A Fucking Queen
Chapter ten
Nyomi
The whole walk to Kiko's room, I caught Deja up on the drama—Kiko possibly being pregnant by Kenji and Hiro, Kiko being a mean girl when I first saw her in the mansion, her trying to crash the Cocktail Party, and of course Kiko calling the Fox to give him the location of the island.
Deja listened and didn't interrupt me once.
By the time we reached the door, Deja had her hand on her gun. The only calming thing was that it was still holstered.
Babies cried somewhere down the hall. Two of them. Their cries came thin through the walls, one a little higher than the other.
I swallowed.
Those are the twins. They’re scared.
I knew it the same way I knew the basement was on the east side of the Bamboo Garden building. The same way I knew what Yoichi was and that he was bound by an ancient secret. The way knowledge had been arriving in me since I opened my eyes—whole, unexplained, and certain.
Hiro's boys. What will he say when he finds out? Is he ready to be a father?
Tension gathered at my shoulders.
Two of my men walked in front of me with their hands resting on their guns.
Four more walked behind.
Yoichi stayed on my side, but kept space between us.
Deja looked at me. “So this bitch has been trying you over and over and you haven’t checked her?”
“Apparently not enough.”
“So then you know what you have to do now?”
“Yes.”
“You need me to—”
“No. I’m doing all of this myself. I have to.”
We stopped at the door.
My men in front stopped too. The lead one looked over his shoulder and waited.
The cold concrete bit up through the soles of my bare feet. The red ritual robe hung soft around me. Reo's soul pin sat at my collarbone.
Hmmm.
I touched the pin.
The babies cried and stopped, and I just. . .knew the nurses were soothing them right now and the twins somehow were soothing each other by squeezing each other’s tiny hands, and that they’d need an incubator.
Fuck. I have to see them, but first this. . .
I nodded to the lead guard. “Go ahead.”
He opened the door and held it for us.
We all walked in.
Inside Kiko's room, two more guards stood at attention by the bed. They turned the moment the door opened, and their hands moved to their weapons.
Once they saw me, their eyes went wide and their hands came off their guns at the same time.
Yoichi walked to the edge of the bed.
Both guards stepped back and stood against the wall.
Kiko and her entourage had been talking. They stopped when we entered.
Kiko was propped up against three pillows in a hospital bed that didn't belong in this part of the island. Her face was pale and damp. Her hair was matted along her forehead. A silk white robe hung off her soaked at the collar with sweat.
All the fucking trouble you started. . .and all the times I should have let Kenji kill you. . .
Kiko tried to sit up straighter when she saw me and couldn't quite get there.
Her cousins flanked the bed. The one on the left had a hand half inside her jacket and froze it there when she clocked my guards. The one on the right just stared.
Frowning, I stepped further into the room.
Deja remained next to me with her hand still resting on Betty Boop in the holster. I hadn’t known until tonight that Deja had shot a gun three times in her life. The fact just came to me when I looked at her gun in the hallway earlier.
The information wasn’t even about Betty Boop, yet I just knew that once when Deja was ten, her mother’s boyfriend snuck into her bedroom and Deja pulled out her dead father’s gun from under her pillow and shot him in the balls.
That was the first time Deja ever shot a gun.
I also knew that once he fell to the ground screaming and her mother woke up to find the chaos. Well. . .her mother grabbed the gun and without asking any further questions, shot the man in the head, right in front Deja.
I knew her mother and grandmother buried the man’s body by the apple tree in the grandmother’s backyard and that sometimes an adult Deja stood in front of that same apple tree and shivered in fear that the secret would come out.
I knew that the second time Deja fired a gun it was Betty Boop and it was because Nika’s husband had hit Nika.
I knew that Deja had already told him she would shoot his ass if he touched her again.
So. . .even though she didn’t want to. .
.she shot him. . .right in the head like her mother had done to the man when she was ten.
And Nika and Deja rolled up his body in the middle of the night, carried it over to their grandmother’s house, and buried his body too. . .right next to that apple tree. . .where there were other shot men.
Twenty of them. . .deep within the ground.
But it was the final time Deja shot the gun that wouldn’t hit my mind. I didn’t know why, just that it was a moment that her mind clearly guarded.
Perhaps, it was too horrific for even me to see with this new gift.
And with that. . .I knew to be very thankful for it.
Soon, my other guards moved past me without a word and took up positions at the foot of the bed.
Yoichi folded his arms.
The room held still.
