Chapter 6
Chapter six
The Hunt
Kenji
Today was about hunting.
Searching for my father.
Looking for my enemies.
Seeking out my Tiger.
Exploring the other side of my DNA where my mother’s bloodline lived.
Each hour represented an unfolded map with worn creases and fading ink.
We never took Akiro’s phone back to the island. Reo suspected that Akiro may have left the phone on purpose.
Therefore, Reo routed it through three dead channels—burner couriers who didn’t know each other nor us and never asked questions. By the time the device reached my hackers, it had passed through enough hands to bury its origin six feet under.
The first thing my hackers found wasn’t data, but a tracker.
High-end.
Deeply embedded.
Designed to stay dormant until it mattered.
As Reo suspected, Akiro hadn’t lost the phone. He’d planted it to later find us.
His biggest mistake was that the phone was actually his. The hardware signature matched his custom builds with modified firmware and reinforced encryption layers.
Before planting the phone, Akiro had done his part. He’d wiped everything that could be wiped.
Messages.
Call logs.
Contact trees.
Even the secret caches most people didn’t know existed.
But nothing was ever truly erased. Not from a device that had lived this long in his hands.
My hackers didn’t look for what was there.
They probed for what had been there. Residual heat signatures in the memory banks.
Fragmented packet trails buried in system logs.
Ghost pings from towers the phone had whispered to before the wipes.
Tiny inconsistencies in the clock cycles—fractions of seconds that didn’t line up unless something had been deleted.
They rebuilt his silence.
Piece by piece.
Akiro was smart, careful, and patient enough to think three moves ahead. But my team of hackers lived ten moves beyond that. And through the cracks he thought he’d sealed, his world started bleeding open for me.
They didn’t just unlock his phone.
They dissected it.
Akiro had encrypted the surface—standard biometric locks, layered passcodes, false partitions meant to stall amateurs.
My hackers mirrored the device at a kernel level, bypassed the OS entirely, and built a ghost environment to run the phone without triggering its internal alarms.
Every keystroke Akiro had ever made was reconstructed from residual memory.
Deleted messages weren’t recovered—they were reassembled.
Even the battery logs were useful. Tiny fluctuations mapped against tower pings gave us movement patterns down to the minute.
They pulled the baseband data and forced the modem to confess every handshake it had made in the last six months.
Cell towers.
Private repeaters.
Dead zones that weren’t supposed to exist.
From that, my team built a map where three locations consistently pulsed.
The first was Yoshiwara Depths. He’d spend a lot of time in those tunnels and service corridors, forming his plan to lure us there.
But was my father still hidden there? The Depths were massive. We could have missed him within that dark maze of deception. This place would be the perfect trap for the next battle. If we returned, we would be the hunted.
Unless that’s exactly what Akiro wanted me to believe.
Perhaps, the trap wasn’t the tunnels, but my fear of them due to losing men there.
What would Akiro guess about my mental state?
The second location was my family’s estate on the outskirts of Tokyo. A place my father had not returned to since losing my mother in an enemy bombing.
Could he be home?
It would make the most sense. I would have never looked for him there, not when it used to give my father anxiety to even hear about the estate’s maintenance.
So much guilt over my mother’s death filled him.
So much. . .yearning for what he’d lost corroded his soul.
. .even though when he’d had her, he never treated her right.
If the Fox hid here, he did so based on emotions and logic.
This could be the most likely one. . .or the biggest trick.
The final location was Hotel Gajoen Tokyo—the Palace of the Dragon King. If the Fox hid there, then he was choosing to mock me in front of his men and it was all about ego.
Yet. . .a place like Gajoen gave him something the others couldn’t, lots of movement, noise, and control.
There would be hundreds of guests moving through its halls. Staff trained to see everything and report nothing. Private rooms layered behind paper walls and locked doors, each one capable of becoming a meeting point. . .or a kill site.
It would be too many bodies for me to track.
Too many exits to seal.
Too many witnesses for anyone to act without consequence.
Or so. . .they want me to think. . .
I exhaled slowly.
Hiding in a maze was tactical.
Hiding in a fortress was predictable.
But if it was Hotel Gajoen, then he wasn’t hiding. He was waiting for me to walk through the doors. To step into a place already mapped, already scattered with mines, and already turned into a stage where every move I made would be seen and countered.
That required confidence and madness. My father had always walked the line between both.
