Chapter 41
Hungry [Rob Bailey & The Hustle Standard]
Senri Toshiharu waits outside the gates of his estate. Guards on either side open them on command, and we enter the courtyard. Tall pine needle trees line the pathway to his home, and vibrant, artificial green grass stretches across the garden with blooming flowers.
Those silver eyes of Senri snap to the flat-chested parasite holding my hand before his gaze shifts back to me. “Thank you for coming. How have your travels been so far?”
“Where’s Kate?” I ask, hearing Pandora’s hitched, excited breath from beside me. She must be as curious as I am about where to find her for questioning.
We follow the path toward the entrance. Astin lands swiftly ahead of us, doing his own thing, while Alad follows behind and listens to every word, digesting it all.
“I placed her in our interrogation room,” he says. “She tried to flee once I mentioned your name.”
The driveway narrows as we reach the front. Pine trees fade, and boxwood hedges line every few spaces until we reach the stairs.
“Interesting. Bring me to her,” I say.
Senri eyes me. “Are you going to kill her?”
I shrug. “Depends.”
His brows furrow. “On what?”
I nudge my head toward the menace beside me. “If she gets to her before I can.”
Pandora beams a smile at Senri Toshiharu’s perplexed look.
Amai Toshiharu bows deeply when we enter the foyer, but her unsettling blue eyes linger on Pandora, and I deem it suspicious. The hundreds of children the family keep fucking popping out watch from a distance through weary dark eyes and short dark hair.
“And who is this beautiful young woman on your arm, Prince Reen?” Amai Toshiharu says her focus never leaves Pandora’s sight.
Alad steps forth and says, “This is Prince Reen’s girlfriend, Pandora Averis. She is accompanying us on this journey. Is that okay?”
Amai Toshiharu smiles warmly. “Of Course. Does she want to stay with me while you do your business?”
Pandora shoots me a glare, causing me to chuckle. “My partner will have my head if I do. She’s fine with me. You can even say that we are a lot alike.”
With a roll of her eyes, Pandora huffs a breathy laugh.
Senri’s wife leaves with her children, and he lures us through his luxurious castle.
My focus lingers on the floor-to-ceiling, oval-shaped fish tank in the centre of the spiral staircase, dipped in black-and-white marble.
I linger on the colourful fish swimming without a care inside, and it causes my stomach to plummet at the memory of going to the fish markets with my mother.
To make matters worse, the one who killed her links her hand with mine, but the more I am around her, the more I understand her fucked-up reasoning when I don’t want to.
She killed my mother—the last piece of my past. Sure, I can understand her motives and where she was coming from, but I will never be able to forgive or forget.
I tell Alad and Astin to stay put while Senri leads us to a metallic red door, reminding me of crimson oozing down my hand whenever I slam my fist into someone’s chest. He presses his hand on the keypad off to the side, and it scans his entire hand before moving in and then sliding to the side.
They go to great lengths to protect whatever they hide within their tall castle walls.
Lights blink on one by one down the cold, clinical hallway, lined with two-way mirrors on the right side and stainless steel walls on the left. An antiseptic bleach smell overwhelms the air. I have only entered the Toshiharu interrogation rooms a handful of times.
We move past the first room with a blindfolded man, his arms tucked around his knees, rocking back and forth, sobbing into his knees.
“Is that who you hired me to investigate?” I ask.
“Yes. He’s part of an organisation that drugs unawakened elemny children and women, and they sell them at large auctions and functions,” Senri says. “I’ve been told there’s a function happening in a week, and I wanted you to see if you can find and track down their leader.”
“What information have you gained from him?” I say.
“Nothing. We have starved him for over a week, and he’s still refusing to talk.”
I grimace.
Pandora touches my arm and says, “Let me interrogate him.”
“No.”
She glares at me. “I used to…” Pandora eyes Senri and then looks away. “You know my past. I can do this.”
I weigh up my options. On one side, I can see how the Commander of the Crystal Guard trained his daughter, and on the other, I can handle it myself and leave her out of this. Even if I decline, I can see Pandora ignoring me and convincing Senri that she can get answers from him.
“You have five minutes, then we move on,” I say.
Pandora spins to Senri and says, “Does he have a wife? What’s his favourite food? Does he have children?”
Senri, as baffled as I am, answers her demands. When she has the information she wants, Pandora enters the room and closes the door behind her. I step towards the two-way mirror, fold my arms across my chest, and narrow my eyes as I watch her work.
