Chapter 2: Emperor of Wrath: Chapter 2

Half an hour ago:

The summer that I was thirteen, our garden was beset by a plague of rabbits. The furry little fuckers destroyed it, eating every single carrot, every lettuce leaf, every radish…even the flowers my mother loved so much.

For a while there, Tak, Mal, and I—often Hana, too—would join the groundskeeper Mr. Coughlin up on the roof of the gardening cottage with a .22 each, and pick them off whenever we caught sight of them.

I don’t hate rabbits. They’re cute. They’re cuddly. They’re dancing and singing in every fucking Disney movie out there. But a thief is a thief, and these little shits were robbing us, not only of vegetables and flowers, but of the happiness those things brought my mother. So we spent hours shooting those goddamn bunnies all day long until the sun went down.

But they kept coming back. They always came back.

Then one day, Mr. Coughlin brought in an old army buddy of his, a grizzled, swarthy man we only knew as Rafe.

Rafe didn’t come to play.

He came to commit bunny fucking genocide.

I learned more about taking care of business from Rafe in the one week he spent at our estate than I had in the thirteen previous years of my life. First, he set traps outside every damn rabbit hole: huge cages with one-way doors. He baited them and left little trails of bait down into the holes. But the real fuck-you to the rabbits was that Rafe kept pet snakes.

Big, scary, snakes.

Snakes that he’d trained to slither into burrows and either eat or chase out every little furry thief they found. One by one, every burrow got visited by a hungry snake and would then empty out in a rush, straight into one of Rafe’s cages.

Then he’d drown them all at once in the pond.

That’s how you catch a thief. You bait them. If necessary, you scare them out. Then you trap them and fucking drown them.

Which is precisely why I’ve to the Kildare estate tonight: to spring the trap I’ve set.

The first step was reaching out to Cillian, with whom I did some business in England a few years ago before he moved to New York, to wish his wife an early happy birthday. Cillian, in turn, mentioned that he was throwing Una a birthday bash, and would I care to pop by if I was in New York?

Why, abso-fucking-lutely. How very kind of you, Cillian.

I already knew about the party. But parties like this require invitations. And there was no fucking way I was going to miss this one.

The next step was laying the bait. Ansel Albrecht, a sneaky little shit involved in the German mafia, isn’t usually someone I’d wipe shit off my shoe with. But Ansel made the fatal error of coming to owe me a favor once, and this was the perfect time to cash it in.

So I had Ansel reach out to Damian Nikolayev, my particular rabbit’s freakish little white-haired friend, and feed him some bullshit about a Spanish Inquisition artifact, and how he’d owe Damian a favor should he be able to retrieve it for him. And, wouldn’t you know it, that mask just happened to be temporarily just outside the city, at Cillian Kildare’s Connecticut estate.

How incredible.

It’s all lies, of course. The mask belongs to a creepy fucking collector in Austria who has it mounted on the wall of his even creepier sex dungeon. But Damian is a greedy little shit, and he took the bait.

I allow myself a small smile as I snag a flute of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray. I survey the garden party as I appreciate Cillian’s excellent taste in bubbly, imagining this party is assembled for me, not Una Kildare.

Not to celebrate a birthday, but to congratulate me on a successful hunt. On finally wrapping my fingers around her fucking throat, looking her in the eye, and knowing as I inhale her fear and defeat that I’ve won.

No one steals from me.

Ever.

If this had simply been about money, maybe I would have tired of this chase by now, and simply hired professionals to bring me the thief’s head in a fucking burlap bag.

But not with what Annika stole. And certainly not with how she stole it.

I take another sip of champagne, filling my lungs with the clean air of the Connecticut countryside.

I’ve been spending too much time in New York lately.

It’s not that I necessarily dislike it there. It’s fun, it’s wild, and I know how to bend it to my will. I don’t even mind the games we’ve been slowly playing with the Russian Bratva families, trying to muscle in on their territory ever-so-delicately as Sota expands into New York.

