Dim Sum Asylum(74)

“He’s my partner and I trust him, more than I trust any of the guys you’ve got covering you, so he’s off-limits.” I shot Trent a look, giving him as silent of a warning as I could, nodding at the gun he had in his hand. I wanted him to be ready, because from the strain in my alleged relative’s voice, I couldn’t be sure the man had all his wits about him. “Go after him and—”

“I don’t have time to talk about… we don’t have time to talk about this. I need five minutes of your time, Rokugi.” He ground his teeth loud enough for me to hear, and then he sighed. “Our grandmother—”

“Yes, I know.” A full cousin, then. Our grandmother. My grandfather had two wives, the first dying by her own hand in Japan, but she’d given him five sons. Yukiko presented him with three, my father being the eldest, but as far as I was concerned, that put him smack dab in the middle of the birth order and nearly dead last to inherit. My grandfather had other ideas, embedding me in his civil wars following my father’s abandonment. “Name a place, Takahashi. I’ll follow you there once I tell my Captain where I’m going.”

“No,” he bit back. “Stay parked where you are. We will come to you.”

With that, he hung up.

“Son of a bitch. We. Who the Hell is we?” I muttered, scrambling to recall anyone with the balls to call me. Names escaped me, and I cursed myself for not paying closer attention to the dossiers Vice sent over. A few possibilities floated to the top, but I’d never heard anyone speak, putting me at a disadvantage. “Now we’ve really got company. Someone’s coming out of that SUV.”

“So we’re just going to sit here and stick our heads into the bear trap?” Trent’s fingers ghosted over my thigh, leaving a frost-kiss pattern on my jeans. I shivered, recalling where those fingers had been last night. “Or are we going to go in guns blazing and apologize for the mess later?”

“I’d like the second, but truth be told, that’ll end all kinds of badly,” I confessed.

Someone was getting out of the SUV, a man large enough to catch the sun if he stretched his arms up. His long, coarse hair was pulled back from his tattooed face, a blue-black fierce display of Maori swirls and lineage. The SUV rose slightly when he stepped clear of it. Then he shook out a golf umbrella, an all-too-familiar mondokoro embroidered in gold on its black fabric. Holding the open umbrella aloft, the Maori blocked my view of who was getting out of the vehicle while his head turned back and forth, probably scanning the street for potential trouble.

Two figures got out, both slender, dark-haired, and dressed in expensive tailored suits. I didn’t know the younger man, but even with his face hidden by the umbrella’s deep, sweeping scallops, I instantly recognized the older one by the way he held himself. The Maori handed the umbrella off to the younger man, who held it low to shield the elder from the brisk, pounding downpour, and the men began to slowly walk toward us, their stern-faced security detail walking ahead of them, not showing a sign of discomfort about being out in the rain.

Sighing, I unfastened my seat belt. “Well, fuck me.”

“What?” Trent scowled while he dug out one of the extra clips I’d put in the console. “What’s going on?”

“The one in the blue might be my cousin.” I nodded toward the older man tucked under the umbrella’s curve. “But that one is my grandfather.”




THEY STOOD in the rain for a few minutes while the Maori walked around the unmarked. I had a brief flirtation with an urge to run him over when he crossed in front of the car, but that was shoved down by a quick rumbling cough from Trent. I apparently had to work on my poker face. But it seemed to be firmly in place when I rolled the window down to talk to my grandfather.

“Am I supposed to let you into the back seat now?” I asked. My definitely-cousin’s poker face was worse than mine, because I heard him gasp, and his head jerked back in shock. He looked nothing like me, probably because he was pure human and skinnier. Younger than I’d thought, not quite thirty, and from his expression, totally cowed by the old man. “Or did you think I was going to stand in the rain for this little chat?”

“Are the back doors open? It would be like you to have your cousin fight with the latch while you played with the lock,” Grandfather drawled. Then he got in and ordered me to drive to the tearoom.

We ended up having tea and dim sum in an ancient teahouse served by what was probably the restaurant’s original staff back in the day when it served as a front for an opium den. The interior was a jumble of large and small rooms, complicated by carts the servers used to bring food out. The tearoom’s dim sum was always fantastic, and the women working the floor were old enough to be the gate dragons’ mothers, so no one dared give them shit. If they didn’t know someone’s family, they knew someone who did, and word always got back to someone if anyone stepped out of line. In a way, it was a mini-sanctuary, but without Kingfisher’s firm stance against weapons and violence. Grandfather asked for a back room, and the cousin scanned it for listening devices before Grandfather went in to take a seat at the only table inside. There were four chairs and not a lot of space to move. It was a tight fit for Trent. His shoulders weren’t made for a Chinese teahouse’s back room, but he wedged himself in. I had only slightly better luck and took the chair opposite Trent, leaving the seat with its back facing the door for my stammering cousin.