CAN'T HIDE IT

' IF I BURN, I RULE '

Not to run. But because it was time to expand.

Ghost raised a brow when she told him.

"You wanna leave the safest place we've had in a year?"

"I don't want safe anymore," she said. "I want controlled. I want rooted. I want to put our name on something that can't be erased or hunted."

Ghost watched her like she was evolving right in front of him.

"You trying to build a home or a kingdom?"

Hayamei looked him dead in the eyes.

"Both."

⸻

They moved into a small house in a forgotten Louisiana backroad town.

Population: 942.

No one asked questions, and the post office was more gossip than government. Hayamei paid cash for the place and changed the locks the second they moved in.

It had two bedrooms, a wraparound porch, and a garage big enough to store four weapons crates.

Ghost started teaching a self-defense class at the rec center. Quiet, low-profile.

Hayamei started planting seeds—literal ones, in the backyard. Tomatoes. Onions. Basil. The kind of things they never had growing up.

But she also started asking around.

She met the women at the hair salon. Listened to what was missing in the town.

She met the store clerk who talked too fast but knew everybody's name. She met a former foster kid raising three boys by herself who needed help paying rent.

Hayamei didn't brag about her past.

She just moved.

Quietly.

Powerfully.

⸻

Within a month, she was organizing after-school pick-ups for single moms.

By the second month, she started a food drive out of the old church.

By the third month, people in town stopped calling her "that new girl" and started saying:

"If you need help, talk to Hay."

But her influence wasn't just charity—it was strategic. She was listening, learning, mapping out how power flowed in the town. Who controlled it. Who abused it.

She started buying properties under fake names. Run-down duplexes, abandoned diners, a warehouse near the edge of town. Each one served a future purpose.

⸻

One night, Ghost watched her come home with blueprints under her arm and dirt on her hands.

"You built something today?" he asked.

She nodded. "Bought a laundromat."

"We already have clean clothes."

"It's not for us. It's for the ones who don't."

He smiled. "You're becoming something dangerous."

She leaned in close. "No, Ghost. I always was."

⸻

They didn't sleep much anymore.

Between Na'Nami, the new responsibilities, and the paranoia building in the corners of Hayamei's mind, rest was rare.

But for the first time in a long time, she wasn't tired from fear.

She was tired from growing.

⸻