Dim Sum Asylum(47)

The grass was wet, a sloshy mess of thick fragrant green blades and loamy mud. I’d chosen a place in the shade for them and in retrospect probably should have found the sunniest spot, considering San Francisco’s weather, but John’s nose always burned with the slightest hint of a clear day, and the girls really liked trees. From where I stood, I could see my mother’s memorial, a set of black Odonata wings rising from the ground, twisting up toward the sky to frame an eternally burning ball of blue mage fire. Flowers lay around the wings, remembrances left by the city and some families she’d saved during her career.

After she’d been assassinated, they’d named a day after her and a foundation to assist faerie officers with their education. She’d have hated the attention, and the memorial would have sparked a yearlong rant about wasting money and aggrandizing the job.

Most of all, she’d have hated knowing her granddaughters followed her in death not even a month after she’d been gunned down.

“She loved you guys,” I reassured the deaf and mute stones. “Even if she didn’t show it like most other grandmas, she loved the Hell out of you. She was just… prickly.”

The tangerines I’d left were still there, but the onigiri were gone, probably as soon as I’d gotten to the car. Apex predators could learn a few things from the cemetery’s squirrels. There wasn’t a lot of space between the cramped plots, and I’d lucked out finding a spot for my family in the older section. The narrow rows had barely enough room to squat down in front of the gravestones bristling up over the slight hillocks, jagged uneven teeth rife with cavities made from gouged-out names of the lost.

It didn’t do any good to leave mementos. The groundskeepers plucked them out within a day of anything being laid down. Well, anything but traditional tributes, but I’d left two tiny koinobori in the gravel-filled metal bowl fixed into the cement in front of their graves. Surprisingly, they were still there, damp but no worse for wear. I wedged a few incense sticks into the heavy grit, then lit them, taking a small whiff of the lemon-myrrh smoke, then stood up, shoving my hands into my jacket pockets.

And stared down at my dead.

The slush-slush of someone making their way through the rows was hard to miss. I should have been more worried, considering I’d rattled a few cages at Kingfisher’s the other day, but if there was one sacred place, it was a graveyard. No one would come looking for me among the markers, but they’d certainly be waiting for me out on the streets. Even by the yakuza standards, killing someone on top of their dead family was taking things a bit too far.

I knew who was there. Or at least I thought I did. No one but Gaines would follow me out to the rain-drenched plots. He hadn’t finished tearing me a new asshole back at the station, and considering I’d not shown up for the family dinner I’d not-quite promised to make an appearance at, hunting me down would be something on his to-do list. So instead of looking up, I simply said, “Hello, my favorite pain in the ass.”

If I’d thought Trent’s fae-iced fingers down my throat were cold, they had nothing on the frigid brittleness in the words flung at my back in response.

“Is that any way to greet your grandfather?” he rasped, wrapping so much disapproval into his voice it could have curdled cabbage into kimchee. “Is it, Takahashi Rokugi?”




THE OLD bastard looked exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, a lean, hollow-cheeked Japanese man with thick black hair slicked back from his hard, handsome face and cold dirt-brown eyes. He’d dressed for the weather, a long navy blue cashmere coat over a tailored pinstriped gray suit that probably cost more than my car. Since he normally came with at least two shadows, I peered into the rising fog and found them, hulking men with stony expressions and dead gazes. They were giving us space. Too much space, if anyone’d asked me. The old man was worth just under a billion in legal tallies. I didn’t even dare to imagine how much he had on his set of uncooked books. Still, it was odd to find him standing behind me in a graveyard, especially out in the open where anyone could take a shot at his head and set a good part of the criminal underworld on fire.

“Nice of you to visit your granddaughters.” I glanced at the koi rattling in the breeze. “I didn’t think you knew where they were buried.”

“Those were not my granddaughters.” His words pressed tightly together, strung beads of coiled dislike. “We shared no blood. We—”

“They were mine,” I reminded him. “You want to hang your family name on me? You hang it on them as well.”

He said nothing at first, his mouth flattening to a straight line. Then he glanced over his shoulder at his bodyguards and pushed them back a few steps with a nod. Clearing his throat, he waited until they were dark shimmers behind the thickening mist, then remarked quietly, “I killed your cousin for what he did. I did what you could not do. For them. So no, they are not my family… not my granddaughters, but that does not mean I do not think of them as yours.”

“I didn’t—” Reminding the old man I hadn’t asked him to kill Donnie wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference one way or the other. In his mind, Donnie’s fate was sealed the second he decided to send his men to board up the doors and windows of my house, then set it on fire with my family inside.

I couldn’t even think of what to say that I hadn’t said before. The old man was both my damnation and my salvation. His overt favoritism marked me as a threat in the family despite my refusal to have anything to do with the Takahashi dynasty, but no one would move against me as long as the old man lived.