" My child , " the church father said, looking at Miriam Ellis, " do you take Kei Kurayami as your lawfully wedded husband — to live together in matrimony, to love, comfort, honor and follow him in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, to have and to hold from this day forward, as long as you both shall live? "

" Yes. I do. "

She said it smiling, her eyes on the man beside her — six feet of him, red-haired and clean-shaven, athletic in a black tuxedo. Kei smiled back.

The father turned to him. " And do you, Kei Kurayami, take Miriam Ellis as your lawfully wedded wife — "

The words went on, and Kei stopped hearing them.

He looked at Miriam and thought how far luck had carried him, that a life like his should end here, at an altar, beside a woman this gentle. A life he would spend the rest of his own beside her.

Life.

The word turned over in him, and behind it came the other things the word had meant, once. Blood. Violence. Poverty and hunger and the long misery of the years before any of this.

He had been in his early teens when the Kuragiri Yami syndicate first took notice of him — the largest and most powerful Yakuza syndicate in Japan. He had beaten one of their men bloody, a collector who had come to squeeze money out of the aged owner of the orphanage where Kei was raised. The man had been acting alone, and Kei had been a boy, and so the syndicate let the matter pass.

More than let it pass. The local boss of the Yami came to him and offered him a place among them.

Kei saw in it the one door out of the poverty he had been born into and had never been given a way past, and he took it.

Sakura Yami — the lady kumichō, the head of the syndicate — brought him in through the oyabun-kobun ceremony. It was the first time Kei had tasted sake, and it went down bitter and his throat had nearly turned it back up, and he had forced it down anyway. Sakura watched his face while he did it and laughed, and the rest of them laughed with her, and the loudest of the laughter came from Ganzuo — the man Kei had put on the ground.

" Omoshiroi shōnen , " she had whispered in his ear as she laughed. Funny boy.

He remembered the words.

" — as long as you both shall live? " The father was looking at him. " Young man? "

Kei came back to the church.

" Yes , " he said. " I do. I take Miriam as my wife and my friend for life, and I promise to strive, every day, to keep our love and our trust strong, until death parts us. "

He smiled as he said it, facing her, and her eyes shone at the words.

" A good reply. " The father’s mouth twitched. " I was beginning to think you had gotten cold feet. " A small ripple of laughter from the pews. " If none present has any objection — then let us begin the exchange of rings. "

Kei looked out at the gathering.

Twenty people, no more. All of them Miriam’s — her parents, her brothers, cousins, the further relatives filling out the small rows. None of them his. He had no one to fill a pew with.

The ring ceremony began.

" I object. "

Sakura Yami had said that too, on another day, when Kei had told her he meant to leave.

By then he had risen. From the first he had shown the syndicate what he was — shrewd, fearless, decisive in the deals, and ruthless when the deals turned to violence, answering force with more force than any of them had the stomach for. He had won the respect of the men above him and the submission of the men below, and Sakura had raised him to wakagashira, second in the whole of the syndicate. A meteoric rise, the older men called it.

He would have stayed on that bloody road the rest of his life. If not for that day.

He did not let himself name that day, even now. He only knew that after it, he had sworn to be done — to walk out of the life and begin another one.

Sakura had not been willing to let him go. His leaving offended her, and an offended kumichō did not simply open her hand and release her second. So Kei had made her release him. In front of the whole of the syndicate, he had taken a blade to his own left hand and cut it off at the wrist — yubitsume, the old ritual of atonement — and offered the hand to Sakura in exchange for his freedom.

She had taken it. She had had to.

Kei left Japan after that. He crossed to Texas and put himself down on a ranch, and let the quiet years pass over him, and three years on he met Miriam. The prosthetic where his hand had been was a thing her family looked at and looked away from, a small taboo they carried in their faces — but Miriam, shy and timid as she was, never once flinched at it, and the two of them grew close.

When he understood that he had fallen for her, he told her everything. All of it. The syndicate, the blood, the hand. She had been shocked, and then she had been quiet, and then she had taken him and his whole red past into her arms and kept them there.

He had felt blessed that day. He had proposed, and she had said yes without making him wait for it.

" Now , " the father said, lifting his voice, " by the power vested in me by God almighty, in the presence of friends and family, it is my great privilege to pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride. "

The rings were on. It was done.

Miriam came up into his arms and pressed herself to him and kissed him, long and deep, and the church broke into cheering and clapping around them.

The kiss ended.

She drew back only far enough to look into his eyes, and Kei, still swaying with it, licked the trace of her lipstick from his lips and looked back into hers, dreamy and dark and close.

" I had fallen for you since the day I met you , " she said. Softly. Only for him. " I would have confessed it, in time. But you — you left me. It felt like a slap laid across my love and my pride, and I could not forgive it. " Her eyes did not blink. " Now you will feel what I felt. Omoshiroi shōnen. "

The church clock began to strike twelve.

The burning started in his throat.

It climbed fast, into his chest, a spreading fire he had no name for and no breath to name it with, and Kei went down — dead before he reached the floor, his open eyes fixed wide on the enormity of what had been done to him.

Above him, the church father looked down at the body and made the sign of the cross.

" Hell hath no fury , " he said, " like a woman scorned. "