Page 10 of Emperor of Wrath

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.

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