Chapter 39 Red-Hot Desire
Chapter thirty-nine
Red-Hot Desire
Nyomi
Damn.
Kenji was nude and sprawled across the page like a fallen god—every inch of him captured in stark charcoal with a level of detail that made my throat tighten.
Mami had drawn him sleeping.
His head was turned slightly to the side, resting against what looked like a pillow, dark hair spilling across his forehead in messy strands. His eyes were closed, lashes fanning against his cheekbones.
His lips were parted just enough to suggest breath—soft, unguarded, vulnerable in a way I'd never seen him in waking life.
She'd caught him defenseless.
And she'd worshipped every inch of that defenselessness.
The heavy muscle of his shoulders anchored the composition, broad and powerful even in rest.
She'd traced the slope of them down to that narrow waist with obsessive precision—every ridge of muscle, every shadow between his ribs rendered in loving detail.
His abdomen was a study in contrasts: hard planes softened by sleep, the ridged terrain of his stomach rising and falling with imagined breath.
The tattoos.
God, the tattoos were exact in placement and detail.
She must have spent hours on them. I could tell by the layering, the way she'd built up the dark ink with careful crosshatching until the dragons pulsed against his skin.
And she’d also captured the sharp cut of his hip bones, the trail of dark hair descending from his navel, and there, between his powerful thighs, she'd drawn his beautiful cock, half-hard.
The rose piercing glinted even in charcoal, a small circle of negative space she'd left white against the dark shading of his cock.
She'd drawn that piercing like she knew exactly how it caught the light.
Like she'd studied it.
Like she'd memorized it.
Jealousy filled me.
How did she see the piercing?
His thighs were thick, muscled, slightly parted in the loose sprawl of deep sleep.
One arm was flung above his head, exposing the vulnerable hollow of his underarm, the bulge of his bicep, the veins mapping his forearm like rivers.
The other hand rested on his stomach—fingers long, relaxed, curled slightly inward.
Killer's hands rendered gentle by unconsciousness.
But it was his face that destroyed me.
In sleep, all the coldness had melted away. The cruel set of his mouth had softened. The calculating sharpness in his eyes was hidden behind closed lids.
He looked younger.
Peaceful.
Almost innocent.
He looked like a man who hadn't killed anyone.
Like a man who could be loved without consequence.
Mami had drawn him the way she wanted him to be—soft, open, belonging to her.
I stared at the page. "So. . .she probably took a picture of him while he was sleeping and then drew this."
“Correct. My brother would never let her see him like this. Not willingly.” Hiro pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Telling Reo that the Eyes are involved.”
I snapped my view to him. “What?”
“The only way she could have done this is if both Eyes let her do it. That means that they have a level of secrecy and odd loyalty that none of us know about.” He sneered and typed into the phone.
“I never fucking liked those Cum Guards, but at least I thought they would keep my brother safe while he was sleeping.”
I’m glad Kenji stopped using them when we got together.
I tensed.
Did the Eyes also work for the Fox?
The thought uncoiled in my mind like a venomous thing, spreading its poison through every assumption I'd made.
The Fox wasn’t just a mastermind.
He was a puppeteer who had spent decades, threading his fingers into every corner of his son's organization. Not with brute force. Not with obvious attacks. But with patience. With placement. With trauma. With the slow, methodical insertion of loyal bodies into positions of trust.
The Eyes could be the Fox’s spies too. . .
Kenji's Eyes were supposed to watch him when he couldn't watch himself.
During those vulnerable hours when even the most dangerous man in Tokyo had to close his eyes and trust that someone was keeping him safe.
During sleep.
During sex.
And the Fox had corrupted even that.
This is worse than anything I could have ever imagined.
If the Fox controlled the Eyes, then every time Kenji had slept, his father had been watching too.
Every time Kenji had fucked someone, his father had known.
Every nightmare, every moment of unconscious vulnerability, every whispered confession in the dark—the Fox had seen it all.
And I thought my father was a piece of shit.
My skin crawled.
This nest of snakes was bigger than I'd imagined. More layered. More insidious. The spy wasn't just one person—it was a network, woven so tightly into the fabric of Kenji's life that pulling one thread might unravel everything.
Or nothing at all.
Because how do you fight an enemy who's already inside?
I felt them then—the snakes.
Not real ones, but real enough.
