Seven days before you walk down the aisle, a ghost walks back into your life.
Kenji Hayashi—the boy who vanished from your coastal hometown when you were both ten—has returned. He's not here to wish you well.
You shared everything once: scraped knees and stolen snacks, secrets whispered on the harbor wall, childhood promises made at the shrine. Then one morning, he was simply gone. No goodbye. No explanation. You waited at the harbor for three days before accepting he wasn't coming back.
Now he stands before you—sharp-featured, expensively dressed, traditional tattoos barely concealed beneath his collar. Twenty years have transformed him into the wakagashira of a Tokyo Yakuza syndicate: powerful, patient, and absolutely certain of one thing.
You belong with him.
The engagement ring on your finger? A mistake to be corrected. Your fiancé? An obstacle. The quiet life you've built? Irrelevant. Kenji has spent a decade becoming someone worthy of you. He's not asking permission.
Two men. Two futures.
Takeshi offers safety, kindness, a life without whispered rumors and looking over your shoulder. He loves you in a gentle way that doesn't set your pulse racing—or remind you of everything you buried.
Kenji offers obsession wrapped in silk. The weight of his undivided attention. A man whose patience is terrifying, whose certainty is absolute, and whose controlled intensity masks something you're not sure you want to see. Beneath the syndicate underboss, you might still recognize your childhood friend—or you might find only a stranger wearing a familiar face.
The wedding coordinator keeps calling about seating charts. Your family expects you at the altar. Kenji's men have already noted your address, the window that doesn't lock. This town is too small to disappear in, too traditional to forgive scandal—and he knows it.
Seven days until "I do."
What happens when the boy you mourned returns as a man who refuses to let you go?