It’s come with other perks, too, like slowly getting to know my half-sister, Fumi, not to mention the biological father I spent most of my life believing was dead.

Thirty-five years ago, my mother Astrid, a young aristocratic Norwegian woman, went to study abroad in Kyoto, Japan. There, she fell for—and had a torrid affair with—a man named Hideo Mori.

But Hideo wasn’t just her wild college romance; he was the head of the fearsome and powerful Mori-kai Yakuza family. My mother loved him, but she was also scared of him, or at least of the life that would come with him. So when she accidentally became pregnant with me, she ended things with Hideo, left Japan, and returned home to Norway to have me.

She never even told my father that she was pregnant.

But absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. And so few years after I was born my mother went back to Japan. She found Hideo, I suppose with the plan to see if she could woo him away from the Yakuza life, and then tell him that he had a son.

Her plan didn’t work, and a few weeks later, she came home, certain that Hideo would never in fact leave the Yakuza.

She also came back pregnant again.

With twins.

A year later, right after my brother Takeshi and my sister Hana were born, Hideo finally found what he never saw with my mother: a way out of the Yakuza. He married a woman named Bella, fathered my half-sister Fumi, and chose to leave the criminal world behind. He changed their name, moved to the US, and until recently, I thought he’d died in Japan ages ago.

I loved my mother, and I understand why she took me away from Kyoto and from a father who lived and breathed the Yakuza.

But you can’t change your DNA. I was born of Yakuza blood, and when I was eighteen, against Astrid’s wishes, I traveled to Japan to explore that side of my heritage.

That’s when I met Sota.

When he heard that a half-Japanese kid raised in England was poking around Kyoto looking for information on a man named Hideo, he sought me out. I’ll never forget the day he kicked in the door to my hotel room, yanked up my sleeve, saw the birthmark there in the shape of a crescent moon, and immediately embraced me like a long-lost son.

Sota and my father had been best friends. Like me, Sota thought Hideo had been killed trying to leave the Yakuza years before. So he took me in, and after a single day dipping my toes into the world of the Yakuza, I was hooked.

A few months later, Mal, my adoptive brother from back home, moved out to join me in Japan. Two years later, after our mother died, Takeshi and Hana came out, too.

The rest is history.

Like I said, you can’t change your blood. I was born into this. It just took me eighteen years to find it.

Through Sota, I learned about the sheer power of the Mori-kai empire, and the weight the name still carried. I joined the ranks of the Akiyama-kai and rose to be one of Sota’s most trusted captains.

He even told me that his ultimate goal was to see the rebirth of the Mori-kai, under me, to whom his own empire had once pledged allegiance.

My mood falters as I consider that that day might be coming sooner than expected. Sota has stage three lung cancer.

The miniscule silver lining is that he’s been in New York for much of his treatment. But it’s still brutal to watch one of the strongest men I’ve ever known brought to his knees by a cowardly fucking disease like cancer.

But I digress. Tonight is for celebrating, not lamenting.

Because tonight, I will finally catch the little thief who drugged me and stole from me. Tonight, my trap will be sprung, and when I wrap my hand around her throat, I’m going to fucking squeeze. Hard.

As if on cue, a flash of red flickers in my peripheral vision. I turn, and the dark, dangerous smile on my jaw widens as my fingers tighten on the stem of the champagne flute.

Just like every time I lay eyes on Annika Brancovich, the swirling, intoxicatingly lethal cocktail of hatred and desire explodes through my veins.

There’s a reason she got the drop on me that night five years ago. The drugs she slipped into my drink didn’t hurt, of course, but after five years reflecting on what happened, I know it’s because she got my guard down.

Because as much as I fucking hate Annika…as much as I’d like to tie concrete to her feet and drown her like a warren full of thieving rabbits…there is zero denying the fact that whenever I lay eyes on her, my cock has other ideas.

