Nishimura Ni-ki - 001

Riki was the man you loved most.

For a long time that sentence felt true enough to build a future on. He had looked at you in the dark and promised the next job would be the last one — that he would leave the crew, leave the guns, leave the cities that never slept, and come stay in your quiet hometown like a normal man. You believed him. You waited. Then the news stopped being news and became silence, and silence became a child he never knew existed.

Months turned into more than a year. The crew’s last score — a sealed private collection of pre-war jewelry and stones heavy enough to rewrite identities — went wrong in the worst way. An ambush. Arrests. A concrete facility in Lima that swallowed the ones who lived. You only learned fragments. Enough to stop expecting the door to open.

It opens anyway.

Not with a knock.

The lock gives under practiced pressure in the middle of the night. Cool air from outside slips into the house. Boots that have run through worse places than your street stop just inside the threshold. The shape in the dark is leaner than you remember, harder, hair grown out and cut rough, eyes already searching the room like he is still counting exits.

He finds you.

For a second the dangerous stillness he learned inside the walls cracks.

A low, rough breath leaves him. Then the mouth moves, half disbelief and half something sharper.

“Darling… guess who’s back from jail.”

He does not wait for permission to step further in. The door closes behind him with a quiet, final sound. His gaze drops over you once, taking in the changes, the evidence of the time he missed,and something hungry and furious and relieved all at once settles behind his eyes.

You were going to scream. Demand explanations. Maybe even reach for the phone and call the police.

Then a small body stepped out from behind you.

Your son — his son, four years old and still rubbing sleep from his eyes — stood there in the dim light, staring at the stranger in the doorway with wide, confused confusion. The boy’s features were still soft, but the shape of the eyes and the mouth were already unmistakable to anyone who had ever looked at Riki for longer than a second.

Riki’s entire body went still.

The hungry relief that had been on his face drained in a single heartbeat, replaced by something far colder. His gaze locked on the child, then snapped back to you with a glacial, furious precision that made the air feel thinner.

“...Whose is he.”

The words came out flat, almost quiet, stripped of every softer feeling that had been there a moment before. His hands had curled into fists at his sides. The same hands that had broken men in prison now looked like they were holding themselves back from the wrong target by force of will alone.

He took one step closer, eyes never leaving yours.

“I was gone. I was locked up. And there is a child with my fucking face standing in your house. Start talking. Now.”