13. Chapter 13
Chapter 13
Andy
Chi is very shaken up from dinner, I can tell, but that doesn’t stop me from fucking her into the headboard of her bed. I think it’s a good stress reliever for her, honestly. And I don’t want to admit it, but it’s good for me as well.
I have a lot to think about for tomorrow, and it’s on my mind as she drifts off to sleep. It takes me a while, but I finally fall asleep next to her, just before my phone buzzes me awake again. I slip out of bed quietly and see Oxy’s name on the screen as I walk to the living area of the suite and take a seat on the couch.
“What’s happening?” I ask in a severe voice. Oxy can be kind of an asshole, but there’s no way she’d call me right now, considering everything that’s gone on over the past few days, if it wasn’t very fucking important.
“Akihito. He’s on the move.” Her voice is low as she speaks. She knows, just as I do, that this can’t be good.
“Is he coming this way?”
“No,” she says quietly. “But he’s doing a pretty good job of avoiding cameras when he can. I think he’s headed toward the master suite. And he’s dressed all in black.”
That’s Chi’s father’s suite. There are cameras on it, and although there were never cameras inside of it before, I just had a couple put in yesterday. Now I have to decide if I want to get the guards to tail Akihito, to stop him, or to let him be. Technically, he’s not actually doing anything wrong. There’s no reason why a guest shouldn’t be able to walk around the mansion at night, especially a family member. However, I need to be prepared for the worst.
I text Cas that he needs to be ready, and my phone beeps with an incoming call a moment later. I add him into the conversation I’m already having with Oxy.
“What’s going on?” he asks, in the same intense voice that I used just moments ago.
I answer quickly. “Akihito is going toward the master suite.”
“He’s there,” Oxy says apprehensively. “It’s hard to see exactly what… oh my gosh, he’s going for the door handle.”
“Let’s keep watching,” I say, at the same time as Cas says, “I should go—”
We both stop speaking as Oxy cuts in. “Wait! He tested the knob and saw it was locked, but he didn’t stop. He has something…” She takes in a sharp breath. “You guys! He’s holding a key!”
“That’s it; I’m going,” Cas says.
I spring up off the couch, as if in protest. “No, Cas, stop. Maybe this is good. Maybe we should just see what the fuck he wants.”
“But there are no cameras in the master!” Cas says harshly on the other line.
“I had them put in,” I shoot back, taking just a small moment to feel pleased with myself.
Before Cas can answer, Oxy pipes back up. “It doesn’t matter, guys. Looks like he doesn’t have the right key anyway.”
“I got new locks,” I say, feeling partially like I lucked out but partially like my curiosity is going to eat me alive.
Cas heaves a sigh. “Okay. Then I can go back to my wife?”
We wait a moment for Oxy’s answer, but it takes too long for me to be comfortable. “Oxy?”
“He’s heading for the front door,” she says in bewilderment.
“What?” Cas asks in clear exasperation.
“Yeah, and he’s going really quickly.”
“Where the fuck is he going at one in the morning?” I ask rhetorically, gripping the phone tightly in my hand.
“We gotta get a guard to stop him,” Cas cuts in.
“Why would we do that?” I ask. I walk to my window and look out, attempting to see something in the depths of the blackened yard beyond the flood lights. There’s nothing out there, and the night is unnervingly still. “We have to see where he’s going. We just need eyes on him.”
Cas sighs. “Yeah, I guess that’s a good idea. But then we need to get some guards to follow him.”
“You guys better hurry,” Oxy says hastily. “He’s quick.”
I’m slow to respond, because either way, this tells us a lot about Akihito’s motivations. The night before a funeral, following the violent, cold-blooded murder of his own father, he is more concerned with running out in the dark at all hours of the morning. But Cas is probably right. “All right, I’ll call the guards at the entrance—”
“Nope, you’re gonna have to make it the back, left-side entrance to the grounds, and hurry,” Oxy says.
I hang up and put in the speed-dial the number for the guard house nearest to the entrance she’s talking about, but when I mention a man in black, they don’t see a soul. They have the best equipment money can buy, including night vision goggles, and I know if he were still there they’d see him.
I call Oxy back, and she puts me through to the call with her and Cas. “Do you still see him?”
“No way,” Oxy replies. “He was moving quick. And once he got outside, he ducked away from the cameras and then out of sight.
“Fuck!” Cas whisper-shouts, likely not wanting to wake Mara with this. I can understand the feeling. I certainly don’t want to wake Chi and tell her that her brother has just tried to break into her father’s office and then snuck off the grounds.
“We can still send out the guards to see if we can find him, man,” Cas juts in.
I sigh and run my hand through my hair. “He’s not an immediate threat if he’s not on the grounds, and we don’t want to send a bunch of guards after him and leave the mansion less protected. Plus, I think we’ll find out more about where he’s gone if we let him come back thinking that he slipped away without being noticed.” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, but before I can speak, Cas puts in his two cents.
“So you just want to let him go?”
“Go where?” I ask, and this time I really want to know. “Seriously, Cas, if he isn’t here, how is he going to hurt us? He’ll come back here eventually. In the meantime, we’ll make sure to take note of how long he’s gone and see if anything exciting and unexplained happens during this time.”
“He could go anywhere within two states before daylight,” Cas points out.
“I guess we’ll just have to see,” I say, shrugging his concern off. I’m sure he realizes that it’s best not to send guards out anyway. Just in case he’s trying to trick us into leaving the estate unprotected.
