Page 39 of Emperor of Wrath

Suck it, Kenzo.

There’s a famous scene in The Watchmen where one of the characters, a vigilante named Rorschach, gets put in prison. At first, the other prisoners think he’s an easy target, being a loner and on the smaller side. Then he beats the hell out of a huge prisoner.

After that, Rorschach turns to the other prisoners and tells them that he isn’t locked in with them. They’re locked in with him.

That’s how I think about my upcoming wedding to Kenzo. We might be forced together. But it’s not me who’s trapped with him. It’s going to be him trapped with me.

And trust me, he’s going to regret ever letting this go this far.

I sip on some bubbles, smug in the double whammy of both snubbing Kenzo and making something happen for him, business-wise, that he wasn’t able to pull off himself.

I knew I recognized Matsui when I saw him in here, it just took me a minute to place where and how I did. Maybe a year ago, I was looking into dirt on the CEO of a company Kir was…aggressively pursuing. It’s part of my gig: if negotiations stall or flame out, I find other, “creative” ways of motivating someone to sell or agree to terms.

Aka blackmail.

I tailed this particular CEO to Paris, and then to a gorgeous older home in Rue Veron, in the Pigalle district near Montmartre.

The CEO was married, to a woman, and very much monogamously. And yet the house he was visiting was an elegant, high-end brothel of sorts with a specialty dealing in very young, very pretty men.

Needless to say, after watching him visit this place four times in five days, I got exactly what I wanted out of negotiations. But I also have a fairly photographic memory. And over the course of that five-day stakeout, there were a few other exceptionally important looking men who visited that house.

One of them was Matsui Aki.

Yes, I just gave Kenzo a win. But it was at the cost of losing to me. And that’s where it matters.

I’m leaning against the bar, feeling quite pleased with myself, when suddenly, the rug gets yanked out from under me.

Two words spoken in his horrible, bone-chilling voice are all it takes to turn my skin numb and deaden me inside. To push me right back into that deep, dark hole he kept me in for so many years.

“Hello, puppet.”

The world goes cold. Numbness and a rabid desire to block it all out and run away screaming suffuses every corner of my being. But I can’t run. Can’t scream. Can’t breathe.

Can’t escape.

Slowly, I turn. My heart twists violently, and a shudder ripples down my spine as my eyes lock with Valon’s.

Instantly, I’m plunged right back into the darkness.

I was twenty-two when Valon Leka first crossed my path. I’d just met Freya, and we hadn’t yet hit our stride in making money, or even surviving very well. We were living job-to-job, mostly just stealing to eat and have a place to sleep inside.

That’s when we met Valon, the head of The Brotherhood, an Albanian crime syndicate with cult-like tendencies. Valon hired us for a job—our biggest one yet. When we pulled it off, he heaped us—me, mostly—with praise, and even let us keep half of what we’d stolen instead of the agreed-upon ten percent.

We did another job, and it was the same thing. The third one, he let us keep almost the entire take, and heaped us with even more praise. Then came the gifts and favors. The clothes, and fancy dinners, and fun cars.

Looking back, I know now that what that was is called grooming. I was twenty-two, had no family or place to call home, and I’d been running for years.

Valon, meanwhile, was forty-five. He was charming, good-looking, powerful, and promised to take care of me. When you’ve had to take care of yourself for years and years, letting someone else take the reins is really hard to say no to.

So I didn’t say no. Not to the gifts, or favors, or Valon taking me out to dinner or the ballet or to fancy clubs, just the two of us. I didn’t say no to him bringing me back to his house, and then to his bedroom.

I didn’t say anything at all, actually. He did what he wanted, heedless of my thoughts on the matter.

And I let it all happen, even when I hated it to the point of holding back tears, because I felt like this was the best I could do. I had nothing, and Valon gave me something. I never once tried to tell myself it was love. But in my shattered, hastily glued-back-together state, I figured whatever he was giving me was as close to romantic love as I’d ever get.

I stayed with him for three cold, miserable, dark years. Years I don’t really remember, because I’ve blocked them out. Years that Freya and I don’t talk about. Years where I was alive, but not really.

And he called me his puppet.

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