Frustrated, Oroshi rushed back to his room. The situation was dire. He failed to kill Kaori and she could surface at any moment, but that was a problem for later. Right now, he was standing worse than naked in the corridor of the Chinzanso hotel, with a gun in his hand and another between his legs, covered in sweat and blood. Even without Kaori’s testimony, he was done for if anyone found him looking like this.

  He rushed back to his room, changed his pants, and made some phone calls to his men around the property. He sent three of them after Kaori. That was a long shot, but one never knew. It was a big fall; she could be dying somewhere in the garden, and if that was the case, one of his men could simply finish her and take the fall for him. Still, he thought he had seen movement, something that looked like a large man rolling and disappearing into the shadows. It made no sense.

  She had jumped from the window out of nowhere in the middle of the night. How could someone be there, ready to catch her and take her away? He called another team to remove all traces of the fight in his suite and dispose of the girl. If he managed to clean up the scene, it would be her word against his. A huge setback, but one he could survive.

  Finally, his preparations well underway, he made one last phone call, one he didn’t want to make, but not one he could avoid.

  His father answered instantly. He spoke a single word:

  “Come.”

  Matsuko Masamune was not a man to be taken lightly. Oroshi scrambled out, leaving his men to their tasks. He would see to them in a bit, if he was still alive then.

  His father’s apartments covered the entire floor above his. As he exited the elevator, guards flanked him and remained a couple of paces away, some distance from each other. They glided across the floor and wore katanas by their sides. People assumed these were traditional ornaments, as were their kimonos, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were weapons used to kill people, and they had done so countless times in recent years. Oroshi himself was a remarkable fighter, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe he would survive taking on these men, alone and unarmed.

  Bravado was well and good, but real warriors had to face the truth, unpleasant as it might be. He would have to talk his way out of this mess. He composed himself, held his head high, and relaxed his shoulders, the very picture of serenity and control. He stepped into the salon looking calm and competent.

  A long, low wooden table occupied the middle of the room. Masamune presided. On either side of the table sat several men he recognized as his principal lieutenants, yakuza bosses one and all, although they all had far more reputable identities in public. A young man walked in and knelt beside Masamune, whispering quietly what was no doubt a progress report, although he couldn’t hear a word of it. Masamune’s reaction, however, was far from cryptic.

  He exploded in anger:

  “You fool! Do you realize what you have done? Years of planning and everything is ruined because my retarded son can’t keep it in his pants for one more night? Someone should lop off the pitiful worm between your legs.”

  As he said this, his glance fell on one of the guards who began to move toward Oroshi. The man appeared to be mildly inconvenienced, as if he had been asked to clean a stain from a window.

  Oroshi bowed deeply: “I submit to your will, Father, but may I be allowed to explain myself? The situation is still well under control.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Masamune snorted, and the men around him marveled at the youth’s polite insolence. Did the whelp really believe he could talk his way out of a disaster this massive with just words?

  “Under control? You fired at Japan’s greatest star in the corridors of the Chinzanso! This merger is over and instead we are now faced with open war against one of Japan’s largest corporations! Is this what you call ‘Under control’?”

  “Did I shoot at Kaori? Who would believe that story?” Looking at his father’s infuriated face, he quickly corrected himself: “Of course, we all know this is the truth. I wouldn’t dare lie to you, but who else knows?

  “No one! I took control of the CCTV network of the hotel as soon as we arrived. Tonight’s footage has already been wiped, and the CCTV power supply has been disabled. There were no witnesses.”

  His father fixed him with a hard, calculating gaze: “You make a good point, but you fired your gun in the establishment, and you can’t scrub that. Not well enough anyway. There is no time to find all the bullets, we won’t be able to hide that.”

  “True, but I don’t need to hide it. A man kidnapped Kaori from right under my eyes. Of course I would shoot at him. What kind of fiancé would I be if I didn’t do at least that much?”

  “This story will hold for now, but everything will all fall apart when Kaori resurfaces and tells her father the truth. Even if she can’t prove it, there is no way Daisuke will trust your word over hers!”

  “Indeed… but that’s only if Kaori survives to tell the tale. My men are holding a perimeter around the hotel. She can’t come anywhere close to it now, even if she dared to, and she won’t. Kanaki confirmed she left carried by a foreigner, and they took her car, the pink Lexus.

  “I have sent a couple of men to lay out a false trail for the police and they are driving north in a stolen hotel van as we speak. This will keep the cops busy and out of our way while we hunt Kaori. Once we kill her, everything will work out perfectly. Even better than the wedding.”

  There was a pause as Masamune processed what Oroshi was saying. He had been too hasty in his judgment. His son didn’t make excuses, he made plans. He respected that.

  “Better? Explain.”

  His father’s voice was still harsh, but the worst was over.

  “Daisuke lives for his daughter. She is his only weakness. If she lived and married me, he would have taken me under his wing, groomed me and eventually, several years down the line, we would have inherited control of the whole thing. It was a good plan, but within those years, so many things could have gone wrong, and the merger would have given him dominant control over some of our companies.”

  Masamune nodded for him to continue.

  “Now, the situation has changed. If we can track down Kaori and kill her, I can bring back her corpse and that of her ‘kidnapper’. We will shift the blame on a gang of foreign criminals. When the dust clears up and Kaori is ‘avenged’, Daisuke will be crushed. He won’t care about business and I, the dutiful son-in-law he always wanted, will be the only one capable of taking over the reins of his empire. We get everything we want, sooner, and Daisuke won’t be looking over our shoulders all the time. Give it another month and we can arrange a proper seppuku for him. No one will raise an eyebrow. Kaori is his everything; we might not even need to help with his suicide.”

  Oroshi stopped. The room was silent. All eyes were on him, showing a mixture of admiration and… was it fear? Yes, it was. He basked in the feeling.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Masamune simply said: “You ARE my son, indeed. See that it gets done. You will have full access to all of the clan’s resources to track and kill Kaori. But if you flub this, this time, it WILL be your head. Don’t think I have forgotten that it was your foolish recklessness that created the situation in the first place.”

  Oroshi bowed low and held the bow a second longer than required by protocol, then left the room. His face was a mask devoid of emotions, but he was jubilant inside. He survived and won great respect in the process. How hard could it be to kill an actress dumb enough to run away in a pink car? The foreigner was barely an afterthought—what could that man do in Japan when Oroshi wielded the full power of the media, the yakuza, the police and the military?

  This was almost too easy.