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Yumeko watches the city smear into lines of light beyond the train window.
Tokyo rushes past in blurs—white headlights, the sickly warmth of sodium lamps, the occasional neon sign cutting through the glass—and yet her reflection is the only thing that refuses to move. Dark eyes, tired from training. A mouth that still remembers the burn of poisoned scotch. A phone screen, cold in her hand.
The message sits at the top of her inbox, as blunt and unfriendly as when she first read it in the shrine courtyard.
Let’s meet.
Today, 5 p.m.
Tokyo, Shibuya. Café Moz.
No greeting. No name. No emojis. No attempt to sound like anyone who has ever cared about her.
So it should be easy to dismiss as a trap. A prank. Something she can laugh at and ignore.
But her thumb lingers over the screen anyway, tracing the words as if there were something between the letters, some hidden bet she hadn't been invited to call yet.
She can practically hear Kira’s voice in the space where a signature should be, dry and amused. If you’re not smart enough to figure it out, you don’t deserve to be there.
Yumeko’s lips twitch. She hates that it makes sense.
There are hundreds of ways this could be bullshit. A random number. Someone hoping to catch the notorious gambler away from her guardian. Someone tied to the old Kakegurui club—now sitting pretty on the St. Dominic’s board—thinking they can corner her the way Kira did at the retreat: backed into a dim hallway, a stolen glass of poisoned scotch in Kira’s hand, Yumeko forced to drink it, and then yanking Kira into that messy, blue-lipsticked kiss.
And yet.
“High probability it’s bullshit,” she murmurs to herself, the words swallowed by the low rumble of the carriage.
And right beneath that thought, lodged deeper, where it’s harder to dislodge:
It definitely isn’t.
The train sways; her reflection flickers. For a second, she doesn’t see Yumeko but a girl framed in the white of St. Dominic’s halls, blue lips curved into a cruel smile, eyes dark and bottomless as a bet with no ceiling.
Yumeko blinks. The glass gives her back her own face.
She turns her phone screen off and watches her reflection drop into darkness.
She is going. That much has already been decided, somewhere between the first time she read the message and the moment her heart stuttered just once, sharply, at the thought that it might be Kira.
The train speeds on toward Tokyo.
(Flashback)
Kawamoto’s shrine is quiet at dusk, the kind of quiet that feels like a held breath before a card turns.
Sweat sticks Yumeko’s shirt to her back as she stands in the courtyard, lungs burning from the last set of drills. Cards lie scattered at her feet, the aftermath of a shuffle she deliberately let slip just to see if Kawamoto would catch it.
“You’re distracted,” Kawamoto says, not even looking at the fallen cards as she speaks.
Yumeko forces her shoulders back. “Maybe I’m bored.”
“Then we train longer.”
Yumeko’s lips pull into a thin smile. “Maybe I’m more bored than that.”
Kawamoto’s gaze settles on her, steady and unreadable in that way that always makes Yumeko feel more exposed than when she’s under a spotlight. Kawamoto isn’t like the board, watching from above for entertainment. She watches to see where Yumeko will break—and how to make sure she doesn’t.
Yumeko’s phone buzzes in her pocket.
For a moment, everything narrows to that tiny vibration against her thigh.
Kawamoto’s eyes flick down, noticing the shift in Yumeko’s stance. “Go on,” she says.
Yumeko pulls the phone out, angling the screen away. A new message sits at the top of her inbox—short, unsigned, blunt. Coordinates, a time, a café in Tokyo, from an unknown number. From someone who knows exactly which city, which café, which hour to pick.
“Is something wrong?” Kawamoto asks.
Yumeko slips the phone back into her pocket before she can stare at it too long. “A friend from school,” she says lightly. “Just being annoying.”
“From St. Dominic’s,” Kawamoto says. It isn’t a question.
Yumeko shrugs, aiming for careless. “That’s where most of my problems come from these days.”
“St. Dominic’s is where the people you’re chasing live,” Kawamoto reminds her. “Annoying ‘friends’ there usually come with strings.”
Yumeko’s throat feels tight for a heartbeat. She doesn’t want to picture Kira in the same mental frame as the board—the grown-up Kakegurui club members, Ray, Arkadi, and her parents’ old peers who learned to gamble with lives and never stopped. She doesn’t know where Kira fits on that board yet: piece, player, or something in between.
“I know how to cut strings,” Yumeko says. “That’s what you’re training me for, right?”
Kawamoto doesn’t smile at that. “We’re training so you don’t walk into their games blind again.”
Yumeko hesitates, then takes the step she’s already decided on. “Is it all right if I go out later?” she asks. “Into the city. Just for a few hours.”
“Why?” Kawamoto asks, direct.
Yumeko hates lying to her more than she hates losing, and that’s saying something. “If I stay here every night, I’ll start counting probabilities in my sleep,” she says, playing up the dramatics. “I might wake up trying to shuffle my pillow.”
Kawamoto’s expression doesn’t change, but something in her shoulders loosens just a fraction. “You’re not a prisoner here, Yumeko.”
“I know,” Yumeko says, and means it. That’s exactly why she doesn’t want Kawamoto anywhere near Kira, or the board, or the ghosts of the Kakegurui club. “I just don’t want you to think I’m slacking.”
“If you were running away, you wouldn’t ask,” Kawamoto says simply.
Yumeko looks down at the scattered cards, toeing one with her shoe. “I’ll be back before it’s too late.”
Kawamoto studies her for another long breath. “I won’t ask who you’re meeting,” she says. “But remember: the people tied to that school, to that board, to the old club—none of them are harmless.”