Which place are you hiding in, Father?
If I chose wrong, many could die.
If I delayed, the Fox and my brother would disappear.
If I split forces, our side would be too vulnerable to their attacks.
No matter what I chose, Akiro had already planned for it.
I have to choose. I just know. . .whichever door we walked through. . .someone will bleed. I just have to make sure the blood is on their side, not ours.
By lunch, our surveillance teams were in motion to monitor the three locations in Tokyo.
One unit infiltrated Yoshiwara's upper markets with false import papers.
Another positioned themselves a block from my childhood estate, disguised as catering staff for an imaginary wedding.
The third rolled into Hotel Gajoen, pretending to be staff—two bellmen, a sommelier, and a florist, all of them mine- by noon.
Meanwhile, my French hackers tracked the Butcher. Jean-Pierre's blade had opened the door my father walked through to kill my men and Hiroko. And a Dragon's memory was a long, patient, unforgiving thing.
One day, Butcher, I'll take everything you've ever loved and serve it to you on a clean plate.
Yesterday, he'd left Paris. He took his private jet and a direct flight to New York for a meeting that had lasted thirty-one minutes at a warehouse on the edge of the Bronx with Fela, the leader of the Nigerian Black Axe.
Thirty-one minutes of two killers exchanging something too valuable to trust to a phone.
What did they talk about? And how can I use that against him?
Then the Butcher had boarded again, flown to the west coast, and landed in Belladonna—a city I knew only by name.
What's in that city, Butcher? What's waiting there that pulled you across an ocean and a continent in a single day?
I didn't know yet. But a man like Jean-Pierre didn't cross oceans for comfort. He crossed them for something rare, fragile, and worth more than the fuel it took to reach it.
Whatever you're reaching for in Belladonna. . .I'll try to reach it first. And when I close my fist around it, you'll feel it all the way in Paris.
I held a meeting with my Roar, Claws, and Fangs next going through weapons inventory, strategy, and battle points so there would be no more casualties in the fights to come.
We were halfway through finalizing entry routes and kill zones when the door slid open without permission.
A lower guard stepped in, bowed once, and spoke fast. He knew he was interrupting something that could get him buried. "My apologies, Dragon. The Tiger has finalized the details for tonight's gathering."
Every head at the table turned.
Reo went still and his gaze sharpened.
I stared at the guard. "Go on."
The guard swallowed. "The Tiger has chosen The Great Gatsby and In the Mood for Love as the party’s aesthetic direction. She has requested all men wear black in their own style. She has opened the evening to any guests that they may want to bring. And she has also added a Best Dressed Competition."
He bowed and left.
I sighed.
Silence came for one full breath.
Then, the ridiculousness began.
Kaoru leaned back in his chair. "Hey, guys. No need to go too crazy with your outfit selection. I’m winning the competition. I do black very well, and I’m bringing my girlfriends."
Yoichi grinned. “I wouldn’t bring them, if I were you.”
Kaoru quirked his brows. “Why not?”
“They may want to go home with me.” Yoichi winked.
Everyone laughed.
"You think a Fang will win at the Claws’ party?" Toma called from the end of the table. “Think again. Everyone in Japan knows that we’re the best dressed.”
I rubbed my temples.
“If you have to say that you’re the best dressed, then you’re probably not.” Rin set his tea down with two fingers. The porcelain made no sound. His other hand brushed the white silk of his sleeve. "By the way, I'll be bringing a guest."
My stomach dropped.
Damn it. Please don’t let it be the hairstylist.
Nyomi still didn't know that Rin had kidnapped Deja. I would have to tell her before the party.
Hiro clicked his lollipop against his teeth once. “I don’t think any Fangs should bring guests. You all should be happy that the Tiger is even letting you all come.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Satoshi eyed him. And to my delight, he had not scratched once during the entire meeting. “The Tiger loves the Fangs. We didn’t have to whine for her food. We got it immediately—”
“What did you say?” Hiro rose from his chair.
The Claws followed.
Reo sighed. “Everyone sit back down. We were having a meeting about strategy.”
Hiro glared at Satoshi and lowered back into his seat. The Claws did the same.
“Sorry, Reo.” Kaede nodded. “We will focus on the task at hand.”
“Thank you.” Reo still didn’t look pleased.
“I do want to add one thing.” Kaede raised one leather-gloved finger. “I look fucking phenomenal in black.”