Page 9 of Emperor of Wrath

What is happening.

What the fuck is happen?—

“And now, without any further ado…” Kenzo smiles like a dragon as he turns to level his eviscerating gaze at me. “It is my distinct pleasure to introduce you all to Annika Brancovich…”

His eyes turn to daggers, and I swear I feel them slice into me.

“My fiancée.”

The floor drops out from under me as my lungs seize up and my vision goes black.

What.

The.

FUCK.

2

KENZO

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.

---