19. Vi
CHAPTER 19
VI
In the morning, I’m alone, and I’m surprised; Kenzo shouldn’t trust me alone in his penthouse. Maybe there’s a guard behind the door, or a security camera system I haven’t spotted yet.
Regardless, I have a job to do.
I call Uncle Jay. “Yep?” he answers. “You doing all right, sweetheart?”
“He’s gone for now,” I say hesitantly. “What am I searching for again?”
“Business connections and their negotiations with other companies. Anything related to Samurai Corporation or the Endo-kai. According to our client, Kenzo does most of the public relations, so he’s gotta have something in there. Go through his office.”
I step into the living room. The door to the balcony is within eyesight, and my mind wanders to what we did last night. The memory heats my body, and a full body shiver rakes through me.
“Vi?” Uncle Jay asks. “You there?”
I shake my head, bringing myself back to reality.
“Yeah,” I say. “Got it. Business connections.”
“Good. And Vi?”
“Yeah?”
“You can do this. I believe in you.”
I smile at the phone, though my mind is still on Kenzo’s perfectly curved cock.
“All right, Uncle Jay. I gotta go work.”
I hang up, then take a long shower, letting the water scald my body, hoping it’ll incinerate the ghost of Kenzo inside of me. But it isn’t just his perfectly curved cock, or the fact that we fucked out in the open. It’s because he knew exactly what to say. Even if he was pretending to treat me like a virgin, everything he said made my belly flutter like I was flying.
What is wrong with me?
Once I’m done, I throw on some makeup, reminding myself that Kenzo is another “friend” our family will use and bleed dry. Even if I’m in the pilot seat for the first time, this has been done successfully before. All I have to do is find those business connections, then we can go, and this will just be a silly memory.
Even if Kenzo is tempting beyond reason, he’s dangerous. I need to finish my work and get the hell out.
There are five bedrooms, four and a half baths, and a movie theater. Most of the rooms are filled with boxes as if he can’t be bothered to unpack. It reminds me of our storage units.
I pry open a box. Inside, there are neatly folded clothes: dress shirts, trousers, suit jackets. In another box, there are dusty bottles of liquor. It’s obviously not what I’m searching for, but I keep snooping anyway. I examine one of the bottles; the label is covered in kanji. He likes Japanese whisky then.
But that’s nothing compared to his love of music.
In the living room, a vinyl record player is out of place next to the flat screen television, but maybe that’s exactly like Kenzo. He’s modern, but he knows what he likes. The shelves next to the stereo system are stacked with records. I pull out one, telling myself maybe I’ll find some business information—a secret note tucked between the cases—but I’m in awe of the covers; each case I pull out has another long-haired musician on the artwork, and though I recognize some of the band names, most of it is lost on me. Kenzo and I can’t be more than five years apart, and yet, he basically worships the rock gods of the seventies. Queen—I know a few songs from that band. But Hocus Pocus? White Heart? Three Dog Night? Most of it doesn’t ring a bell.
The fourth bedroom is closed. I try the handle, but it’s locked. There’s a small keypad above the handle. It must be digital, but there’s also a tiny keyhole in the handle. Maybe I can pick the lock. Uncle Jay always discouraged me from learning that kind of stuff. He never wanted me in these situations to begin with, which is why I’m the researcher.
And I’m good at researching. I may not be able to find anything about the Endo-kai, but I can research how to pick a lock.
After doing a quick internet search, I pick through my toiletry bags, searching for a hairpin. A door creaks at the front of the penthouse. I lean my head out of the bathroom, but instead of hearing Kenzo’s booming entrance, there’s barely any movement.
I tiptoe to the front of the penthouse, and when I get to the kitchen, I flinch. A stranger I recognize from the wedding peers through the kitchen. His arms are muscular and bare. He narrows his eyes at me.
“You didn’t run,” he says dryly. “Surprising.”
“Who are you?” I ask.
He crosses his arms over his chest, staring at me like I’m a cockroach he’s ready to squash. Then he tilts his head. “I should ask you the same thing.”
“Why are you in my—I mean—Kenzo’s penthouse?” I ask cautiously. If he got in here easily, that means he has clearance at the front desk, like me. “At least tell me your name.”
“Niko.”