Phantom scales sliding up my ankles, coiling around my calves, slithering higher. They wrapped around my thighs, my waist, squeezed my ribs until breathing hurt.
Tons of them.
Their tongues flicked against my ears, hissing secrets I couldn't understand.
We're everywhere. We're everyone. You'll never find us all.
I shuddered.
Hiro looked up from his phone. "Reo's personally grabbing the Eyes now with two men.”
“He’s leaving Kenji alone with the Scales?”
“His Fangs are in there.” Hiro put his phone up. “Once they have the Eyes, Reo will have a Fang check their movements in the footage to see if anything's been strange."
"Shit." I pressed my palm against my chest, trying to slow my racing heart. "This is insane."
"But good too."
I blinked. "How is this good?"
Hiro's smile was sharp—the smile of a predator who'd just caught a scent. "You're helping us catch snakes. Enough snakes will help us catch the Fox."
"How?"
"Once we trap all of them and put them in the prison my brother has below the mansion—" He paused, letting the weight of that settle. "Reo, Kenji, and I will have a very lengthy conversation with all of them."
All I could imagine was the splattering of blood.
Crimson on concrete.
Screams echoing off stone walls.
The wet sound of flesh meeting fist, meeting blade, meeting whatever tools they used to extract confessions from people who'd betrayed them.
Hiro continued, "They'll show us how to contact our father. And Kenji's hackers can use that. We can grab his location much faster."
“Oh.” The dread that had been crushing my chest shifted. Something else pushed through.
Hope.
“Good job. . .sis.” Hiro winked. "You may be helping us end the war much sooner than we thought. Instead of waiting on my father to call Jean-Pierre, we may lure the Fox out this way."
I stared at him, and the snakes around my body loosened their grip and fell away.
I put my view back on the sketchbook. “But is Mami involved or was she just able to get the Eyes to sneak her in?”
I traced my eyes over the drawing again—the intimacy of it, the invasion of it, the desperate love bleeding through every charcoal stroke.
Mami hadn't just drawn Kenji's body. She'd drawn the version of him she prayed existed underneath all that ice.
I flipped the page, and my breath caught hard in my chest. "Uh. . ."
Hiro was close enough beside me that I felt the warmth of his body along my arm as we both looked down.
The sketch was. . .intimate in a way that made my pulse skip.
Hiro.
Nude.
On a bed.
And he wasn't alone.
And he was definitely fucking.
The composition was framed strangely—edges darkened, the perspective slightly skewed, as if Mami had captured the scene through a narrow opening.
A closet door, maybe.
A gap in a doorway.
Something that said I shouldn't be seeing this while simultaneously screaming I couldn't look away.
Hiro dominated the center of the page, his body rendered in painstaking detail. Every muscle in his back was defined—the broad wings of his shoulder blades, the deep valley of his spine, the dimples just above the swell of his sculpted ass.
His skin glowed against the darker shadows of the sheets beneath him, charcoal smudged and layered until he looked almost luminous.
He was on his knees, thighs spread, his weight braced on one powerful forearm while the other hand gripped the headboard above him. The position made the muscles in his arm bulge, veins standing out like rivers beneath his skin.
Behind him—pressed flush against his back—a man.
The man's body was sculpted, beautiful, rendered with the kind of obsessive detail that only longing could produce.
His chest was broad, his stomach ridged with muscle, his hips snapped forward in a way that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
One of his hands splayed possessively across Hiro's stomach, fingers digging into the hard flesh there.
The other gripped Hiro's hip, pulling him back, holding him in place.
His face was partially obscured—turned into the curve of Hiro's neck, mouth pressed to the spot where shoulder met throat. But his jaw was sharp, his hair dark and disheveled, and even in charcoal I could see the tension in his body. The coiled power of a man lost in pleasure.
And beneath Hiro—a beautiful woman.
She lay on her back, her body arched upward. Her spine curved off the mattress, her head thrown back against the pillows, her lips parted in what could only be a moan.
Her big breasts were full, nipples stiff, rendered with such careful attention that I could almost feel the weight of them.
Her thighs bracketed Hiro's hips, her legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him deeper.
One of her hands clutched the sheets beside her head, fingers twisted in the fabric. The other reached up—not to Hiro, but past him, her palm pressed flat against the chest of the man behind him.
Connecting them.
Completing the circuit.
Three bodies.
One rhythm.
One unbroken line of ecstasy.