Page 138 of Dance of Devils

33

KIR

My immediate reactionto my study door banging open is to reach for the gun I keep holstered under the desk. But when my eyes focus on the grinning face peeking through the door, I smile widely.

“Hi, Dad.”

I chuckle as I stand, stride around the side of the desk, and scoop Freya into a big bear hug. She hugs me back fiercely, then pulls away and shakes her head, a weird look on her face.

“Nope. No ‘dad’. Sorry, I keep trying it on for size. But that’ll never feel right.”

I grin. “Just Kir worked fine for a long time. We can stick with that,daughter.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Eww, why do you say it like that? So weird.”

“What do you mean,daughter? Is it weird,daughter, when I call you?—”

“Fuckin’stop,” she groans, laughing.

I first met Freya and Annika when they linked up with Damian. The two of them had been scratching out a survival thieving on the streets of various European cities for years. Slowly, as they honed their talents—Annika's for pickpocketing and break-ins, Freya’s for computers—they started to make a name for themselves as a go-to team for certain jobs.

They ran afoul of Damian at a rich, snobby fundraiser where they were pretending to be catering staff while robbing the place blind—including lifting his watch.

Unfortunately—orfortunately, seeing how things turned out—Damian was taught byme, which means he saw the lift when it happened, and then tailed the two of them to the bar they slunk off to after the heist to gloat over their spoils.

Instead of busting them, the three of them teamed up. And soon, Freya and Annika came to work for me.

It wasn’t until recently that we pieced together Freya’s murky background: her mother, Petra, was the wife of a Norwegian mafia head who I was, unfortunately, doing business with—an abusive, cruel monster.

I know my brief affair with Petra was wrong, even if her home life was a mess. It wasn’tloveor anything close to that. I think we were just two broken people who found temporary escape with each other—she from her husband, me from the demons still chasing me from my time in Siberia. Then we parted ways, and I never knew Freya existed—as my own blood, that is—until recently.

But seeing as she’s mainly in Japan now, I’m more than a little surprised to see her without notice, waltzing through my door halfway across the globe from where she calls home.

It’s that thought that has my brow furrowing as I look at her.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, my voice edged.

She rolls her eyes. “What, I can’t just bounce in and say hi to myfather?”

“Of course you can,daughter?—”

“Yeah, we have to stop that.”

I chuckle. “I’m just surprised, is all.”

She grins impishly. “There’s a tech startup here in New York that Hana and I have been eyeing for an acquisition. I'm having a sit down with them tomorrow night to get a feel for their tech first-hand. I thought I’d surprise you.”

Hana Mori, Kenzo’s sister and Damian’s wife, is the head financial wizard of the Mori-kai’s legitimate business interests.

“I thought I’d surprise you.”

“Well,” I smile. “You’ve succeeded.”

“You still have that .45 under your desk?”

I nod. Freya grimaces.

“Shit. How close did I get to being shot?”