Page 41 of The Dragon 1

Here, the scent of narcotics was overwhelming—earthy heroin, gasoline-laced cocaine, chemical dust from crushed pills.

A dull ache bloomed in the back of my throat as it settled into my lungs.

The room itself was massive, maybe seventy feet wide. The floors were black tile, sanitized nightly. Long metal tables stretched across the space in clean rows, each lit from above by a single spotlight.

And the thirty women seated at the long tables were all naked, their hair pulled back into tight ponytails or sleek buns, exposing every inch of their bodies to the fluorescent light.

Breasts of all shapes—small and pert, heavy and swaying, round, flat, veined—moved subtly with each measured task. Some wore surgical gloves. Others didn’t. The softness of theirbodies stood in stark contrast to the hard-edged drugs in their hands.

Thin fingers broke down bricks of coke, carving white lines with practiced grace and pressing the powder into smaller packets, each one stamped with the Dragon’s logo in red foil.

Others weighed heroin into plastic capsules, their bare chests rising and falling with slow, methodical breaths as they counted out the grams.

Another group crushed pills and repackaged them into fake prescription bottles. The labels—Xanax. Oxy. Adderall—were indistinguishable from the real ones, printed to perfection. From the neck down, they looked like soft machines built for one thing: speed and precision.

Their nudity wasn’t sexual.

It was strategic.

No pockets.

No hiding places.

No temptation to tuck a gram beneath a lace bra or slide a capsule into a waistband.

I didn’t let any men patrol this room. All the guards were women—deadly, silent, and clean. They stood at the corners. Their eyes never stopped moving—scanning hands, gestures, breath patterns. Watching for twitches. Lies. Theft.

I’d learned early that the naked workers—many of whom had clawed their way out of hell—felt more at ease under the gaze of women.

They worked faster.

As we passed, a few of the women glanced up.

One nodded—just a small tilt of the chin.

Another gave Hiro a tiny smile. He didn’t return it but something shifted in his jaw. Softened for a fraction of a second before hardening again.

We moved past a table where three women were sealing coke packets with small red wax stamps. Each stamp bore the kanji for “fire.”

I leaned Reo’s way. “Did the French give us a clean batch?”

He nodded. “It was triple tested. 98% purity. We’ll push it into Sapporo by Monday.”

“Price?”

“Sixty thousand per kilo. Maybe less once the Vietnamese flip their route to us.”

I hummed low in my throat. “We’re saving a lot of money this way.”

Reo adjusted the cuffs of his suit. “Correct. The Lion charges seventy-five thousand. Eighty, if you count the security fee.”

I snorted. “That damn security fee. For what? A few Bratva boys in leather jackets and bad cologne?”

“He calls it ‘operational integrity’,” Reo smirked. “But it’s just extortion with a receipt.”

Continuing forward, I watched one of the women flick a bead of wax onto a finished packet then press the seal. “Now we’re saving twenty thousand per kilo and moving three times the product.”

Reo nodded. “That’s a lot of fucking money.”