The glass plate of the alarm clock shattered and Hyakuhei tried to pull his rage back into his mind. “Brother? I no longer have a brother… only an enemy.”
“Come now Hyakuhei… you were never a worthy enemy… you never had the temperament for it,” Tadamichi whispered softly as if he were consoling a child. “You could never be a danger to me.”
Hyakuhei shuddered, almost feeling his brother’s fingers trying to sooth him. Instead of the fury that would have heated the room, he felt all the warmth being sucked from it as the air around him became crisp like the dead of winter. “I have never had anything to fight for… but now I do, and that makes me more dangerous than you could ever imagine.”
The lover’s caress he had felt within his soul turned to claws as Tadamichi’s voice became something f
