Chapter 6
Yuki
Lying on the cold, hard concrete, I try to get shallow breaths past the agonizing pain in my chest.
My padded shirt feels like it’s crushing my broken ribs to dust.
How long has it been?
Two days? Three?
Whenever I’m left alone, I try to find a way out of the hangar, but all the doors are locked, and there are no windows.
A while ago, I heard cars and muted voices, and soon after, the sound of the private jet’s engines. As I listened to the aircraft take off, hope poured into my heart.
Did they leave?
My hope is short-lived, though. The heavy doors of the hangar roll open, and I suppress a whimper and begin to struggle to climb to my feet.
My left arm is useless, and my body is weak from the torture and not getting anything to eat.
They’ve only given me two bottles of water, but luckily, I’ve had some privacy when they allow me to use the restroom.
A dizzy spell makes my head feel woozy, and I shake it to try to clear my mind as I sway on my unstable legs.
“Let me know the instant the private jet lands in New York,” I hear Augusto say.
“Will do, boss,” Raffaele replies.
Just hearing Augusto’s voice makes panic bleed through my soul, and my heartbeat instantly speeds up.
As Augusto walks toward me, his eyes slowly drift up and down my body. “You look like shit. Ready to call your father?”
I shake my head while my quick breaths make my chest feel tight and as if icy shards are stabbing my lungs.
My legs give way beneath me, and I drop down to the cold concrete floor. The movement jars my body, causing more pain to shudder through me.
On the next breath, I can’t get any air in, and my panic spirals out of control.
Feeling like the padded shirt is suffocating the air from me and crushing my chest, I don’t think and begin to frantically struggle to take off my sweater.
When I finally get the fabric over my head, I’m so lightheaded, my vision goes black.
Gripping the padded shirt with my right hand, I can only pull the tight fabric up an inch or so, and not being able to get it off, I let out a strangled sob.
Augusto
What. The. Fuck.
For a few seconds, I’m not sure what I’m looking at, but I don’t have time to try to figure out what the fuck Tanaka is wearing, because he starts struggling to breathe.
“Christ!” I snap as I drop down beside him.
Not wanting him to die on us, I grab hold of the weird-looking shirt, and when I pull the fucking tight and thick fabric over his head, he lets out an agonizing cry that sends chills down my spine.
I drop the surprisingly heavy padded shirt on the ground and look at him to see if his breathing is better.
Before the thought can register that the cry sounds like a woman’s, my eyes lock on the sports bra covering feminine swells and hard nipples.
“Jesus Christ,” Raffaele gasps.
“She’s a fucking woman?!” I say, my tone sounding incredulous.
It takes a lot to catch me by surprise, but as my eyes rake over all the bruises on the much smaller torso, now that the padded shirt is off, an emotion I haven’t felt before creeps into my chest. Something akin to remorse, but much, much worse.
What have I done?
Once the shock begins to lessen, I notice Tanaka has passed out, and my eyes return to the sports bra and horrible bruises over her ribs, chest, and shoulders.
“Fuck,” I growl. I have no other words to express how I feel in this moment.
In the Cosa Nostra, we don’t torture women. Ever.
If we’re faced with a female enemy, we usually give them a quick death with a bullet to the head.
Recovering quicker than me, Raffaele says, “Her shoulder is dislocated.” He crouches down on the other side of her. “Should I put it back in place while she’s unconscious?”
I nod and slowly rise to my full height, trying to process the shock as quickly as possible.
Watching Raffaele fix the woman’s shoulder, I wonder who the hell she is and why she didn’t say anything.
Jesus. We’ve been beating a woman for the past couple of days.
I press my hand to my stomach when nausea rolls through my gut.
“Do you think she’s Masato’s daughter? Maybe the fucker didn’t want everyone to know he doesn’t have a son?” Raffaele asks as he stands up.
Before I can answer him, the woman regains consciousness. She lets out a whimper, and the moment she realizes the padded shirt is off and we’re staring at her, she panics.
She tries to drag herself away with her right arm while shaking her head, and then, for the first time, she speaks.
“Please.” The word is weak but filled with terror. “Please.”
When I take a step toward her, she lets out another scared whimper, shaking her head wildly. “Don’t rape me. Please.”
I stop dead in my tracks and quickly say, “We won’t, and if you’d told us sooner that you’re a goddamn woman, we wouldn’t have hurt you.” I crouch down on my haunches to make myself smaller as I meet her terrified eyes. “Who are you?”
Tears begin to spill over her cheeks, and she slumps down onto her back, her breathing shallow and fast. “I’m nobody. Just a shadow.”
Her words are so soft I would’ve missed them if I weren’t looking at her face.
“Are you related to Masato?” I ask.
