Page 10 of Emperor of Havoc

“Part of the initiation,” Kaiju growls darkly. “Part ofmyinitiation. I was…” He turns toward me, tilting his head to the side in a way that might be amusement or might equally be menace.

“Testingthis one.”

“Okay, well, you’re needed back there.”

Kaiju shrugs, holding the baseball bat over his muscled shoulder.

“Fine.”

“What about him?” Mal grunts, nodding at me.

Kaiju turns to leer at me through his blank, emotionless mask. The seconds tick by.

“He’s done,” he finally growls. “I’ll kick his ass out.”

I shudder as his huge hand jerks out and grabs my upper arm. His grip is rough and unmerciful as he turns and starts to drag me after him across the compound. My legs feel like jelly as I stumble after him.

Back inside, he leads me down a few dark hallways until we reach the same side door I entered through before. I’m still shaking everywhere as he hauls me out the door and finally releases me.

He doesn’t move. He just stands there, baseball bat draped across the back of his neck, his arms over it and his head to the side as that blank, black stare stabs into my very soul.

“Playtime is done for now,prey,” he growls quietly, a slightly amused tone in his voice.

I inhale sharply as he moves right into me, looming over me.

“But don’t think for asecondthat this is over…”

And deep down, I know he’s right.

3

KATARINA

“Sometimes I wonderif I’ve failed you, raising you to be stronger than our world permits.”

My father’s words settle heavily into the space between us. He’s seated across from me in his office, his hands folded neatly on the oak desk as if we were discussing something as inconsequential as a shipping route, instead of my entire future, and our family’s.

I hate every second of it.

Kolya Ishida doesn’t say things lightly, not to anyone, and certainly not to me. He wields words like weapons, precisely and deliberately. There’s something softer in his tone just now, a rare glimpse of the man beneath the steel exterior. Then it’s gone as quickly as it came, his storm-gray eyes pinning me in place with cold resolve.

Many people find my father confusing, because they like to put others into boxes that are easy to distinguish or label, and Kolya Ishida defies description.

Part Russian, part Japanese, Papa is a complex man. For one, his reputation is one based on brutality and savagery: that’s followed him ever since he returned to Japan to claim what was his.

Papa’s mom, my grandmother Kiko, was the daughter of the Ishida-kaiOyabun.When she eschewed her arranged marriage because she had fallen in love with a Russian man, my great-grandfather banished her for loving a man from another world and culture and cut her out of the family. And then Grandpa Leo’s Bratva family did the same to him for the same reason.

So they moved to Vladivostok, in the harshness of Northeastern Russia, where they lived as outcasts as they raised my father and my uncle Jin, straddling a cultural divide between old-school Japan and old-school Russia.

When Papa's parents died when he was just a teenager, Papa took matters into his own hands. He came back to Japan, not as a tourist, nor as a beggar looking for a handout from his estranged family.

As a dark angel of vengeance.

Papa took on the full might of the Ishida-kai, hacking away at them little by little until he finally went head-to-head with his own grandfather and killed him for throwing my grandmother out into to the cold.

Papa seized both his grandfather’s sword and his empire and honed them to a deadly force, turning the Ishida-kai into the most powerful Yakuza family in Tokyo.

Until the fucking Mori-kai decided to branch out from Kyoto.

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