more, as if apologetic for the honesty he’d just let me glimpse. “I met someone when I was eleven. A guy I saw practicing martial arts on my block. Considering my heritage and the stories I’d grown up with, I immediately had a kindred connection. I asked him to teach me. He did.”
He rubbed his face then squeezed the back of his nape. “My parents didn’t know who I fought with. They believed I went to the community gym, and I didn’t tell them otherwise. I went from a scrawny kid who never saw the sun with bleeding fingers from playing the cello to a muscly fighter who learned to master his own body. I didn’t look my young age. I shot up and piled on power. I knew every ligament and tendon. I studied textbook after textbook on the best way to strike, what a punch did to the human tissue, and how to kill with every part of me.
“I became good. I became a master. I became noticed.” He scrubbed his forehead, shaking his head as awful memories turned sinister. “At twelve, I was recruited to be security for the same men my father had borrowed money from. Even so young, they said if I helped them out, they’d forget about the debt and excessive interest they charged him—even after three years, he was still paying them back. I agreed, willing to take the pressure off my family, knowing how complicated it was having a son like me.”
He looked up, his face tight as if preparing himself for the worst. “I want to say I believed them when they said they were into import, export. I pretended not to notice when some containers held screaming people instead of crates of food. I lied to myself that they weren’t bad men even as I was used to teach lessons to those who defaulted on drug money or failed on a run. I was a stupid fucking kid who only wanted to focus on fighting, cello, and origami. I couldn’t afford to obsess over anything new.”
I inched forward off the bed, dropping to my knees before him. I didn’t do it out of servitude but as an avid listener to his tale. Hesitantly, I placed my hand on his knee.
He jolted as if watching me touch him didn’t prepare him for the physical heat of it.
With his eyes locked on my hand, he said, “It started slowly. They told me they’d need my skills to protect a shipment, and I went. They said they’d arranged a fight to showcase my talent, so I fought. I didn’t care my opponents were all terrified or that they all lost. I became drunk on my own stupid power until one day, I became addicted to the look on their faces. I needed that fear in their eyes. I went searching for it.”
He flinched. “One day, when I was thirteen, I picked a fight with my little brother just because I needed to see that fear.” He choked on a swallow. “I broke his arm.”
I hid my gasp, doing my best not to show any judgment. He threw me a quick glance then dropped his gaze as if he couldn’t stomach looking at me.
“My father was the one who found us. Me in tears. Kade in tears. His arm hanging weirdly. We took him to the hospital. When we got home, Okaasan hit me, and I let her. She hit me until I bled, and then she disowned me. My father tried to defend me. My brother, too, even as he stood with his arm in a cast because of me. I was given one last chance. Cease to fight for the Chinmoku or leave.”
Elder stood, shoving his hands into his hair as he paced. “I went that afternoon and handed in my resignation. I was a silly kid who thought it would be a simple goodbye.” He snorted. “Needless to say, they didn’t accept it. They came after me that night. Otōsan was the one who answered the door and told them I would no longer fight for them. He knew who they were. He understood the shit I’d landed our entire family in. He’d done the unthinkable and borrowed money from the Chinmoku, but I’d signed our death warrants by becoming one of them.”
Elder’s voice turned tortured and thin. He cleared his throat twice before he continued, “The next night, I woke to a burning house with a message painted in blood on the living room wall. ‘Once a Chinmoku always a Chinmoku. You chose family. Now you have no one.”
Those words hovered in the room long after Elder had spoken. He didn’t speak for an eternity until he finally murmured, “There was no way out. They’d drilled the windows closed and barricaded all the doors. I was the only one not locked in my room. It was as if they expected me to escape and return to their brotherhood rather than fight for my family.”
He stopped pacing, swaying in place, ghosts of firelight dancing over his face. “I managed to break into the second-story window and pull my mother to safety. Otōsan went to get Kade when the gas cylinder in the kitchen blew up and sent the house into smithereens. I tried to go back in, but the fire crew arrived and stopped me. I can still hear my mother’s screams, my curses, and the knowledge I’ll forever have their blood on my hands.”
He looked up, his skin white and eyes far away. “After that, we had nowhere to go. No one would take us in because of my ties to the Chinmoku. With no home, my mother and I ended up on the streets. I traded my skill of playing sonnets for pillaging pockets. Until one day, she just vanished. I found out later her brother had offered her a place to live if she abandoned me—which she was only too happy to do.”
I slapped a hand over my mouth in horror. “That’s awful.”