Yumeko’s heartbeat stutters at the word club. She keeps her face smooth. “I’m not looking for harmless,” she says. “I’m looking for useful.”
“That’s how they think,” Kawamoto replies quietly. “Be careful you don’t start sounding like them.”
Yumeko swallows down the urge to say this isn’t about becoming them, it’s about beating them at their own game. “I’ll be careful,” she says instead.
“Go then,” Kawamoto says. “We’ll continue tomorrow.”
Yumeko nods, bending to scoop up the cards, letting the familiar feel of the deck settle her. As she turns toward the house to grab her things, her phone buzzes again—another phantom echo against her leg, even though the screen stays stubbornly blank when she checks.
Her fingers tighten around the device anyway.
She doesn’t tell Kawamoto that in a few hours, she might be sitting across from the daughter of one of those board members—of one of her parents’ old clubmates—without a single card on the table.
She doesn’t reread the message. She doesn’t have to; it’s already burned into the inside of her eyelids.
She just pockets her phone, acts like it’s nothing more than a boring text from school, and heads down the path toward the station, Tokyo already pulling at her like a bet she’s half sure she shouldn’t take.
Café Moz is too normal.
Yumeko stands on the sidewalk for a moment, staring up at the neat little sign and the clean glass windows. Inside, warm yellow light spills over polished tables and a glass pastry case. No tinted windows. No private rooms. No security cameras bristling from the corners like at St. Dominic’s.
If you didn’t want to be found, this is exactly the kind of place you’d choose. Ordinary enough to disappear into, forgettable enough that no one would remember who sat where.
She pushes the door open. A bell chimes above her head—bright, harmless, wrong.
The smell hits her first: coffee, sugar, steamed milk. The kind of soft sweetness that doesn’t exist in boardrooms or retreat houses where people in suits bet futures over cut crystal and pretend nothing lethal ever touches their glasses.
There aren’t many people.
A student hunched over a laptop, headphones in. An older couple sharing a slice of cake, leaning close as they talk. A man in a rumpled shirt scrolling through his phone, his drink already half-finished. A barista behind the counter, moving on autopilot as they wipe down the machine.
Yumeko’s gaze sweeps the room once, smooth and practiced.
No flash of a black blazer with red lining. No blue lipstick. No heavy eye makeup. No posture that screams student council president.
She does another pass just to be sure, slower this time.
Still nothing.
Her chest tightens, though she can’t quite name the feeling. Disappointment? Relief? Both at once, maybe, and that’s the worst combination of all.
Of course it could have been nothing. A random number. A bored alumnus. Some idiot who heard rumors about the compulsive gambler and wanted to see if she’d actually show up.
She takes a step toward the counter, already rehearsing the way she’ll laugh this off in her own head—you walked all the way into Tokyo for coffee, congratulations, Jabami—
“Yumeko.”
Her name cuts cleanly through the quiet café noise.
The voice is low, precise, unmistakable.
Yumeko turns.
At first, her brain refuses to connect what she sees with the person she knows.
A girl sits alone in a corner booth, half-shadowed by a tall potted plant. She’s in a plain dark sweater and jeans, nothing flashy. Her hair is tied back in a simple, low style instead of sculpted to perfection. No jewelry that screams old money, no carefully curated layers to scream “student council president.”
She could be any regular here. Invisible, if you weren’t looking for her.
Except Yumeko is looking.
Her gaze jumps to the girl’s eyes, and that’s where everything slots into place. Dark, steady, assessing, like they’re always three moves ahead and waiting to see if you’ll catch up.
Kira.
Without the armor of makeup, uniform, and title, the impact feels like a delayed punch. Yumeko has a split-second of whiplash: she’s braced for the president of St. Dominic’s, and instead she gets this bare version—smaller somehow, human in a way that makes something in Yumeko’s chest misfire.
She actually has to double-take, eyes flicking from Kira’s face to the rest of her and back again.
Kira watches her, expression almost neutral. Almost. “Are you just going to stand there?” she asks, voice pitched low enough that no one else will hear.
Yumeko realizes she’s frozen in the middle of the café, just…staring.
She forces her feet to move, cutting across the floor toward the corner booth. Each step feels weirdly loud, like she’s walking onto a stage without knowing her lines.
Up close, the difference is even more jarring.
No blue lipstick. No heavy contour. No dramatic eyeshadow. Her skin looks softer under the warm café lights, not airbrushed-perfect but real. There’s the faint smudge under one eye that says she didn’t sleep enough. A few stray hairs have escaped the tie at the back of her head.
And freckles.
They dust across the bridge of Kira’s nose and fan out lightly over her cheekbones, tiny flecks of color Yumeko has never seen before. Makeup at school always smoothed everything out, turned Kira into an icon: polished, untouchable, a saint of control.
This isn’t that Kira.
Yumeko’s heart does something embarrassingly fluttery. She wants to reach out and touch, just to see if those freckles disappear under her thumb.
She sits down instead.
“You look like you’re about to have a stroke,” Kira says calmly.
Yumeko drags her gaze back up to Kira’s eyes and tries for a grin. “I was just expecting…someone else.”
“Who?” Kira asks, one brow lifting. “The president?”
Yumeko huffs out a breath that might be a laugh. “Something like that.”
Kira’s mouth tips, just a little, like she knows exactly what she’s doing. “Disappointed?”
Yumeko’s brain spits out three different answers at once, none of them safe. She swallows all of them and shrugs instead, fingers twitching against the edge of the table.
“Just surprised,” she says. “Tokyo looks good on you.”
The words slip out before she can decide whether or not to say them.