Kiko's eyes moved over Yoichi, my guards, Deja, me, and then finally over the soul pin on my robe.
She rolled her eyes, turned her gaze toward the cousin on her left, and spoke in Japanese. "This dark bitch must have come in here to gloat."
I stared.
Both cousins snorted.
Kiko kept going, "The joke's on her. Once the Fox wins, I'll make sure he rapes her until she begs for death."
The cousin on the right laughed. "The Fox has taste. He would never want to rape her."
The one on the left, smirked. "She's too black and ugly."
The three of them shared a small, vicious laugh.
For three seconds I let them have it.
I let my rage rise in my body.
I let the heat of it find the cold emptiness that the sacrifice had left in me.
Then I turned to the lead guard at the foot of the bed and spoke in Japanese. "Take these two cousins outside and fucking kill them. Make it quick, but make sure it hurts. Then, put their bodies in a pile. We will burn them in the morning, once the war is done."
The room went deaf.
The guard's head snapped up to me. He stared in shock. Surely, he was not used to my ordering him to kill anyone.
The second guard at the foot of the bed turned and stared in shock too.
Yoichi's lips parted and then his mouth closed.
Deja's eyes moved between every face in the room and read the space—watching the people who understood the language, watching what their faces did, and feeding the information into whatever part of her brain put pieces together faster than anyone gave her credit for.
The cousins shook their faces and then let out nervous, broken little chuckles.
The cousin on the left tipped her head. “Look at her. She thinks she can order us to death.”
The other smirked. “Reo’s pin or not, the Dragon would never allow such power.”
They stopped laughing when the guards moved to them and raised their big hands to capture them.
Kiko’s guards looked the other way.
The cousins screamed in horror and fought against them.
"Oh no! Please! She has no authority to order our deaths!"
"Stop! Stop, you can't—"
"She can't do this!"
“This is insane! We will tell the Fox!”
They kicked. They clawed. One of them managed to grab the door frame on the way out and the guard wrenched her hand off it without slowing his pace. The other one was screaming Kiko's name now.
“Kiko, help! Please!! Kiko!?”
Kiko watched in shock. Her face had gone from pale to gray. Her hand fisted the bedsheet over her thigh and crushed it.
The door banged open.
The screams went into the hallway. They kept going for a few seconds—growing fainter, the cousin still calling Kiko's name—and then the corridor swallowed them.
A door somewhere further down the basement closed.
The babies cried again and I knew that the nurses were checking their vitals.
Kiko sat up straighter against her pillows. Her chin came up as she spoke in English, "You think you are a boss now."
I watched her.
"You are not a boss. Those guards will not kill them. They are just pretending to follow your order." Her voice fought to hold, but her bottom lip betrayed her as it quivered. She looked to Yoichi. "Tell this outsider, Yoichi. Tell her about our way."
Yoichi only looked at me.
The silence stretched for one long minute.
Then, I frowned. "Everyone leave, please. I want to talk to her by myself."
Deja shifted at my side. “Are you sure?"
“Yes.”
She didn't move. “Do you want Betty?"
“No.”
All the guards left.
Deja stayed another half second. Her eyes searched my face. She wasn't looking for permission to stay. She was checking to see if I really had it in me to do what must be done.
Whatever Deja saw, she nodded once and she walked away. "I'll be right outside."
Kiko sneered. “And what do you think? That we will have some talk. Or you will get some revenge. My twins belong to Hiro. He won’t allow you to touch me.”
Yoichi remained. “Tora—”
“Please leave.”
His expression was the most unguarded I had ever seen it. Whatever had been an unreadable mask for years had thinned, and underneath was absolute grief. "Are you sure you are ready to do this?"
"I am."
"You will not be the same."
"I stopped being the same after that sacrifice."
Sadness filled his eyes. Yoichi nodded once and walked away.
The door closed behind him with a click. And it was only her, me, and the sound of babies crying down the hall.
I looked at Kiko and just like that the room dropped out from under me.
A luxury hospital room came up around me instead.
Fluorescent light. White sheets. A monitor beeping. A bed cranked to a half-sit. Machines on either side. An IV pole and a bag of clear liquid running into a thin, bruised arm.
In the bed was an old man. His body was gaunt under the sheets, gone half to bone. His skin was paper thin. His mouth was open. His eyes were sunken but alive and resembled Kenji’s.
In fact. . .his face was an older version of Kenji's mixed with Hiro's. Yet, older, ruined, twisted by years and sickness and whatever darkness lived in his blood.