“Fine,” Cas says harshly. “You got this covered, Oxy?”
“Don’t I always?” Oxy singsongs, still a cocky bastard even while her employer is frustrated beyond words.
In true Cas fashion, he hangs up without saying goodbye.
“Should I be watching or doing anything, Oxy?”
“Nah,” she says dismissively, “I’m nocturnal anyway. I’ll probably be up. And if I’m not, my phone will do the job. The cams and sensors will give us plenty of data to examine when he comes back, which path he takes, if he brings anything back with him, and whether or not he got into a knife fight and won. Or lost. It’s cool.”
I give a long, angry sigh. “I hope we’re not fucking everything up. Feel free to call me if you see anything else. I doubt I’ll be able to sleep much anyway.”
I get a text from Oxy just two hours later that Akihito has returned and that he skirted many of the cameras again as he walked up to the house. He was still in full black, but aside from that, nothing else seemed to be noteworthy. I’ll go through the footage later myself, but for now, I have to worry about the funeral. I decide not to bother Chi with this, since she’s already hanging on by a thread the moment she wakes up, stressing about whether or not she’ll be able to hold it together today.
Needless to say, as people start milling into the funeral home, I’m on high alert.
I didn’t think I’d be so tightly wound during this excursion to the mansion, seeing Chi’s family, and getting ready for the funeral, but more and more I have realized that this just comes with the territory of being Chi’s bodyguard right now. It’s not just the fact that her brother snuck away last night, either. It’s an all-around tense time, not only for her but for the entirety of the Yakuza as an organization. I’m not even sure she realizes the scope of what her father’s death has affected yet. In fact, I don’t know that any of us do.
Every moment at dinner with her family was filled with tension, but now there is even more to contend with. I have been surrounded by enemies, bombed from the sky out of nowhere, and on multiple active battlefields, but I’ve never felt this paranoid. Every man and woman at this funeral represents a possible threat to Chi.
“You’re hovering,” Chi mutters as she takes a sip of water from the small bottle in her hand. We stand in the funeral home as people crowd in before she is forced to make her speech during the short ceremony.
“Oh, baby, don’t even start. I’m going up to that podium with you too, so get used to it.”
I know she doesn’t really have a problem with this, and she even looks behind her as she begins her prepared speech to make sure I’m still there. I don’t care if it’s obvious that I’m too close. I hope everyone notices.
She delivers her speech quickly, but with her usual gracefulness. As she finishes thanking everyone for coming, especially her mother and brother, she stops for a moment and looks up at the crowd.
“My mother and brother came all the way from Japan, putting on hold many of the heavy burdens of our businesses there…” She trails off here and studies the crowd. “Of course they did. Of course all of you did. My father and Daiki were hard and stern, but they were fair and honorable men. They were…” She falters at first but then breathes out harshly and sets her face in a grim line.
“They were my family. And I will make sure their deaths are avenged.” She doesn’t only look at her brother and mother when she says her last line; she looks out to the sea of faces, all of whom had an affiliation with her father and Daiki. I realize that although we have some good guesses, we don’t know the who, how, or why at all. And if that drives me crazy, I can’t imagine how it makes Chi feel.
A moment later, Chi forces a plastic smile onto her face that looks like it hurts her cheeks. “Thank you all for coming. I hope you’ll come back to the Chashitsu in my home and celebrate their lives with us from one to two o’clock today.”
She walks off the podium and straight for the doors in the back of the hall, pushing them open and all but running to the bathroom. It says “Ladies” on the door, and I couldn’t give a shit less. I barge in behind her anyway.
She’s hysterical immediately, which means she held it in expertly as she finished her speech. She tries so hard to quiet her sobs, but I lock the door anyway so that no one gets the bright idea of trying to come in here. I run the water so that there’s some background noise; we really can’t have people hearing her distress, unfortunately.
“I—I shouldn’t have,” she whispers, sitting on the settee lounge. “I should’ve just-just stuck to the script, I know!” She grabs my shirt but stays back, putting her head down in the space between us instead of on my chest, so as not to ruin it with her tears, presumably. But I don’t give a shit about that. I grab the back of her head and push it onto my shoulder. My jacket is black anyway; there’s not much harm she can cause.
She grabs onto the lifeline I extend like it’s a rescue tube in the middle of the ocean, and she’s been stuck there for days. “I have to pull it together. I have to stop.”
She’s right; she really should pull it together as quickly as possible. I’m not about to force anything, but I try to encourage her. “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to take a couple of breaths, collect yourself, wipe your face, and go out there with your head held high.” I push her back and look into her eyes. “I can guarantee that all the money you invested into your waterproof makeup is seriously working out well for you. No one will even know.” They may suspect that she ran out of there to break down and cry, but I doubt they could hear much for the brief time Chi was inconsolable.
She stares into my eyes as she tries to even out her breaths, taking gulps of air in and letting them out slowly. She nods her head. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she tells herself over and over. I grab a tissue and dab underneath her eyes, making sure not to loosen an eyelash or a glob of mascara. I never realized how important it was for exceedingly rich people to drop so much money on these things, but if Chi wasn’t wearing the best fake lashes and waterproof mascara money could buy right now, we’d likely have a big problem on our hands. As it is, when she blinks up at me once I’m done, there is no sign that she cried beyond a slight shine in her eyes.
“Okay. I can do it. Let’s go.”