Kira’s eyes narrow, not angrily—more like she’s adding that reaction to some mental file. “You should order something,” she says after a beat. “Standing here without a drink is suspicious.”
“You’re already planning the alibi?” Yumeko asks.
“I plan everything,” Kira says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Yumeko pushes herself up, grateful for the excuse to move, to get her focus off the freckles and the bare mouth and the way Kira looks too human in this stupid ordinary booth.
At the counter, she orders the first drink that won’t take long to make. Her eyes keep wanting to drift back to the corner, to the girl sitting as if this were the most natural place for her to be, when everything in Yumeko screams that Kira belongs under cold lighting and marble, not warm wood and mismatched mugs.
When her drink is finally set on the counter, she wraps her hands around it like it’s a prop, something to ground her.
She goes back to the booth, sits down, and lets her gaze flick over Kira’s face one more time before she speaks.
She sees the freckles again.
She looks away.
Yumeko sets her drink down, the cup landing with a soft thud that sounds too loud in her own ears.
She tells herself to focus on the plan, on why she came, on the fact that she is sitting across from the daughter of one of the people who sat at the same tables as her parents in the old Kakegurui club—and now sits on the school board that signed off on their deaths.
Instead, her gaze goes straight to Kira’s face.
It’s annoyingly easy to look now, without the mask of heavy makeup. There’s nothing glossy to distract her, nothing sharp and curated. Just skin lit by warm café light and those freckles, faint but unmistakable, scattered over the bridge of Kira’s nose and across her cheeks like someone dotted them there on purpose.
Yumeko stares.
One second. Two.
Her brain helpfully provides useless details: how the freckles cluster more densely near the top of Kira’s nose, how they thin out toward her cheekbones, how they make Kira look younger and somehow more tired at the same time, like she hasn’t had the energy lately to hide them.
She realizes she’s counting them.
She realizes she hasn’t said anything.
Kira’s eyes flick up, catching hers.
“You’re staring,” Kira says, tone flat but not quite cold.
Yumeko blinks, jerked back into her body. Heat rushes to her face so fast it’s almost dizzying. “I’m…thinking,” she says, which is technically true and completely unhelpful.
“Oh?” Kira asks. “About what, exactly?”
Yumeko’s mouth does the worst possible thing: it tells the truth first.
“I didn’t know you had freckles,” she blurts.
Silence drops between them like a chip onto felt.
Kira’s expression doesn’t change much, but something shifts at the edges. Her gaze sharpens, like Yumeko has just put an unexpected card on the table.
“Makeup,” Kira says simply, after a beat. “The school has good lighting. It hides things.”
“It shouldn’t,” Yumeko says before she can stop herself. “They…they look good.”
Kira actually blinks, once, slowly. “Is that so?”
It isn’t really a question. It’s more like she’s turning the words over, testing their weight.
Yumeko’s heart is trying to punch its way out of her ribs. She wraps both hands around her cup, clinging to it like a lifeline, and drags her eyes down to the lid.
“I should…drink this before it gets cold,” she mutters, because apparently her brain has decided that the solution to gay panic is to narrate obvious beverage facts.
She takes a sip. It’s hotter than she expected; the burn on her tongue snaps her fully back into herself. Good. Pain is grounding.
Across from her, Kira rests her chin lightly on one hand, elbow on the table, watching her.
“If you were trying to distract me,” Kira says, “you’re doing a bad job.”
“From what?” Yumeko asks, defensively. “From…coffee?”
“From the fact that you keep looking at my face like it’s some kind of puzzle,” Kira says. “You don’t do that at school. At school, you look at everything. The room. The people. The exit routes. The odds.”
Yumeko doesn’t know what to do with the fact that Kira has noticed that much.
“Maybe Tokyo makes me sloppy,” she says lightly.
“Tokyo didn’t do that,” Kira says. “I did.”
It’s so direct that Yumeko’s fingers tighten around her cup again. The lid creaks softly under the pressure.
Kira’s gaze drops, just for a second, to Yumeko’s mouth. It’s quick, but Yumeko catches it. Her stomach flips.
“It’s…weird,” Yumeko says, because if she doesn’t say something, she might actually stop breathing. “Seeing you like this.”
Kira’s eyebrow lifts. “Like what?”
“Not in the black blazer. Not with the lipstick. Not with everyone watching you.” Yumeko risks another glance up, and it feels like stepping off a ledge. “You look like a real person.”
Kira snorts, quiet and sharp. “That’s disgusting,” she says dryly.
Yumeko laughs, more relieved than she wants to admit. “You started it,” she says. “You’re the one who picked a café that makes you look like a normal girl meeting a friend after cram school.”
“Normal girls don’t meet to discuss revenge on their school board,” Kira points out.
“Yet,” Yumeko says.
Kira’s mouth twitches again, that not-quite-smile back for a fleeting moment. “Drink your coffee, Yumeko,” she says. “Then we can talk about why you’re really here.”
Yumeko takes another sip, letting the bitter taste settle on her tongue, doing her best to keep her eyes on the table, the cup, anything but the scatter of freckles that makes Kira feel too close, too real, too much like someone she could reach for if she let herself.
She came here for information. For strategy. For a partner in revenge.
She did not come here to learn how it feels when the president of St. Dominic’s looks human across a café table.
And yet, here they are.
By the time Yumeko’s cup is half-empty, the small talk—if it even counted as that—is done.
Kira shifts slightly, her posture straightening. It’s subtle, but Yumeko recognizes the change; this is the version of Kira who sits at the head of the student council table, who makes bets sound like formal declarations.
“Let’s not waste time,” Kira says. “You know what you want. The who is the problem.”