Pandora spins the keys she took from Senri around her finger until they rattle. The man raises his head, his entire body jerky and twitchy, as if on high alert.
“Hey, honey,” she purrs. Disgust tenses in my stomach. “I’m home.”
This is sick.
Pandora touches his shoulder, her fingers brushing against his flesh with tender affection.
Every word from her mouth solidifies my thoughts on what her parents wanted her to be.
It explains a lot about why she uses her body for persuasion and maintains a flirty, overly lustful persona when she’s acting like someone else.
This is what her parents trained her to be, and every word coming out of her fucking mouth causes my throat to tighten, gripping my jugular.
She told me in the briefest moments that she isn’t good at interrogating unless it involves abusing her body. Now, my mind fills with chaos and disturbed imagery of her parents forcing Pandora to act suggestively, touching men with sick minds to gain knowledge when no other method works.
Pandora flicks her leg over his, ready to straddle him, when my brow twitches. As I open the door, Pandora rises. Her eyes widen, but there’s nothing in them. It’s as if she’s nothing more than a puppet on strings, moving to someone else’s rhythm.
That’s what she meant when she tried flirting with me in her room, and Pandora mentioned being a puppet trained by everyone around her.
“Reen,” Pandora breathes.
I grab the guy by the throat, raise him off the chair until his legs flail from underneath him, and I squeeze very fucking tight. “Who the fuck do you work for?”
Silence.
I step toward the wall, slam his body against it, drop my grip on his throat, and then pin his head against it with my hand. “Say it or die,” I say through clenched teeth.
He grits his teeth, biting back his words.
I move him away from the wall and slam him against it with a sickening crunch. “Say it.”
Nothing.
Another sickening crunch, and then another. His brain bleeds out of his cracked, fragmented skull.
“Okay,” he gargles, blood dribbling out of his mouth. “Walsh…Walsh.”
“Walsh?” Pandora furrows her brows. “That’s…I was meant to meet him when I got to…here. He would protect me—at least, that was what Maya told me.”
“She spoke utter fucking bullshit because she wanted you dead,” I say through clenched teeth. “If this is the same Walsh, he was there to kill you, not help you.”
“Fuck me,” she mutters. “Why is everyone always out to use me?”
Narrowing my eyes, I lift his bloody head away from the wall and hiss, “Is that all you know?”
Blood spews out of his mouth as he nods.
Knowing that’s all, I slam his head against the wall until I hear another sickening crunch.
Then I do it again, feeling his skull break into fragments, and again, causing his head to crumble in my hand.
Again and again and again until his brains slip through my fingertips, and there’s nothing recognisable about him that Pandora will remember.
“Reen…” Her eyes widen, and she takes a cautious step back as I approach her.
My nose flares, and this irritable anger towards Pandora comes out. “If you end up killing me, don’t do that again. Got that?”
Wide brown eyes waver with unshed tears, and she dips her head in a nod.
Dragging my bloody hands through my hair, I exhale a frustrated breath and turn away from her. “Come on. Let’s interrogate Kate.”
“Are you angry with me?” she says as I reach for the door.
I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and then sigh. “I am more livid with how your parents raised you, Pandora. If what I witnessed was your life, it’s no way to live. You deserve better.”
A bell-like laugh trickles out of her mouth. “So, are you catching feelings, eh?”
I twitch a smile. “You really know how to ruin a moment with your vulgarity, don’t you?”
Pandora hops to my side, beaming a smile as she says, “I try.”
Senri hands me antiseptic wipes. Blood and fleshy brains strip away from my hands with every wipe, and when I’m done, we stop by a two-sided mirror overlooking Kate Grant. Pandora takes a breath, causing me to eye her and her widened, gobsmacked expression.
“What?” I say.
“This is what Kate looks like now?” she says. “I didn’t know how much she has…She was at my home in Oceanview Harbour recently. I saw her enter my apartment block the day before I went to the Flesh. Why?”
I eye Senri, who’s absorbing all of this, and wonder if he’s putting the pieces together with the rumours about an ice elemny, and now I’m here, claiming I have a partner. For any air elemny, the gears must be ticking inside his mind, and he’s connecting the dots.
“Say anything, and you die,” I say under my breath to Senri.
“Then I will keep my thoughts to myself,” he replies.
I may have to get Alad to create a contract with him, but my threat may be enough to keep him quiet.