She shakes her head again, and even though we’ve worked her over pretty hard and she’s clearly out of it, I can see her mind working behind her brown eyes. “I’m just a random woman pretending to be his son.”
“If she’s a body double, it explains why she didn’t answer the questions,” Raffaele comments. “A body double won’t have any information. She was probably terrified we’d just off her if we found out she’s not Ryo Tanaka.”
The woman turns her head to look at my underboss and nods at him, and finally admits, “I have no information. Please, let me go.”
Jesus, she’s in no condition to walk out of here. She won’t even make it to the door.
I shake my head as I stare at the woman who’s barely able to breathe where she’s lying on the ground.
I move closer, and when I slip my arms beneath her, she begins to shake her head frantically. “Please. Don’t!”
She’s only able to slap my neck with her right hand because her left arm will be out of commission for a while.
“We’re going to drop you off at the hospital,” I tell her, so she’ll stop worrying.
She gives me a wary look, fear for me darkening her eyes, then she glances at her hoodie.
Right. She probably feels exposed in the bra.
I reach for the oversized hoodie and pull the fabric over her head. She pushes her right arm through the sleeve but keeps her left one tucked against her black and blue middle.
I pick her up, and now that the shirt is off, she weighs practically nothing.
A crippling wave of guilt fills my chest, and as I carry her out of the hangar toward the SUV, I glance down at her swollen face.
She did a fucking good job of impersonating a man, and even though her face still looks masculine, especially with the bruises, it doesn’t make me feel any less ashamed.
It doesn’t matter what she looks like. She’s a woman, and we beat her to within an inch of her life.
Slowly, the guilt keeps growing, and I know when my mother hears about this, she’s going to be fucking disappointed in me.
“Fuck,” I snap angrily, which has the woman’s body jerking in my arms. My eyes snap down to her fear-filled ones. “You really should’ve told us you’re a woman!”
She practically folds into herself, and it feels like she’s shrinking in size to make herself a smaller target.
“Follow us in the other SUV,” I order the two guards who stayed behind with us while everyone else returned to the States.
Because I did most of the damage to her, I feel responsible for making sure she gets to a hospital. If she were a man, I wouldn’t care.
Once I’ve placed her in the backseat, I slam the door shut. My eyes meet Raffaele’s across the roof of the SUV, and I shake my head.
“Do you want to search for the Yakuza once we’ve dropped her off, or head home?” he asks.
I let out a sigh and glance at the empty airfield. “We have to wait for the jet to come back, so we might as well find another way to contact Masato Tanaka while we kill time.”
He nods as he gets in behind the steering wheel. I climb into the front passenger seat and let out another sigh.
This unexpectedly turned into a shit show.
Originally, the intention was to call Masato, so I could hand his beaten son to him as a warning to never fuck with the Cosa Nostra again. But we don’t have Ryo.
I glance over my shoulder to ask the woman what her name is, but seeing she’s unconscious, that idea goes out the window.
As Raffaele drives away from the quiet airfield, he mentions, “We could go to the club where shit went down and see if we can get our hands on other Yakuza members.”
“Yeah. It’s worth a shot.”
When we pull up to the hospital, I have one of the guards take the woman inside. We don’t wait long for him to come running out of the building, and the second he jumps into the other SUV, we speed away. The last thing we need right now is to be arrested for assault in a foreign country.
“She knows who we are,” I say as we speed down the road.
Raffaele nods. “She’ll probably tell the police everything.”
I suck in a deep breath before letting it out in a huff. “Let’s lay low. I’ll ask Rosie to do some more digging on the Yakuza.”
“Back to the hotel?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I pull out my phone and dial Rosie's number.
“What’s up?” she answers the phone, then something crunches in my ear.
“What the hell are you eating?” I ask.
“Carrots.” I hear her take another bite, the sound of the vegetable snapping coming over the line.
“Turns out we didn’t have Ryo Tanaka. It was a body double.”
“Oh shit. That sucks,” Rosie says. “What do you need me to do?”
“See if you can find any more leads on the Yakuza.”
“On it.”
“Thanks, Rosie.”
I end the call, and glancing down at the red bruising around my knuckles, my thoughts turn to the woman.
“I’ve never hit a woman before,” I whisper.
“That makes two of us.” Raffaele shakes his head. “In our defence, we didn’t know she was female.” He glances at me. “They did a fucking good job of making her look like a man.”
Still. I spent the past couple of days beating the shit out of her. Up until today, she hasn’t begged for mercy. She never made any sounds.
“She’s fucking strong,” I say. “Bianca and Sienna wouldn’t survive a beating like that.”
“Yeah.”
I can hear the guilt in Raffaele’s voice, and wanting him to feel better, I say, “It’s all on me. I issued the order.”