Tokyo, Present Day – Hours After the Crash
Minutes before the accident, Akiko had sent a final message. Not to her sister. Not to her parents. But to the man she had once trusted with her whole future. A single line, typed with shaking fingers and unshed tears clouding her vision: "I know what you did." She never received a reply. Not even a read receipt. Her phone, still glowing dimly with the unopened message, had been found lodged beneath the passenger seat, cracked but intact—unlike her body. In that moment, barreling through the rain-slick streets, Akiko had been more than heartbroken. She was done. Done being the dutiful daughter, the perfect girlfriend, the responsible older sister who cleaned up everyone's mess. Her world had collapsed in one night. Her boyfriend's betrayal with her own flesh and blood. The lies. The humiliation. The sickening, silent betrayal. She had screamed until her throat bled. Now the only sound was the wail of sirens—and the sickening crunch of steel folding into itself.
The hospital corridor pulsed with harsh fluorescent light, the floor slick with rainwater, and the coppery scent of blood trailing after the gurney. Akiko's body—limp, broken, smeared with glass and red—was wheeled through the ER as nurses shouted orders over the storm's echo. Her wallet had fallen out during triage; an intern picked it up and muttered her name. Takahashi Akiko. Twenty-five. The trauma surgeon didn't flinch. They knew what they were dealing with: internal bleeding, a cracked skull, and a chance—just a chance—of survival. But the odds were brutal. Her chart read accident. But nothing about the expression she wore—tight-jawed and half-smiling in unconsciousness—looked accidental. She had gone down fighting. Teeth clenched, heart shredded, resolve like iron. Somewhere inside that mangled frame was the last breath of a woman who had known she was betrayed—and dared to confront it. Even in this coma, her body refused to surrender without leaving behind a final scar.
Mrs. Takahashi burst into the hospital less than twenty minutes later, drenched and breathless, as though outrunning fate itself. "My daughter!" she cried, collapsing into the arms of a nurse, sobs tearing through her chest. "Where's my daughter? Where's Akiko?" Her husband followed quietly, but his silence was laced with dread. The doctor who approached them had that practiced look of restrained sympathy, but it wasn't enough to hide the truth. "She was found unresponsive. There's significant trauma. She hasn't regained consciousness." The words sucked the air from the room. Mr. Takahashi squeezed his wife's shoulders, blinking hard. But even as the mother wept, murmuring Akiko's name like a prayer, a different daughter drifted into the hallway unnoticed—her eyeliner running, but not from tears.
Mika stood in the corner like a forgotten shadow, arms folded, lips pursed. Her gaze was not on the ICU doors, but on the clock. Renji should have been here by now. She scrolled through her phone with mild irritation, not a trace of guilt behind her eyes. When their mother finally noticed her, she rushed over and wrapped her in an embrace, whispering, "Thank God you're here. I don't know what I'd do if something happened to you, too." Mika blinked, nodded, and managed a theatrical sniffle. Of course, she cried, she thought. She always cried too easily. But inside, Mika felt nothing but annoyance. Akiko's accident had ruined everything—especially tonight's plans. She would have preferred not to come at all, but staying away would have looked suspicious. Their parents never saw through her. To them, she was still the delicate one. The good one.
Renji arrived last, his shirt damp, his jaw set like a man trained to perform grief. He didn't rush to Akiko's side. He didn't ask to see her. Instead, he greeted Mika first—a subtle glance between them, quick and sharp. Then he moved toward Mrs. Takahashi with an expression that mimicked devastation. "I came as soon as I heard." She grabbed his hands, eyes filled with misplaced warmth. "Renji, thank God you're here. You've always been like a son to us." Mika watched, smug behind her mask. No one suspected a thing. Not about the nights she spent in his bed. Not about the message Akiko had sent her just hours before the crash. "I know what you did." Mika never responded. She had nothing to say. And now… maybe she never would. As the doctors discussed the next 24 hours, Mika and Renji stood side by side like statues carved from false sorrow, their hands almost brushing. Behind them, Mrs. Takahashi whispered a prayer. For the daughter who had always been too alone to be seen clearly.
