POV: Anika (Final)
The Kurosawa name was a ghost.
It lingered in whispered legends and bloodstained history books, but no longer on ink-stamped ledgers or temple scrolls. The empire had burned — beautifully, violently — and Rai Kurosawa vanished with it.
But Anika had never needed a crown.
Not anymore.
She stood in the garden she had planted with her own hands. A cliffside sanctuary hidden from the world, where black roses bloomed even in winter. The wind carried the salt of the ocean below, and above, the sky stretched wide and mercifully empty.
She wore no silk. No makeup. No lies.
Just a simple black dress and a blade tucked in her boot — not out of fear, but out of ritual.
A soft rustle came behind her.
She didn't turn.
"I wondered when you'd come back."
Footsteps.
Slow. Familiar. Heavy with ghosts.
Then—his voice. Rougher now. Deeper. But hers.
"I never left."
She turned, and there he was.
Rai.
Hair longer, streaked with gray at the temples. A scar ran across his collarbone, barely hidden by his shirt. He looked like a man carved from the wreckage of gods.
She walked to him.
Each step silent, like walking toward a memory.
When she reached him, neither of them smiled.
But both breathed.
Like it was the first time in years.
He touched her cheek. Fingers calloused from too many sins.
"You kept them alive," he whispered, looking at the black roses around them.
"No," she said. "I let them grow wild."
A pause.
"And us?" he asked.
She stepped closer. Their foreheads touched.
"We're not a legend," she said. "We're just two people who survived the war."
Rai's eyes softened.
"And if I asked you to run again?"
She kissed him once—soft, full of ash and honey and every vow that was ever spoken without words.
"I'd walk with you. Wherever. Until the end."
No empire.
No throne.
No Kurosawa-gumi.
Just Rai and Anika.
He reached into his coat and pulled something out — a small velvet box.
Inside, a black ring. No diamond. Just a carved obsidian stone in the shape of a single rose.
Not a symbol of ownership.
But a bond forged in fire.
"For the girl who made a monster love," he murmured.
She slid the ring onto her finger.
"For the man who made a weapon feel."
They stood there as the wind howled around them, black roses swaying like shadows remembering the past.
The world thought the Kurosawas were dead.
Maybe they were.
But the Bride of the Black Rose lived.
And she was no longer waiting to be saved.
She was the storm.
And beside her stood the man who once ruled the underworld — now content with ruling nothing…
but her heart.