Ideas like savaging her. Pinning her to the dirty ground and burying every thick inch of me into every tight little hole she has. Making her scream as her eager little cunt milks my dick. Or watching her moan and drool as I fuck her throat.

My fantasies involving this woman, in case I wasn’t clear, do not involve making love to her. Or even “having sex” with her.

They involve dominating her in the fullest extent of the word. They involve her on her knees, whimpering and begging and submitting to me, with my cum glistening on her skin.

My jaw tightens.

Fucking hell.

I hate that this is where my mind goes with this woman. It’s not as if I see her often—she has, after all, spent the last five years running from me. But when we do cross paths, even momentarily, or at a distance like this, it’s the same thing every time.

There’s no denying that Annika is attractive. Half-American, half-Serbian, with high, full breasts and an ass to sink your teeth into. She’s also tall for a woman.

I like that.

I’m pushing six and a half feet, which makes me tall in the West and a fucking giant in Japan. And smaller women have never appealed to me. They just seem so….

Breakable.

Annika, however, is close to six feet. And although she’s on the thin side, probably from her years running and surviving as best she could, she seems…not so breakable.

Like I could manhandle her.

Pin her down.

Fuck her savagely.

I keep my eyes on my prey as she plucks a flute of champagne from a passing tray and then nods curiously at Neve Kildare, for some strange reason.

Oh. She’s trying to fit in.

Play the role all you fucking like, little rabbit, I think darkly.

Soon, you’ll be MINE.

Part of me wants to make my move right now. Fuck trying to catch her mid-theft of an item that isn’t even in the country. I could do it right here. Scene or not, Cillian and I have old business together. I’m sure he wouldn’t begrudge me doing what’s necessary to punish someone who’s wronged me the way Annika has.

But just as I’m putting the pieces together of what happens after I wrap my fingers around Annika’s pretty little throat, I feel a presence at my back.

Frowning, I start to turn. Then I go rigid.

“Sota-san,” I mutter quietly, bowing in confusion before my eyes lock on those of my mentor. He waves away the two personal guards standing beside him, and I stare at him incredulously.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Like I said, Sota is both mentor and like a father to me. Family. Around our men, and in public, yes, I will always give him the honor and respect that he deserves and is expected within the regimented, ultra-traditional world of the Yakuza. But in private? We can speak a bit more informally.

Sota smiles wryly at me. “I could ask you the same⁠—”

He suddenly coughs violently. I grimace, moving toward him, but he waves me off, hacking up another lung before he wipes his mouth with a piece of silk and tucks it back in his tuxedo.

“Walk with me, my friend,” he mutters quietly. For the first time, I notice the lines drawn darker on his face, and uncustomary worry in his eyes.

I frown, nodding as I take his arm. The two of us slowly begin to walk across the manicured lawn, past the garden party and around the side of Cillian’s estate.

“I’ve always told you that a leader does what is necessary, Kenzo. Being a king does not mean you serve yourself. You serve those you are charged with leading. Being a king is not about clinging to power but about earning it every single day and showing those under you why you deserve that power.”

I nod my head. “I know.”

Again… One day, this will be me. Sota has no children of his own, and even when he thought Hideo was dead, he adhered to the oath he’d made to the Mori-kai decades previously. The Akiyama-kai is an empire in and of itself. But its allegiance, even today, is to the Mori-kai.

Its allegiance is to me, and Sota has spent years teaching me and molding me into the king I’ll need to be.

I turn to him, smiling gently. “You should be resting back in the city. I’m fairly certain you’re not supposed to be up and about in the middle of a treatment cycle.”

“This is important, Kenzo.”

“Well, you also could have just called⁠—”

“This warrants a face-to-face meeting.”

The lines on his face. The haunted sadness in his eyes. The fear…

“Aoki is dead, Kenzo.”

Something twists hard in my chest.

Aoki Juro is the head of the Juro-kai, a tribute family to the Akiyama-kai. Aoki and I met about fifteen years ago, when I was new to the Yakuza world, and he was the newly crowned nineteen-year-old king of his late father’s empire.

