The next morning, sunlight filtered weakly through the blinds, turning the dust in Aki's apartment into drifting gold. She sat at her small kitchen table, hair still damp from her shower, scrolling through her messages. No new jobs yet. Only one text from an unknown number that still lingered on her screen:
"You shouldn't have burned it."
She stared at the words for a moment, then deleted the message.
It didn't matter. Whoever sent it would stop when they realized she wouldn't respond. They always did.
People talked about ghosts haunting the living. But sometimes, it was the living who haunted ghosts.
---
Aki drove to her shop. It was a small place wedged between a dry cleaner and a used electronics store — nothing special from the outside. A faded sign above the door read Sato Cleaners – No Mess Too Tough.
She unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and inhaled the faint scent of antiseptic. Her tools were laid out exactly as she'd left them. Everything in its place, precise, silent.
Aki found peace in order — because her past had been anything but.
There was a time when she didn't clean blood. She spilled it.
---
Five years ago, Tokyo.
The night smelled of rain and exhaust. Aki — then known by another name that no one remembered now — had stood in the middle of a warehouse not unlike the one she'd cleaned last night. Around her lay bodies. Forty men, maybe more. Gang members, thugs, killers. People who had thought they were predators until they met her.
Her black hair had clung to her face, her blade dripping red. The men she'd worked for — the Yamaguchi faction — had called her Kurokami no Onna, "The Woman with the Black Hair." She was the ghost they sent when diplomacy failed.
Her face had been seen by only a few. None of them lived to describe it.
That night, she'd walked away and never went back. No one chased her, because no one could find her.
In the morning, she cut her hair, burned her old clothes, and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.
Aki Sato was born the next day — quiet, clean, harmless.
---
The door chime rang softly, pulling her back to the present.
A man in his fifties stepped in. He looked ordinary — khaki jacket, nervous hands. But Aki could always tell when someone wasn't normal. It was in the way their eyes darted around, measuring exits.
"Can I help you?" she asked, her tone calm and professional.
"You're… Miss Sato?"
"Yes."
"I need your service. A cleanup job. My boss recommended you."
"Address?"
He hesitated. "He said to give it to you in person." He slipped her a folded note, hands shaking slightly.
Aki opened it. It was a warehouse address on the east side — and below it, written in small, neat handwriting:
"You've cleaned this place before."
She looked up. The man was already leaving.
---
That night, she went.
The address led her to the same seafood storage facility she had cleaned just 24 hours ago. The rain had washed away her footprints from before, but everything else looked unchanged. Except for one thing — the faint smell of smoke still hung in the air.
She stepped inside.
The concrete floor she had polished was once again darkened — not with blood this time, but with a symbol. Someone had painted a large circle in the center using red dye. Inside it, a single word:
"Remember."
Aki's eyes narrowed slightly, but her face stayed calm. She crouched down, touching the painted surface with a gloved hand. The dye was still wet. Whoever did this had been here recently.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown number again.
"Still spotless. You always were efficient."
She looked at the message, her expression unreadable. For most people, this would be a threat. For Aki, it was background noise.
She typed a single reply:
"If you want me dead, come clean it yourself."
Then she pocketed the phone and began scrubbing.
---
Two hours later, the circle was gone.
When she stepped out into the night air, the moonlight caught her reflection in a puddle — pale skin, sharp eyes, dark hair framing a face that looked almost serene. There was no trace of fear.
Aki didn't fear the past. She had lived through it.
She unlocked her van, sat behind the wheel, and stared ahead for a moment.
There were things people never knew about her — that she could move faster than most men could see, that she could silence a scream with one strike, that she could vanish into a crowd as easily as she erased blood from a floor.
No one knew because no one who saw her that way had ever survived.
She didn't clean because she wanted forgiveness. She cleaned because it kept her hands busy, because it stopped her from thinking too much about the night she killed forty men and walked away without a mark.
Now, someone out there knew. Someone remembered.
And if they remembered her face, that meant only one thing.
Soon, she'd have to clean again — not for money this time, but for silence.
---
When Aki returned home, she made tea and sat by the window again. The city lights shimmered like a sea of ghosts below her.
She felt no fear, no regret. Only a quiet readiness.
If her past had come looking for her, it would find her.
But it would not survive her.