Page 25 of Emperor of Wrath

I walk her down to her waiting car, hug her, then head back upstairs to my dad. When we’re alone, he eyes me coolly with the look of a man who’s spent his life reading between the lines.

“You want to talk about what you really came over here to discuss, before you realized Fumi was here?”

I chuckle. “You can take the man out of the Yakuza…”

Hideo smiles wryly. “My sake bomb days are over. But if you wanted to pour two glasses of that scotch over by the window, I’d join you.”

I pour us two splashes of the Yamazaki eighteen-year-old, neat, and walk back to my father, taking a seat opposite him and clinking my glass to his.

“Kanpai,” he murmurs, taking a sip. “What’s on your mind, Kenzo?”

I clear my threat. “I wanted to ask you about marriage.”

He chuckles, and then goes still.

“You’re serious?”

I nod.

“You’ve met someone?”

I exhale. “In a sense.”

There are certain things that come to mind when Annika enters my thoughts. Things like vengeance and retribution. Things like punishment.

Things too like fucking her hard, and without mercy. Owning her. Dominating and subjugating her. Taking her every way a man can take a woman.

Not once—ever—have I imagined marrying the fucking woman.

To be fair, it’s not a thought or desire I’ve ever had for anyone else. The darkness in me doesn’t allow for anything so normal inside my black veins.

“I didn’t know?—”

“Neither did I,” I growl bitterly, sipping my drink.

My father nods sagely. “Ahh. It’s like that.”

Yeah, he knows what this is.

“It is,” I grunt back. “But my question,” I barrel on, “isn’t about contractual mafia marriage. It’s about marriage itself.” I consider how to approach this delicately. “When you met Bella?—”

“I just knew.”

He says it without a single second of hesitation. Then he quickly frowns.

“I don’t mean any disrespect toward your mother. I cared for Astrid, a great deal.”

I smile quietly. “I know.”

“If she’d told me about you, that second time she came to Japan…” He shakes his head. “I think things might have been different. But I knew I never had all of her. I knew she kept some part of herself back. And I think I did the same in response.”

“She wasn’t your person,” I mummer. “Bella was.”

My father frowns, clearly unsure how to answer that without offending me.

“You won’t ever hurt my feelings talking about this, you know,” I say quietly. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you were her person either. If you were, she would have made it work. She would have stayed and told you about us.”

Hideo looks away, nodding and taking another sip of scotch.

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