***
Old Japan, Present-Day
Later, when the servants departed and silence returned to the paper-walled chamber, Akiko pushed herself upright with trembling arms. Her legs dangled off the futon like unfamiliar branches, numb and uncooperative. When she tried to stand, her knees buckled under the weight—not just of the body, but of everything it had endured. Still, she rose. Shuffling forward, every step a negotiation with strange muscles, she crossed the creaking wooden floor to the mirror—an antique lacquered thing propped in the shadows like a watching spirit. Her hands gripped the ornate edges. And when she looked up, the breath caught in her throat. The woman staring back was exquisitely, unnaturally beautiful. Ethereal skin like porcelain, lips like wilted roses, and hair blacker than a raven's wing. But the eyes… they weren't hers. They were haunted. Older. Deeper. Eyes that had seen seduction turn to survival, and favor rot into ruin. They were not the eyes of Akiko Takahashi, trauma surgeon. They were the eyes of a woman who had known what it was to be hunted.
They had given her a name, though no one dared say it aloud in her presence. Kiyomi no Tsukihara. A noblewoman disgraced, a court concubine who had once aimed for the throne—and missed. The whispers said she'd offered her body for power, then been cast aside. Akiko didn't know if it was true. But her body remembered things her mind did not. When she moved her fingers, they curled into gestures of obedience. When she spoke, the words were old, dusted with the dialect of a vanished empire. Even her heartbeat felt misplaced, as if it marched to a drumbeat from another life. She turned from the mirror and stumbled back toward the window. Outside, the moon hung low and wide, bathing the room in silver sorrow. From the corridor beyond the shoji walls, voices began to stir—hushed, eager, and sharp-edged like broken jade.
"The courtesan has risen?" one voice whispered, just beyond the doorframe.
"Barely alive. She should've bled out."
"Some say it's not her soul that returned... Only the shell."
"She dared tempt the King—and lived. That alone is a curse."
Another voice, sharp and cruel, sliced through the hush like a blade drawn in the dark. "No one survives a fall from the Emperor's bed and walks away," the servant whispered, voice dripping with disdain. "Not with breath in her lungs and that face still untouched. He discards them—shames them, ruins them, erases them. But her?" The speaker scoffed, the sound bitter and incredulous. "She crawled out of that ruin alive. Worse, she returned. And now she haunts these halls like a ghost too stubborn to die.
Akiko froze, back pressed to the cool wood of the inner wall. The tea left for her on the tray was untouched; her fingers hadn't uncurled from their tension. Every syllable of gossip clawed at her ears like a verdict. She wasn't wanted here. She wasn't even feared. She was resented. The maid who entered later to clear her untouched supper refused to meet her gaze, instead bowing so low her forehead nearly kissed the tatami mats. And when she spoke, her voice was just above a whisper: "You should never have awakened, my lady."
But she had. Against the odds. Against history. And someone knew. Someone had made sure Kiyomi no Tsukihara's body hadn't rotted in its shame. Someone had dragged a soul from another world—Akiko's world—and buried it in this beautiful corpse like a blade slipped between ribs. Who? Why? Was it vengeance? A curse? A test? She didn't know. But she intended to find out. She closed her eyes, not to sleep—but to remember. Her last image in the car crash wasn't her dashboard or her phone or the shattered glass. It was a figure, standing in the rain, on the side of the road. Watching her. Smiling.
And now, in this strange, silken prison where a dead woman's name clung to her like rot beneath perfume, Akiko felt the weight of that vanished life settle into her bones. Kiyomi's smile—rumored to charm ministers and silence maids—lingered like a blade's edge, ghosting her reflection in the moonlit mirror. She hadn't simply returned from the brink; she had defied something deeper, darker—something final. No one was supposed to come back from that kind of fall. No one. And yet, here she stood, bones unbroken, heart pounding with borrowed time, a walking question the palace didn't want answered. Why had she survived… when she was never meant to? And what, in the hollow between power and punishment, had she done to earn the ruthless King's unrelenting hatred?