Page 122 of Emperor of Wrath

Like, a lot.

“Not Kenzo’s,” Mal growls quietly. His brow is furrowed as he stoops down, running his fingers over scuff marks on the stone patio. “Kenzo got dragged over…here,” he murmurs, moving quickly to one of the porches that ring the courtyard. He squats next to a post, pointing to some scuff marks on it. “He was tied up here. There’s a little blood, see?” He points a little higher up on the post. “Tak said they hit Kenzo in the back of the head. That’s what this blood is. It’s not…” He turns to nod his chin at the huge stain in the middle of the courtyard.

“Valon,” I hiss venomously through clenched teeth.

Mal nods. “Yeah, I think that was him.” He frowns. “Shit. That’s…a lot of blood.”

The stain becomes a wet looking drag mark, like a body being pulled away to one side. We follow the trail, my heart thumping at the prospect of walking around the corner and finding the monster cut in half. When we hit a wall with bloody scrabble marks streaked up and over it, my brow darkens.

He got out too.

I glance at Mal, who is nodding.

“My guess is, they left Leka for dead. After he was alone, he made it over here and got away over this wall.”

I swallow thickly, twice. A second later, I glance over at Mal to see him looking at me curiously.

“I want him dead,” I hiss coldly.

He nods. “I think you probably already got your wish. That’s a crazy amount of blood on the ground. He might’ve managed to get over the wall, but he didn’t get far.” He peers at me closely. “Leka’s gotta be dead, Annika. He might’ve made it down the street, or across the road on the other side of this wall to hide in a ditch. But he has to have bled out by now.”

A burning desire to go find the body and cut out the heart consumes me. But there’s something else I crave even more than that.

I need to find Kenzo.

I can’t think about Valon right now, or my revenge if he is somehow still clinging to life nearby.

Right now, I have to find my husband.

“They’re not far.”

Mal is crouched down, pointing to a cigarette butt in the white stones of the Zen garden. It’s still glowing faintly.

The bastards who took Kenzo are still close.

Which means he is too.

A searing pain I’ve rarely felt before stabs into me. It’s the pain I felt the night my family died. The night I thought I’d lost Taylor. It’s the pain I felt not so long ago, when she was in harm’s way and I almost lost her all over again.

The realization hits me like a slap.

I know what this pain is.

It’s the fear of losing love: real, genuine love. The sort of love I’ve tried to shield myself from since I was eighteen. The sort of love I now feel deep in my bones and in my soul for Kenzo.

I am not going to lose that.

I’m not going to lose him.

“How tight are you with the local authorities?”

Mal nods, reading my mind. “Tight. I’ll call our guys at the local station. There’s only so many roads in and out of Kyoto. They can set up some bullshit drunk driver roadblocks and scan for Gacaferi and his men.”

I nod brusquely and yank out my phone. “Thank you,” I mumble as I tap on the contact name and bring the phone to my ear.

“What is it, two in the fucking morning there?” Freya grumbles. It’s around one in the afternoon back in New York, which means she’s probably just getting up.

“I need you to hack into the Kyoto municipal CCTV system,” I blurt.

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