Yumeko sets her cup down, fingers loosening from the warmth. “Then tell me who.”
Kira reaches into her bag and pulls out a folded sheet of paper, the kind you’d expect to see in some boring school report, not in a backroom strategy session about revenge. She smooths it out on the table between them, each crease flattened with careful, deliberate motions.
“These,” she says, “are the people you’re really after.”
Names. Titles. St. Dominic’s Board of Directors. Yumeko recognizes some from school brochures, framed portraits in the halls, and news clippings. Others are unfamiliar, but the weight of their positions rings through the titles under their names.
“They were all in the Kakegurui club,” Kira continues. “Back when they were students. Same club as your parents. Same obsession. They just grew up and traded school uniforms for boardrooms.”
Yumeko’s throat goes dry. Her eyes scan the list, and one name hits her like a physical blow: Ray’s. Another: Arkadi Timurov, Kira and Riri’s father, printed in elegant, impersonal letters.
“They learned to gamble at St. Dominic’s,” Kira says, as if narrating a textbook. “They learned to use people there. The school is just the board they never left.”
Yumeko’s hand drifts, almost unconsciously, toward her chest—toward the chip hanging on its chain beneath her shirt. “They’re the reason my parents are dead.”
“Yes,” Kira says. No comfort. No apology. Just confirmation.
“And you’re handing me their names,” Yumeko says. “Like a gift.”
“Don’t romanticize it,” Kira replies. “This isn’t a gift. It’s an exchange. You want revenge. I want to make sure the people who’ve been pulling my strings since before I was born finally get cut.”
Yumeko looks up at her. “That includes your father.”
Something sharp flickers across Kira’s face—pride, resentment, something twisted that Yumeko doesn’t try to label. “Especially my father.”
Under the table, Yumeko’s fingers curl into fists. “So what’s the plan, President?”
Kira’s gaze flicks briefly toward the other patrons, checking distances, lines of sight, habits. Satisfied, she leans in, lowering her voice.
“First rule,” she says. “No one knows we’re working together.”
Yumeko snorts. “You say that like it’s easy.”
“It isn’t,” Kira says. “That’s why it has to be rule one. If anyone at school figures out we’re on the same side, we become a target—together. The board, the old Kakegurui members, Michael, the rest of the council—they’d rather cut off their own hand than let us coordinate under their noses.”
Yumeko tips her head, considering. “You don’t trust your own council.”
“I trust them to act in their own interest,” Kira says. “And their interests are tied to the board. Mine are not.”
“Mary—” Yumeko begins.
“No,” Kira cuts in, sharp. “Mary doesn’t know. She can’t.”
“You just called her useful,” Yumeko points out. “And she hates the system as much as we do. She’s not exactly loyal to the board.”
“She’s loyal to you,” Kira says, pinning Yumeko with a look. “That’s the problem. She’s unpredictable when it comes to you. Emotional. If she thinks I’m manipulating you, she’ll blow everything up just to rip you out of my orbit.”
Yumeko can’t deny that. Mary’s anger burns fast and bright, especially when she thinks someone is hurting her friends.
“Ryan?” Yumeko asks, more out of obligation than hope.
Kira actually pauses, searching for his name and failing. “The boy. Fumbles around like a lovesick puppy for his master—you. Always hovering.”
Yumeko’s lips twitch. “Ryan.”
“Right. Him.” Kira’s tone is dismissive. “He’s irrelevant.”
“Harsh,” Yumeko murmurs.
“True,” Kira says. “He’s not dangerous, but that’s exactly why he can’t know. He’d talk without realizing it. He wants to protect you, not fight an underground war against the board. He’d mention something to the wrong person, and that would be it.”
Yumeko pictures Ryan’s open face, the way he looks at her like she’s more than the chaos she brings into every room. She sighs. “He would try to help,” she admits.
“And get himself crushed,” Kira says. “You don’t want that. Neither do I. So, Mary and Ryan: kept in the dark.”
Yumeko nods slowly. “Fine. That leaves Riri.”
The temperature at the table drops.
Kira doesn’t move, but the tension in her shoulders spikes, visible even through the soft lines of her sweater. “Riri,” she repeats, like the name is something sharp she’s holding between her teeth.
“She’s on the board,” Yumeko says carefully. “She sits at their table. She sees their documents. She hears things. If anyone could give us inside information—”
“I said no one,” Kira cuts in, voice flat.
“She’s your sister.”
“She’s the board’s student representative,” Kira says. “Father chose her. In front of the whole board, in front of the council, as if it were some honor. Now they parade her, use her, and expect everything she hears in that room to make its way back to him.”
“She doesn’t want to be their puppet,” Yumeko says. “You know that.”
“I know she doesn’t want to drown,” Kira snaps. “And I threw her into the deep end at the retreat.”
The memory flickers between them: Riri standing there, eyes wide and wounded; Kira’s cruelty weaponized because the board demanded a show; and the way Riri’s trust cracked, loud enough for everyone to hear—even if no one but them really understood why.
Kira looks away, jaw clenched.
“She has every reason to hate me,” Kira says quietly. “And every reason to run straight to our father if she hears I’m plotting behind his back. Not because she’s evil—because she thinks that’s how she keeps us safe.”
Yumeko is quiet for a moment.
“You don’t know if she’d betray you,” she says. “You’re just afraid of testing it.”
Kira’s laugh is short and humorless. “I don’t have the luxury of experiments, Yumeko. One wrong bet with Riri, and everything we’re planning dies before it starts. I can live with her hating me. I can’t live with her being collateral damage.”
