The night air was sharp with the kind of quiet only a city’s skyline could conjure—horns and sirens muted beneath the height of my penthouse balcony, where the world became small enough to forget it wanted me dead. Neon spilled across the glass like spilled ink. Los Angeles was all teeth and no sleep.

I had come to the States for business—“work”. Work meant keeping the syndicate’s West Coast pipeline from tearing itself apart. It meant dinner with corrupt officials, nights in warehouses by the docks, a gun under the table while I spoke in languages no one here understood. Work had no room for softness. It certainly had no room for her.

We met by mistake. I’d ducked into a dusty second-floor bookstore in Santa Monica on a night when rain had chased me off the street, my coat still reeking of cigarette smoke and saltwater. She was behind the counter with a half-open paperback, hair in a messy knot, biting a pen between her teeth while writing in the margins. A literature undergrad, she told me later — working evenings to pay for classes, still believing in things like student debt and first editions. She didn’t recognize me or my name. She only saw a stranger looking at a copy of Osamu Dazai and asked, “You like tragic men?”

I should’ve walked out then. But she smiled with this strange defiance, like she’d already read my ending. She recommended me a book — Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse — and wrapped it in brown paper before handing it over. No one had handed me anything gently in years.

Jun Saito. That’s the name they fear back in Osaka, the name they whisper in the alleys of Shinjuku. Here, in this borrowed city, it meant nothing to the girl sitting across from me in one of my shirts, hair damp from a shower, sleeves rolled past her wrists like she’d stolen time itself.

She had her legs tucked under her, book balanced against her knees, and her voice carried words that could cut deeper than any blade I’d held. Woolf again. A passage about love, impermanence, and the absurdity of believing one could hold onto either. She didn’t rush the sentences. She let them hang between us, like an offering, like a dare.

Her tone wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t performative—it was soft, careful, like she was giving me something sacred. Every syllable rolled from her lips with a weight I didn’t deserve. And I sat there, cigarette half-burnt between my fingers, staring at her as though she were a piece of art hung in a gallery I had no business entering.

The city pulsed beyond her shoulder—Los Angeles glowing with its hungry, restless energy. But she eclipsed it all, wrapped in the oversized cotton of my shirt, collar dipping just enough to make me forget I was supposed to keep distance. There were bullets waiting for me, enemies stalking my shadow. Yet in that balcony’s hush, the only war I felt was inside my ribs.

I’d learned every type of loyalty, every permutation of fear, but she was something else. She didn’t orbit my world — she dragged it off its axis. She made tea instead of whiskey. She tucked my gun out of sight without a word when a delivery boy knocked. She had no idea what kind of man I really was, and yet she stayed.

She laughed at a line, glanced at me for a heartbeat, then tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear before reading on. And something broke loose. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t strategic, it wasn’t the calculated cruelty they train into you when you’re raised in the underworld.

It just slipped out.

“Marry me.”

The words were blunt, raw—more confession than question.

The book wavered in her hands. She searched my face, perhaps for irony, maybe for the punchline men like me are known to deliver. But I had none. My gaze was steady, chest tight, the pulse of my empire shrinking to the outline of her figure beneath that shirt.

Then—slowly—her mouth curved, not into a full smile, but something half-shy, half-terrified. “You don’t mean that,” she whispered, though her voice carried a tremor that betrayed her.

I leaned back, crushing the cigarette into the ashtray.

“I’ve never meant anything more.”