“This was a fucking disaster.”

  The harbor wasn’t just burning—it was screaming.

  Flames devoured the shipping containers, their metal skeletons groaning as they twisted into grotesque shapes. Thick, oily smoke strangled the stars, staining the sky with a sickly orange hue.

  I flicked ash off my blazer sleeve, scowling.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  The air tasted like hell’s kitchen: burnt plastic, diesel vomit, and something sharper, chemical, that clawed at my throat. Below, the water mirrored the chaos, its surface shimmering blood-red where floating debris smoldered.

  Yoishiro stood motionless beside me, a shadow carved from granite. His shaved head gleamed under the firelight, his eyes narrowed to slits. Always judging. Always disapproving.

  He had once been the personal bodyguard of my mother, Ageha Arakawa—the head of the Arakawa Conglomerate, that glittering empire with its polished corporate fronts and its tentacles deep in technology, finance, and other… less public enterprises.

  And now, by extension, he was my shadow. My loyal jailer.

  “A desperate escape attempt,” he said, voice flat as a corpse’s pulse.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Spoiler alert: nobody escapes,” I muttered. Mother’s favorite bedtime story. But here we were—charred metal, scattered bodies, and the reek of failure.

  A subordinate approached, bowing too low. His uniform reeked of smoke, the Arakawa conglomerate’s nine-tailed fox emblem barely visible through the soot.

  “Arakawa-sama… we found something.”

  “About time,” I sighed.

  I followed him, my heels clicking against asphalt slick with chemical runoff. Yoishiro’s presence loomed behind me, a silent threat to anyone foolish enough to step out of line.

  The car.

  No—the corpse of one.

  Once yellow, now a charcoal carcass, its Chevette emblem dangled upside-down from a mangled grille. The roof had caved like a stepped-on soda can, tires melted into tar puddles.

  Yoishiro brushed a gloved hand over the wreck.

  “A classic,” he said.

  For a fleeting heartbeat, his stone mask cracked—nostalgia? Regret? Or just the ramblings of an old fool? After all, he was one hundred and eighty-four years old, even if his frozen, expressionless face looked barely thirty.

  “Classic trash,” I scoffed, kicking a hubcap. It clattered into the dark, echoing like a funeral bell. “Who the hell would drive this relic?”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Survivors,” Yoishiro said. “The desperate.”

  “—Arakawa-sama, over here,” my subordinate insisted, pointing at something on the ground near the front of the wrecked car.

  He gestured to the body.

  It lay in a pool of congealed blood and engine fluids, limbs splayed like a broken marionette. The face was… gone. A crater of bone and brain matter, swarmed by flies buzzing a hungry hymn.

  Yoishiro knelt, clinical.

  “Male. Early twenties. Gunshot residue suggests execution-style,” he observed.

  “I have eyes, Yoishiro,” I snapped.

  He pulled back the t-shirt, exposing a tattoo—a heart coiled around a rose, its petals intertwined with vibrant yellow letters: Clara x Ezra.

  “A cover-up, perhaps? Or a deeper mark of affiliation—Yakuza, maybe?” I said, though my pulse betrayed me, quickening with the possibilities.

  “Just a fool in love,” he replied, his insufferably plain tone turning the words into ash in the air.

  “Of course, I was making a joke,” I said sharply, feeling my throat burn with irritation. “Do you think I'm an idiot?”

  He ignored me, tracing the tattoo with a gloved finger. “He drove this… baby,” he murmured. Mourning the car, not the corpse.

  I turned to head back toward our waiting vehicles, already anticipating the fine wine waiting for me—and the conversation I’d rather avoid—when I felt it.

  Vanilla and gun oil. And something else.

  Lilia.

  That fucking traitor scent.

  Lilia Takahashi. That half-breed daughter of—

  I froze mid-step.

  Slowly, I turned back toward the corpse. The scent wafted from it—faint, but undeniable. Mixed with blood and death, yet it was there. That cheap, sickly-sweet perfume. The essence of her.

  Was Lilia among the rebels we’d been hunting?

  Was she with this man?

  Why hadn’t my mother told me?

  Why had she hidden this from me?

  I knew we were tracking a small-time group of dissidents—petty smugglers of stolen tech—but Lilia?

  A cold, fiery fury took hold of me. I felt my hands trembling, the blood boiling in my veins.

  My focus wavered.

  Yoishiro cleared his throat discreetly beside me, barely a sound, but his gaze flicked briefly behind me.

  Damn it. The illusion.

  The familiar tingling flooded over me, energy spilling out. For a moment, under the dim light of distant flames, a long, silky tail—golden, like ripe wheat, prideful and betraying every Kitsune trait—materialized behind me, swaying faintly in the polluted air.

  With an effort of will, I wrestled back control, forcing the spell into place again, feeling the illusion realign. The tail shimmered once, then faded into nothingness.

  I took a deep breath, steadying myself. Ignoring the curious stares of my subordinates, I approached the corpse once more and leaned closer, discreetly sniffing.

  Yes. Definitely. This man had been more than just Lilia’s casual companion. Her scent clung to him—too recent, too intimate.

  “Bag him,” I ordered. “Tamamo-no-Mae-sama will scrape his bones clean.”

  The men scrambled to obey. Yoishiro watched, unreadable.

  I pulled a silk handkerchief from the pocket of my jacket and pressed it against my nose. The scent of that vixen churned my stomach.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Yoishiro, turning my back on the macabre spectacle. We started walking back to the SUV. “You’ve got a lot to explain to my mother.” My tone carried a hint of malice—a promise of trouble for him.

  “Me?” Yoishiro replied.

  For the second time that night, his unshakable facade seemed to crack, crumbling into tiny pieces—if only for a fleeting moment—before he pulled himself back together.