“Thanks for letting me know, I’ll handle it just as soon as I’m done here,” I told Rhodes and hung up my phone, gripping it tightly in my fist as I tried to get a hold on my emotions.
Anger coursed through me that had nothing to do with the man who was sitting across the table from me. Shuuhei Saito had been a hard man to track down for the last week and made it to where I only returned home to change and put my head down for a few minutes before heading back out again.
We were currently sitting in a small, run-down diner that served as one of our neutral meeting grounds outside of City Hall.
Perrie’s scans had thankfully come back all clear and my omega was healthy. Unfortunately that knowledge came with a reminder that Ethan Chandler was, and would always be, a weak-willed bastard who reneged on his promises. Even if that promise was to his own fucking daughter.
“Problem?” Shuuhei asked as he slowly stirred sugar into his cup of coffee, willfully oblivious to my men glaring at him from over my shoulder. His own men, dressed in their bright and colorful suits—a trademark of the Saito Yakuza—were also starting to get twitchy while they waited for us to get down to business.
I took a sip of my own coffee and tried not to grimace. Sally, the owner of this diner, may have been a scary ass woman with a cigarette perpetually perched in between her cherry-red lips, but even after twenty years her coffee still hadn’t improved much.
“Nothing more than the usual shit,” I told him offhandedly, not wanting to give away my frustrations that had been building over the last two weeks since my interrupted wedding night. “So tell me, Saito, what have you been up to?”
It was phrased like we were two friends catching up, but Shuuhei knew that I wouldn’t have arranged a meeting like this unless I had a really good reason and I had really good fucking reason.
Two weeks ago, after a brawl broke out at my wedding, I received news that our biggest shipment of the year so far had been intercepted and my men had been ambushed.
Fifteen casualties and the weapons were gone. The only thing left behind? The body of one of Shuuhei Saito’s men. One that I recognized from our last all family meeting the day Alessandro Amante tried to protest my marrying Perrie.
My knee-jerk reaction—if I ever gave into those—would have been to get revenge for the young men who had died leaving their wives, children, and other family members behind for some fucking guns.
But then I took a step back and viewed the scene as a whole. I was no expert on crime scenes, but even to me the scene that had been set forth on a backroad upstate had been too perfect. Almost theatrical.
And at the center of the dead bodies of my men was Shuuhei’s man who had been posed, almost like he was a flag exclaiming: ‘The Japanese did it!’
“The same as always. You know how it goes.” Shuuhei’s voice was flat, all of the friendly inflection from earlier gone as his dark eyes narrowed at me. “Now are you going to tell me why you’ve really called me here, Edison? Last I checked, we’re not the type of friends to get a casual brunch on a Friday afternoon.”
It was a risk to let him know I was onto him if he had been the one who’d ambushed my men and stolen my shipment… but as I stared at him my instincts, which had never steered me wrong before, were telling me to trust him.
“One of my shipments was ambushed two weeks ago and this,” I gestured for my men to bring the little gift that I’d brought for him, “Was left at the scene.”
We’d kept the body of Shuuhei’s man on ice, and while pulling him out in the late summer was probably not a good idea, I’d always had a flair for the dramatic.
They deposited the long black body bag on the ground next to our table and Collum, the man who usually took over for Rhodes when he couldn’t be with me pulled the zipper down to reveal the grayed face of the man who had been the bane of my existence for the past two weeks.
“Haruto!” One of the men behind Shuuhei gasped, only to be silenced by the guy standing next to him.
“Oh, so you recognize him? Good that makes this so much easier.” Reading my chin on my palms, I waited for Shuuhei to react to the body next to us.
The head of the Saito family stared down at the still face of his man, his own expression neutral despite the storm raging in his dark eyes. “What did you do to him?”
“Me?” I asked, surprised. “I did nothing, though I’m still not sure if one of my own men who were gunned down had something to do with it. See, I found good old—Haruto—was it? Yes, Haruto. I found Haruto here at the center of a sea of my own men’s bodies and my weapons shipment completely gone.”
Shuuhei seemed to finally be connecting the dots, his gaze darting in between Haruto and me like a ping pong ball. “And you think I had something to do with it.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, all signs point to it being a job done by the Japanese, which is strange because I thought we were allies.”
“We are allies,” Shuuhei insisted and I watched as the men behind him started to get a little bit twitchy, their hands shifting to their barely concealed weapons.
“Really, then why are your men looking as if they want to put a few more bullet holes in me and my guys?” I nodded at the men who shifted guiltily on their feet as Shuuhei whirled around to look at them, barking orders in Japanese.
I didn’t understand what was said—Japanese was one of the languages I could never truly grasp when I was being tutored as a young boy—but it was clear he was arguing with them and they were arguing back.
Then, they filed out of the diner except for one man, the one who had been arguing with Shuuhei the most. He remained standing right behind his boss, eyeing me like I was the devil coming to take him away.
“You didn’t need to send them out,” I told him, fiddling with one of the rings on my fingers.
Shuuhei leaned forward, his expression serious. “My men did not do this to yours, I swear it. Haruto has been missing for a month now. We just figured he’d run off with one of his women. My family has been set up.”
I’d figured out as much before this meeting with Shuuhei. But now I had him right where I needed him to be. “Then prove it. Find out who killed your man, and inevitably it will lead me to who killed mine.”
Shuuhei glanced down at Haruto again, the tendon in his jaw twitching as he clenched it. “Deal. Can I take him with me? His mother deserves to be able to bury him.”
I nodded my approval and Shuuhei gestured to the man behind him. The guy ducked outside, returning with two others to carry the body out as Shuuhei himself slid free from the booth and turned to leave.
“Saito,” I called after him, making him pause. “Find out who did this or I will assume that it was you, and while I want to avoid a war at all costs, I will avenge the fifteen men of mine that were taken from this world far too soon and you are at the top of my list.”
Shuuhei nodded solemnly, swallowing hard before he turned to leave, the golden threads of his embroidered suit jacket catching on the bright afternoon light outside as his men closed rank around him.
We waited for them to clear out completely before Collum leaned down next to my ear. “Should we head back to the estate now, Mr. Keane?”
“No,” I said, standing up from the booth and straightening my suit. “There’s one more stop I have to make.”
Ethan Chandler’s screams were still ringing in my ears as I sat in my study for the first time in weeks, sipping on two fingers of whiskey and trying to put all of my raging thoughts into order.