We’ve been friends almost ever since.

I stare at Sota, understanding the sadness in his eyes. I’m not the only “stray” that Sota has mentored. He’s a collector of lost souls. And when, like me, Aoki lost his father, it was Sota who coached him how to step up and be king.

“What?!” I hiss.

“There was an altercation in New York two hours ago. Aoki and some of his men crossed paths with some of Kir Nikolayev’s men. Guns were drawn. Aoki was killed on the scene…”

“Fuck!” I snarl viciously. “Who⁠—”

Sota interrupts me, his voice cold and brittle. “And Damian Nikolayev, Kir’s nephew and heir, is on life support.”

I go still.

Oh, shit.

Sota looks more worried than I’ve ever seen him.

“Whether the nephew lives or dies, Kenzo… This is bad,” he says quietly. “Very bad. As in, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand thereby setting off World War One bad.”

I grit my teeth, turning away from him, my eyes stabbing through the window beside us and into the house. My gaze lands on a familiar head of red, and my eyes narrow as I watch my prey sashay through the party.

“An agreement has been reached,” Sota says, pulling my attention back, “to avoid war with the Bratva.”

“Why the fuck are we avoiding that?” I snarl.

Sota shoots me a hard look. “War is seldom the answer, Kenzo. And this bullshit between our two families is…untenable. It cannot continue. Aoki was one of our best men. Damian is Kir’s fucking heir. If this comes to war, it will be bloody, and there will not be rules.”

I slam back the rest of my champagne as Sota shakes his head sadly.

“War cannot happen, Kenzo.” I stare at him, livid. “Don’t look at me like that,” he grunts. “It’s not that I’m too old or too weak.”

I smile wryly. “That is the very last thing I’m thinking.”

“Good,” he smiles. “Because I can still best you.”

My own smile turns grim as I frown. “So… What’s the agreement?”

Sota’s jaw sets. “It’s going to mean changing your plans for the evening. I know why you’re here, Kenzo. I know what you’ve set up.”

My mouth tightens. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re⁠—”

“I’m in no mood for games, Kenzo,” he sighs. “You’re the son I never had. All due respect to Hideo, you’re my heir. You’ll take both my empire and his and turn them into your own. But that can’t happen if there’s war.”

“Sota—”

“Kir has no sons, which is why his nephew Damian is his heir. He has no daughters, either. But like me, Kir took in a stray…”

When it hits me, my whole body tightens. My eyes turn glacial as I stare at him.

“No.”

Sota nods. “Yes,” he says quietly. “I’m asking you to do what is⁠—”

“It’s a fucking no, Sota.”

“While I am still breathing, Kenzo,” he snarls viciously, “you will obey my wishes.”

I grit my teeth and bow stiffly. “Of course, Sota-san,” I growl.

He exhales a long, stuttering breath. “I am sorry, Kenzo. I truly am.”

Slowly, I turn to look through the window, watching as Annika makes her way through the party, her white dress clinging to her every curve, highlighting the modelesque length of her legs.

Watching the swish of her hair as she turns to smile at another guest. The bat of her lashes over her lying eyes. The curl of her poisonous mouth.

“This is the only way we’ll avoid war,” Sota growls quietly. “You and Annika Brancovich will marry. That’s final.”

My lips curl dangerously.

Then I think of Rafe.

Straight out attacking didn’t work. Baiting helped to draw the rabbits out of their burrow but didn’t finish the job.

It took sending a snake inside to truly end things.

My eyes lock on Annika through the window as she blithely sips her champagne.

Hello, little rabbit. My name is Snake. And I am going to eat you fucking ALIVE.

Ten minutes later, I’m dragging her out of the study, yanking her down the stairs, setting her in front of a crowd of clapping onlookers and announcing to the world that we’re engaged.

I have her.

I’ve trapped her.

So why the fuck do I feel like the one who’s been caught?