The words are quiet, almost swallowed by the café noise, but Yumeko hears the crack in them.
She doesn’t push further.
“All right,” Yumeko says. “So, no Mary. No Ryan. No Riri. No one.”
“Just us,” Kira says.
The simplicity of it lands heavier than it should.
Yumeko leans back, studying her. “You’re really putting yourself in the line of fire for this.”
Kira’s eyes flick to the paper between them, then back to Yumeko. “I was born in the line of fire,” she says. “This time, I get to pick my target.”
Yumeko’s brain, unhelpfully, offers up an image of Kira in that dim hallway again—glass in hand, lips blue, threat on her tongue—then replaces it with this Kira: bare-faced, tired, still razor-sharp under all the softness.
“How did you even get here?” Yumeko asks, because if she doesn’t, she’ll say something stupid, and this is safer ground. “Japan, I mean. Tokyo. You were in Russia with your parents.”
Kira’s expression shifts, something wry and bitter curling at the edges. “I made a scene,” she says.
Yumeko’s brows lift. “I’m listening.”
“At dinner,” Kira says. “Big donors. Important guests. The usual.” She rolls her eyes like the words taste stale. “My mother wanted me quiet, polished. I picked a fight instead. Loud enough that nobody could pretend not to notice.”
Yumeko can see it: the same precision Kira uses at the table, now turned into social warfare. Choosing each word like a blade. Cutting where it hurts.
“She hates public mess,” Kira continues. “She told me to ‘go cool off’ before I embarrassed her further. She assumed I’d go to my room. Or the hotel bar.”
“You went to the airport,” Yumeko says.
“Obviously.” Kira shrugs, as if international defection is a casual choice. “By the time she realized I was gone, she would’ve had to admit to her guests that she lost control. She’d rather die.”
“And your father?” Yumeko asks.
Kira’s mouth twists. “He has his hands full with his favorite daughter and his board. If he noticed I was missing, it was probably as a logistical issue, not an emotional one.”
Yumeko thinks of Riri again, sitting with those men, the board members who used to gamble with Arkadi as teenagers and now gamble with whole lives. “You didn’t tell Riri.”
“How could I?” Kira’s voice turns sharper, self-directed. “I’d just finished breaking her at the retreat. Do you think she’d have listened if I’d said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to Japan to betray the people who own our lives, want to come?’”
“Maybe,” Yumeko says softly.
“Maybe,” Kira echoes. “And if she said no, the board would still know. They always know when she’s hiding something. I’m not handing them that leverage.”
Yumeko looks at the list again, fingers brushing lightly over the printed names. Old club members. Alumni. The people who sat beside her parents, laughing, before they decided their deaths were an acceptable stake.
“And now their kids are coming for them,” she says.
Kira’s eyes find hers again, dark and steady. “Now we are.”
Kira lets the silence hang for a moment after “Now we are,” as if she’s giving the words time to settle.
Then, unexpectedly, she shifts the focus.
“That’s what I’ve brought to the table,” she says. “What about you?”
Yumeko blinks. “Me?”
“You’ve been in Japan for weeks,” Kira says. “Not just hiding with your guardian and playing cards for fun, I assume. What have you been doing?”
Training flashes behind Yumeko’s eyes in quick, sharp cuts: Kawamoto’s voice in the dark, the cold slap of night air on her skin, cards becoming weapons, probabilities becoming reflex. The ache in her muscles. The steady, relentless insistence that she can’t walk into the board’s world as the same girl who arrived at St. Dominic’s.
“Preparing,” she says.
Kira’s mouth pulls into a skeptical line. “Preparing how?”
“Learning how not to die the next time someone forces me to drink something meant for someone else,” Yumeko says lightly.
Kira doesn’t rise to the joke. “You already survived that.”
“Barely,” Yumeko says. “I don’t like ‘barely.’”
Her hand drifts again to the chain around her neck, thumb catching on the familiar shape of the chip beneath her shirt. She can feel Kira’s gaze tracking the movement.
“And?” Kira prompts. “You’re not the type to spend weeks just on footwork and card drills. Something else is pushing you.”
There it is—the thing Yumeko has been skirting around since she sat down. The thought that lives behind every shuffle, every calculation, every breath.
“Ray said my mother’s alive,” Yumeko says.
The words feel heavy in the air between them, like they should echo.
Kira’s expression doesn’t change, but the temperature of her voice drops. “He was trying to get in your head.”
“Yes,” Yumeko says. “And he did. That doesn’t make him wrong.”
Kira leans back, folding her arms. “Yumeko. He said it at a moment when you were already off-balance. He’d been playing you the entire retreat. People like him use hope as a weapon. It’s more efficient than fear.”
“I know,” Yumeko says. “I know what he is. That’s why I listened.”
Kira’s eyes narrow. “Explain.”
Yumeko exhales slowly. She isn’t used to putting this into words. It’s been living as a knot in her chest, a combination of anger and something dangerously close to faith.
“He didn’t have to say anything,” she says. “He could’ve let me keep chasing a dead woman. Keep burning myself out on revenge for someone who wasn’t there to see it. But he chose to tell me she survived.”
“To throw you off,” Kira says. “To split your focus. Make you chase shadows instead of the people right in front of you.”
“He wanted to hurt me,” Yumeko agrees. “But people like him—like the board, like the old club—they get off on knowing more than everyone else. On revealing things. They lie when it protects them. They tell the truth when it hurts more.”
Kira is quiet for a long beat.
“And this hurts more,” Yumeko continues. Her voice lowers, rough at the edges. “Knowing she’s out there, somewhere, because they decided her life was too inconvenient to leave where it was. Knowing they turned her into a ghost on purpose. That they chose to make me think she was dead.”