Right. Niko was the one who let us into the lobby before the ceremony, and the one who got into Ronin’s face when he said he was Tomo’s first-born son.
His black eyes have hints of blue warping the sides. Tomo’s eyes aren’t like that. He must get it from his mother.
“Niko. Right,” I say. “So that makes you…”
“ Wakagashira, ” he says.
I remember the title from studying yakuza terminology.
“Second-in-command,” I say.
“Which means your husband works for me.”
A sour taste forms on my tongue. He seems to like the status, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. But I shove those suspicions away, pretending I’m unaffected by his arrogance.
“You’re half-siblings, right? Or adoptive. Chosen family. Step-siblings? Something like that,” I ramble.
“Sure,” he says again, his voice both bored and irritated.
“You scared me,” I laugh. “Kenzo didn’t tell me you can come in unannounced.”
“Why? Are you already stealing from us?”
My chest tightens with nerves, but I can’t let his accusations get to me.
“Just fixing my hair,” I say. It’s sort of true, after all. Niko eyes my hair—it’s damp from the shower and pulled up in a messy bun. But before he can deduce whether or not I’m lying, I change the subject: “You have a key?”
“We all have keys to each other’s places.”
If Uncle Jay and Patrick and I lived in different places, would it be the same for us? Uncle Jay is too particular about certain things, and I doubt he’d let us have free rein over his place. I tell myself it’s a good thing, but part of me hates it.
“So there’s no such thing as privacy then,” I say jokingly, keeping my tone light. Inside, I’m jealous though. Why can’t our family have trust like theirs?
“If you have a problem with that, take it up with your husband.” He pries through the refrigerator contents again. “Go back to your”—he angles his head toward the side—“hair.”
Something tells me Niko is not here to make a sandwich, and an uneasiness rolls through my stomach. Niko isn’t like Kenzo at all; he gives me the creeps. But he’s probably not here to kill me. If that was the plan, Kenzo would’ve done it. Niko must either be waiting for Kenzo, or searching for something Kenzo has.
Like me.
I go back to the bathroom and actually fix my hair, keeping my eye on the door, conjuring a plan to get Niko to leave.
I’m not here to be Kenzo’s kept wife. The more I know, the better, and if that means talking to my husband’s weird underboss or whatever the hell Niko is, then I’ll do it.
By the time I’m done in the bathroom, the penthouse is eerily quiet again. I don’t find Niko anywhere, so I check the refrigerator to see if he was truly grabbing a snack. But everything is organized and in its place, untouched, as if nothing happened and I imagined Niko entirely. Either Niko was here to organize Kenzo’s fridge, or Kenzo hires someone to do his grocery shopping for him. Kenzo likes moving where he sleeps frequently; he lives on chaos and adventure. This level of organization is not Kenzo.
I don’t understand his family.
My eye catches on the locked room. The door is pushed halfway open, like it was never locked in the first place.
Niko must have unlocked it.
If Niko is the underboss, then why would he be snooping through Kenzo’s locked room?
He has to know everything Kenzo is doing, right?
I double-check to make sure there are no security cameras in the penthouse, and then I step inside.
Natural light enters from a window. A wooden desk is positioned at an angle, and a bookshelf covers the back wall. A small globe. A set of books with bookends. Another record player, but this time, only a small set of albums sits next to it. Reading glasses collect dust on the top corner of his desk. His laptop is closed, stacked with a handful of papers.
My pulse races. It’s almost like this stack of papers was placed there so I could find them, like this information was waiting for me.
Golden Honor Firearms is written at the top of the first page, with a few illegible notes. I decipher a couple: Harry Hayes. Offer sixty? Then a phone number.
Does the note mean sixty thousand or sixty million? Either way, I type the company name on my phone for later. This is the kind of thing our client wants.
The second page reads: Legendary Analysis. “Charity donations” never went through. Jones used payments for what? Tuesday.
I type that name too, but it seems different from the firearms company. Kenzo wants the firearms company, but Legendary Analysis seems like a company he wants to blackmail.
The door slams open at the front of the penthouse, and a deep male voice bursts with song.
“Vi,” Kenzo shouts. “I bought you something.”
My stomach drops. I have no idea what that could be, but my heart pummels my rib cage, and I race to the front of the penthouse.
I hope whatever he brought for me is big enough to distract him.
I can’t let him find out I was in his office.