This was his moment of triumph.
The Gentleman dashed back another mouthful, wiped the sting from his lips. He stared at the irezumi on his flesh—the koi fish and cherry blossoms and geisha girls marking him as clanless trash. Not lucky enough to be born one of the four mighty zaibatsu, no. A child of gutters and a nameless family. He wondered who his people were. Where they’d come from, in days before the Empire crushed two dozen into four. Panda? Mantis? Cat? Monkey? Dog?
None of it mattered anymore. Tonight, he was Oyabun of the Scorpion Children. Master of the largest band of cutthroats, pimps, drug dealers and extortionists in all of Kigen. From lowborn trash, to a lord of the city. And all it had taken was a few hundred murders …
Eri stood in the doorway, the lantern behind throwing a long shadow on the floor. “Will you say good night to your son, Husband?”
“Soon, love.”
She touched his face, swept the graying hair back from his brow and kissed his cheek. Tiptoeing up the hall to their son’s room, to coo and sing the child into pleasant dreams.
How long did he sit there, drinking in the dark and dreaming of empire? A kingdom of shadows, wrought with his own bare hands. Eri’s voice finally roused him, thin and trembling. There was something in her tone. Something close to …
The Gentleman pulled himself to his feet, padding up the stairs to the babe’s room, door ajar, flickering with the dull flame of a single night light. He could hear little Kaito laughing—his firstborn son, the boy’s voice high and bright, filling him with momentary joy.
Melting into fear.
It hit him like a hammerblow as he stepped into the room, seeing the boy in his crib, plump and rosy-cheeked, pawing at the sleek black shapes coiled around him. His crib infested with them, the smallest at least two feet long, dead doll’s eyes and crooked yellow fangs.
The gasp caught in his teeth as he lunged forward. “Kaito!”
“Far enough, friend.” A hiss. Behind.
He turned, caught sight of him then, standing in the far corner with hands in sleeves, Eri trussed at his feet like a corpse-rat in a butcher shop window. Blank expression. Pale and still. Only the eyes gave him away, swimming with the empty solace of murder. The eyes of a killer in a pretty boy’s face—a face the Gentleman had last seen weeping and screaming as he tore his sister’s eye from her socket.
The rat-speaker.
Rage flooded him, hot and blinding. He took two swift steps forward, tantō somehow already in his hands as the boy held up his finger and the corpse-rats shrieked, one sawing note that set Kaito to screaming, surrounded by hungry, open mouths.
“You think they’ll fret or froth?” The boy glanced at the bedful of vermin. “If the fellow holding their leash slacks his grip?”
The boy nodded to the knife in the Gentleman’s hand.
“Best be dropping that shiv. Supposing we can be gentlemanly about this. Gentleman.”
“You threaten my family—”
“Oh, don’t step there, little yakuza. Don’t even dare.”
A corpse-rat stood tall in the crib, licking Kaito’s tears with a long, gray tongue. Eri’s weeping was a distant waterfall. The tantō thumped into the floorboards, point down and quivering.
The boy’s voice was soft as velvet. Black as night.
“There once was a clever boy named Yoshi. And being who he was, which was no one of much account in the grandest of schemes, and not half so clever as he thought, he took what wasn’t his, and lost almost everything that was.”
The boy stepped closer, footsteps lost under corpse-rat whispers.
“And at the last, with empty pockets and empty chest, he paid a visit to the man who’d taken all of it away. Because good or bad, favors are just like kisses. They taste sweeter when you give them back.”
The boy unfolded hands from sleeves. The Gentleman was not the least surprised when he saw what he held in his fists.
A claw-tooth hammer and a rusted pair of pliers.
“Get on your fucking knees.”
“Suppose then,” the Shinshi said, “that I do not.”
“Then I suppose you can listen to your son die.”
The Gentleman blinked, gaze flickering from the rusted tools to the boy’s eyes. No trembling in the gutter-rat’s voice. No hint of fear or hesitation. An impressive display.
A peacock before wolves.
The Gentleman tilted his head, felt the vertebrae pop. His cheeks were saké warm, his tongue slightly too big for his mouth. Edges numb. Heavy as lead. But there was no pup on earth he couldn’t whip, no matter how blurred the lines.
“Yoshi, isn’t it?”
The boy made no reply. It would not matter if he had.
“It takes a peculiar kind of emptiness to murder children, Yoshi-san. I’ve seen the eyes of men who kill babes. It leaves a mark, that callousness. A stain, if you will. And forgive me, child, but for all your crowing, I do not see that mark in you.”
Fists clenching.
“I called you coward once.”
“Don’t—”