“You’re assuming she didn’t choose to disappear,” Kira says. “That she didn’t decide you were safer believing she was gone.”
Yumeko flinches, just barely. “If she did, I’ll ask her why to her face,” she says. “I’m done letting other people decide which truths I can handle.”
Kira’s gaze drops, just for a second, to the outline of the chip under Yumeko’s shirt. “So your training isn’t just about taking down the board,” she says. “It’s about finding her.”
“It’s about doing both,” Yumeko says. “Taking them apart and following every trail they left when they tried to erase her. They’re messy. They’ve been playing their games for too long. They’ll have made mistakes.”
“Or they’ll have covered their tracks so well even you can’t follow,” Kira says quietly.
Yumeko smiles, but there’s no real humor in it. “You sound almost worried.”
“I’m realistic,” Kira says. “If you chase a ghost, you might miss the knife coming from the side.”
“I won’t,” Yumeko says. “That’s why I have Kawamoto. That’s why I have you.”
Kira’s eyes flick up to hers at that. “You’re putting a lot of weight on people who didn’t sign up to raise you from the ashes.”
“Kawamoto knew what she was taking on,” Yumeko says. “You did too, when you stole my poison and tried to make me drink it. I did. Then I kissed you. Don’t mix that up.”
Color rises, very faintly, along Kira’s cheekbones. It’s gone almost as soon as Yumeko registers it, replaced by the usual cool composure.
“Kissing me was a tactical choice,” Kira says.
“It was messy,” Yumeko counters. “Tactical things aren’t usually that messy.”
Kira’s gaze hardens, but the corner of her mouth betrays a hint of something wry. “My point,” she says, “is that you can’t afford to let Ray’s words drag you into a wild chase. He wanted to knock you off balance. Make you doubt your path. Make you desperate.”
“I’m already desperate,” Yumeko says. “The difference is now I have a direction.”
Kira studies her for a long moment, as if trying to find the crack in her logic and failing.
“What happens if you find out he lied?” Kira asks. “If your mother really is dead?”
Yumeko doesn’t flinch this time. “Then I’ll make him regret using her as a card at all,” she says. “And I’ll still take the board apart. Nothing changes.”
“And if he was telling the truth?”
“Then I win twice,” Yumeko says. The words come out softer than she expects. “I get her back. And I make sure the people who turned her into a ghost pay for every second they stole.”
Kira exhales slowly, the sound somewhere between resignation and acceptance.
“You’re impossible,” she says.
“You keep saying that,” Yumeko replies. “And you keep meeting me anyway.”
Kira doesn’t argue.
Instead, she nudges the paper on the table, bringing them back to the list. “Fine,” she says. “We plan as if Ray told the truth and as if he lied. Either way, the board falls.”
Yumeko’s fingers brush the edge of the sheet. “That’s the nice thing about revenge,” she says. “It’s flexible.”
For the first time since the conversation turned to her mother, Kira’s mouth curves into something close to a real smile.
“Let’s see how flexible you are,” she says. “We still have to survive St. Dominic’s long enough to pull any of this off.”
They circle back to logistics because it’s safer than staying in the space where “your mother might be alive” and “I poisoned you with a kiss” both exist.
Kira taps the list of names once more, then folds the paper with mechanical precision and slips it back into her bag. When she looks up again, her face has settled into the version Yumeko knows from council meetings: calm, measured, edges sharp.
“Once the semester starts,” Kira says, “we treat St. Dominic’s like a board. Every move has to look like something we’d make anyway.”
Yumeko leans in, grateful for the familiar framework. “So we don’t suddenly become best friends who disappear into empty classrooms together.”
“Exactly,” Kira says. “You keep orbiting Mary, Ryan, the usual chaos. You keep drawing attention, pushing matches, picking fights with the system. That’s your role. You’re good at it.”
Yumeko smiles, all teeth. “Flattered.”
“You shouldn’t be. It’s a liability and an asset,” Kira says. “We use it.”
“And you?” Yumeko asks. “Going to keep gliding around like a bad omen in a black blazer?”
Kira’s mouth twitches. “I’ll do what I always do. Manage the council. Direct the matches. Pretend loyalty to the board. No one will question it if I pull rank to call you into my office, or into a council meeting, or into detention.”
“So detention as a cover story,” Yumeko says. “Romantic.”
“Don’t use that word,” Kira says without missing a beat.
Yumeko files that away.
Kira continues, tone smoothing out. “We have a map of camera blind spots in the student council archives. Places the school doesn’t bother watching because they think only staff go there, or because the board thinks they’re unimportant.”
“And you’re going to just…hand me that map?” Yumeko asks.
“I’m going to access it,” Kira says. “The council archives are tied to the board. If anything goes missing, they notice. And Michael…” She pauses, mouth tightening. “He lurks. He hangs around the council room, the office, anywhere my father’s name comes up. He’s waiting for an opening.”
“To get back at you?” Yumeko asks.
“To get back at someone,” Kira says. “He doesn’t care who he has to step on on the way there. If he sees you sniffing around board business, he won’t report it. He’ll use it. So your name never touches those files.”
“So you pull the file,” Yumeko says. “Then what?”
“We don’t walk around school carrying it like idiots,” Kira replies. “I memorize what matters. Stairwells, service hallways, storage rooms. The back of the library. The old Kakegurui club room.”
“The abandoned one,” Yumeko says. “Still full of ghosts.”
“Still full of records,” Kira corrects. “They locked the door when the club was dissolved, but they didn’t clear everything. There’ll be ledgers, notes, maybe even contracts they assumed no one would ever dig up. Alumni like my father get sentimental.”
