Page 34 of Siren's Gift

But his desire to be on the Council, to be first, wasn’t just a generational defect. Ichiro had emigrated with his family from Japan over fifty years ago. They arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs and remained poor throughout his childhood.

A bitterly cold winter robbed him of his youngest sister, who never recovered from a bout of pneumonia. She’d only been six when she died.

While losing a sibling must have been devastating to my grandfather, it was the Council’s lack of support for his family that corrupted him. He’d convinced himself that his sister would have survived if the Council had approved his family’s request for emergency help.

I wasn’t as convinced. To this day, pneumonia killed thousands of people each year. Fifty years ago, the odds of death were even greater, and she hadn’t been Gifted with a dragon yet.

Ichiro’s lifelong devastation over the loss also explained his reaction to my mother’s, his daughter’s, death. He likely saw the similarities and blamed anyone he could—including a defenseless baby—for what he considered an unnecessary death.

I wasn’t completely heartless; I felt a shred of sympathy for the old man, even after years of enduring his abuse. But most people didn’t turn into monsters when they lost their loved ones.

"Did you see the date in picture five?" Aaron asked.

I flipped to that image and clenched my jaw. How the hell had this experiment been going on for almost two years? Without me ever having a clue or hearing about missing dragonkind? Ichiro had only found success in the past few months, but too many test subjects had lost their sanity or even their lives.

Rage simmered inside me, and Jou roared in defiance. He wanted to kill my grandfather as much as I did. Maybe more. The severing was hurting his brethren or possibly even destroying their spirits if the cycle of torture went on for too long.

What none of these notes answered was how Ichiro had come up with this ridiculous concept of manufacturing crystals in the first place. How had he produced these final successful results? What was in the mysterious blue liquid he received from an unnamed source that made it all possible?

We didn’t have enough. Sure, there might be enough here to knock Ichiro down from his pedestal. Perhaps enough to convict?—

My blood chilled.

No…

I flipped through the photos again, then brought up the computer file containing the lab’s holding within the business ledger, confirming my suspicion.

Not a single document named Ichiro as the perpetrator. Not even as the owner of the lab. Everything was listed under Sato Enterprises, which sounded like a done deal, but Ichiro was cunning. He could easily spin this to fall on someone else, and I knew just who he would blame.

Me.

"Fuck!" I slammed my first down on my desk. The wood groaned and split beneath the force. Everything on the desk slid into the gap between the two halves and crashed to the floor.

Double fuck.

Keiko blinked at me over the debris. "Temper tantrum or muscle spasm?"

"We can’t use any of this."

"What? Why not?"

Aaron grimaced as he connected the dots. "Ichiro’s name isn’t listed anywhere. It’s all Sato Enterprises."

I rubbed a hand over my face, suddenly exhausted. We had made actual progress tonight, gotten further than most of the past month’s attempts combined. Now, all the extra hours and sleepless nights might have been for nothing.

"So what if his name isn’t listed?" Keiko frowned. "He owns Sato Enterprises."

"He’ll simply pass the blame on someone like me," I said.

"The Council isn’t that dumb. They’ll see through that. It’s a flimsy excuse." Keiko waved a hand dismissively. "Even if it was true, he should know what his employees are up to, right?"

"For anyone else, maybe, but Ichiro’s too well connected. The Council won’t risk it unless our evidence is ironclad. We need more." I ground my teeth together. "I have to go back in there before the meeting."

"Then I’m going with you," Keiko said.

"No."

"There’s no way you can get in and out without being seen," she argued.

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