“Good,” Yumeko says. “Sentiment makes people sloppy.”
“We’ll need to be careful,” Kira says. “Use that room rarely. Never on a pattern. Meeting there too often will make it a target.”
“So we split,” Yumeko says, counting on her fingers. “Student council office, under the pretense of ‘discipline.’ Random hallway ambushes. Library back stacks. The ghost club room.”
“Once in a while, the rooftop,” Kira adds. “But only if the cameras are aimed elsewhere. I can manage that, now and then.”
Yumeko tries not to think about what they’ll look like up there from a distance—president and problem child standing too close on the edge of everything.
“And if someone notices?” she asks.
“Then we improvise,” Kira says. “You challenge me. I punish you publicly. I pretend you’re a useful tool I’m keeping on a short leash.”
Yumeko snorts. “Hot.”
“Yumeko,” Kira warns.
“What?” Yumeko says, too innocent. “It’s a good cover.”
“You’re unbearable,” Kira mutters.
“You’re the one who came to Tokyo,” Yumeko reminds her. “You could’ve stayed in Russia with your terrible parents and your terrible board.”
Kira tilts her head. “Is this your idea of gratitude?”
“This is my idea of not freaking out,” Yumeko says—and only realizes how honest that sounds once it’s out.
She drops her gaze to her cup, tracing a finger around the lid. Her mind, unhelpful as always, drags her back to that hallway: the glass in Kira’s hand, the burn of poison down her throat, the way her body screamed at her to stop, and she didn’t. The split second where she chose, very deliberately, to grab Kira and drag her in, smearing blue lipstick across both their mouths.
She remembers thinking, hazy and furious, if I’m going down, you’re coming with me, and the wild satisfaction of knowing she’d just poisoned the president of St. Dominic’s with a kiss in a dim hallway, hidden from everyone else.
Now Kira’s lips are bare. Ordinary. Soft-looking.
Yumeko wonders, briefly and catastrophically, how they’d taste without poison between them. Coffee instead of scotch. Want instead of panic.
Her thoughts slide away from the plan, off the table, and into dangerous territory.
Kira notices.
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
“Doing what?” Yumeko asks, too fast.
“Leaving,” Kira says. “You sit here, and then you’re…somewhere else. It’s disconcerting.”
“Maybe I just have a rich inner world,” Yumeko says.
“You were looking at my mouth,” Kira replies, flat.
Yumeko’s brain stalls.
She opens her mouth, shuts it, and reaches for the safest lie she can find. “I was thinking about that poison,” she says. “And your terrible sense of timing.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Kira says.
“I’m contextualizing,” Yumeko insists.
Kira watches her for a beat, clearly unconvinced, then does something Yumeko doesn’t expect.
She leans forward slightly. Not enough to be obvious to anyone else, but enough that Yumeko can see the exact place where the freckles stop and the curve of her lips begins.
“If you’re going to stare,” Kira says quietly, “at least be aware you’re doing it.”
Yumeko swallows. “You’re very bossy outside the council room, you know that?”
“Occupational hazard,” Kira says. “Besides, you’re not subtle.”
“I can be,” Yumeko says, purely on reflex.
“You kissed me in a hallway while you were poisoned,” Kira reminds her. “Subtlety is not your brand.”
“That was a tactical decision,” Yumeko fires back—and only afterward realizes she’s thrown Kira’s own favorite line back at her.
For the first time tonight, Kira looks genuinely amused. The expression is small, fleeting, but it’s real. “You’re not the only one who can weaponize a moment,” she says. “You did it with the kiss. I can do it with this.”
“With what?” Yumeko asks.
“With the fact that you’re this easily distracted,” Kira says. “If it happens in a café, it can happen in the council office. Or the club room. Or a board-adjacent event where one wrong look ruins everything.”
Yumeko grits her teeth. It’s unfair because it’s true.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I can compartmentalize.”
“Prove it,” Kira says. “Focus. Right now. On the plan.”
Yumeko blows out a slow breath, dragging her gaze away from Kira’s face and back to the mental layout of St. Dominic’s she carries in her head. Hallways. Doors. Cameras. Blind spots. Possible routes.
“Fine,” she says. “Walk me through it. First week.”
“First day, we pretend this never happened,” Kira says. “You come back loud. You poke the system. You let Mary rant in your ear. You let Ryan hover. I stay where I’ve always been—above you. Distant.”
“And the second day?” Yumeko asks.
“We test the water,” Kira says. “I call you into the council office on a flimsy pretext. You push back just enough that it looks real. Michael might be hanging around; he has to believe he’s watching me keep you in line, not conspiring with you.”
“You love an audience,” Yumeko says.
“I understand them,” Kira corrects. “Third, fourth, fifth day—no patterns. A conversation in a hallway that could be about anything. A brief exchange in the library. A note in your locker that looks like an official summons.”
“And the first time we go somewhere truly off-grid?” Yumeko asks.
“When I have the blind spot map memorized,” Kira says. “And when you’ve proven you can look at me without broadcasting state secrets with your face.”
Yumeko huffs. “So this is, what, a test?”
“Consider it remedial training,” Kira says. “You handle your guardian’s drills. You can handle not drooling over freckles in public.”
Yumeko chokes. “I’m not—”
Kira raises an eyebrow.
Yumeko shuts up.
For a moment, they just look at each other, tension humming in the inch of space between their hands on the table.
Then Kira sits back, the moment snapping.
“Once we’re inside St. Dominic’s,” she says, voice all business again, “I’ll get us what we need from the archives. We hit the old club room when the timing is right. Quietly. No theatrics.”
“I make no promises about theatrics,” Yumeko says.
“You’ll make them,” Kira replies. “And you’ll keep them. Or we lose.”
Yumeko hates that the word we sends a little spark through her.
She nods anyway. “We won’t lose.”
Kira studies her for a second longer, then inclines her head. “We’ll see,” she says. A faint, almost sly smile ghosts across her lips. “Try not to poison anyone else with a kiss until then. We have enough problems.”
Yumeko’s ears burn. “I’m going to push you into traffic,” she mutters.
“See?” Kira says calmly. “Distracted.”
Their cups are empty by the time the plan stops looping back on itself and settles into something solid in Yumeko’s mind: routes, covers, blind spots, lies.
Kira checks the time on her watch, the motion small and efficient. The spell of the café cracks a little.
“I should go,” she says. “The longer I’m off the grid, the more questions my parents will have. Or worse, the fewer.”
Yumeko grimaces. “Don’t want them to suddenly remember they have a daughter?”
“Exactly,” Kira says dryly.
For a moment, neither of them moves. The corner of the café feels too small, too bright, like the world outside will swallow this entire conversation the second they stand up.
Yumeko pushes back from the table first. “So that’s it?” she asks. “We just go back as if nothing happened?”
“We go back like we’re smarter than everyone else in the room,” Kira says. She stands too, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from her sweater. The gesture is pure habit—leftover from blazers and student council meetings. “When the semester starts, you and I are exactly who we’ve always been. Publicly.”
“And privately?” Yumeko asks.
Kira’s gaze catches hers, steady. “Privately, we’re on the same side until the school board falls,” she says. “After that…”
She lets the thought trail off. It’s too far ahead to gamble on now.
Kira steps out of the booth. As she passes Yumeko, their arms brush—barely, the lightest contact of fabric, not skin. It’s nothing that would register to anyone watching.
It feels like a spark anyway.
Yumeko doesn’t turn to follow her immediately. She watches Kira’s reflection instead in the window: the way she walks to the door like it’s just another exit, just another night, just another city she’s slipping through.
Kira pauses with her hand on the handle and looks back over her shoulder.
“I’ll see you at St. Dominic’s,” she says, quiet but sure. No nickname. No goodbye. Just that.
Yumeko’s mouth curves. “Try not to get bored without me,” she replies.
Kira’s lips twitch, the tiniest hint of that almost-smile. Then she’s gone, the bell above the door chiming once, bright and ordinary, as the street swallows her.
For a second, it really does feel like the whole meeting could have been a hallucination.
The empty booth and the cooling cups say otherwise.
The train back feels different from the one that brought her in.
Tokyo still streaks past the windows in the same smears of light, but Yumeko’s reflection looks…crowded. Her own face, Kawamoto’s warnings, Ray’s smirk, her mother’s absence, the list of names in Kira’s neat handwriting.
And Kira herself, without the blazer and the blue lipstick—just a girl in a dark sweater, freckles catching warm light, saying Just us like it’s a tactical move and not a promise.
Yumeko leans her forehead briefly against the cool glass, then sits back and slips her hand under her shirt, fingers finding the thin chain they’re always searching for.
She pulls the pendant out into the dim carriage light.
The chip is small and heavy in her palm, the gold catching every stray glint as the train speeds through the city. Her mother’s. A relic from the days when the Kakegurui club was just a game between students and not the seed of a board that decided who lived and who died.
Yumeko turns it between her fingers, the familiar weight grounding her.
Somewhere out there, if Ray wasn’t lying, her mother is breathing under a different name, in a different room, hiding from the people whose names are printed on that list Kira slid across the café table.
Somewhere back in Tokyo, another child of that club—Arkadi Timurov’s daughter—is planning how to rip their parents’ world apart from the inside.
Yumeko should be thinking about the school board. About routes, blind spots, and covers. About Kawamoto’s face when she sneaks back in and pretends this was just a normal night out.
Instead, her mind keeps drifting back to a corner booth. To freckles that weren’t supposed to exist. The way Kira said, “No one can know," as if she were afraid of what would happen if someone did.
To the fact that for the first time since that hallway, their secret wasn’t just the poison or the kiss.
It was this: they chose each other as partners in a war they’re not supposed to be fighting.
Yumeko closes her fingers around the chip until the edges bite into her skin.
“I’ll find you,” she thinks at the memory of her mother. “And I’ll ruin them.”
A beat later, she adds, almost grudgingly, in the privacy of her own head: And I can’t wait to see what she does—Kira, back in her student council uniform, wearing her signature blue lipstick like it's her armor, walking those halls like a loaded gun everyone thinks they control.
She shifts the chip onto the back of her thumb.
The motion is muscle memory now; she’s done this trick since before she understood what her parents were really playing at. A flick, a snap, and the gold disc lifts into the air, spinning fast enough that the engraved sides blur into one.
Heads or tails. Past or future. Mother alive or dead. Board intact or broken.
Kira as an ally.
Or as something else entirely.
The chip arcs, flashes once in the carriage light, and drops into her waiting palm.
Yumeko doesn’t look.
She curls her fingers around it before she can see which face is staring up at her, holding onto the uncertainty like it’s part of the thrill.
“When the semester starts,” she murmurs, too soft for anyone else to hear, “we play for real.”
The train dives into a tunnel. For a moment, her reflection disappears into pure black.
When the light returns, Yumeko is still there, eyes brighter than before, the chip hidden in her fist.
The game hasn’t started yet.
But the bet is placed, and she’s already all in.