Page 123 of The Dragon 2

For the last six hours after arriving in Tokyo, I’d had a whole special team of men trying to figure out the location.

Nothing came.

Even her personal guards didn’t know.

She hadn’t left the apartment once the entire fucking day.

That was the first red flag—she knew I was watching.

Although many people went in and out of her friend’s apartment, none gave us any clue of where tonight’s date would be.

Therefore, I’d activated three layers of new surveillance. One Scale simply watched her building. Other Scales tailed every friend she’d seen in the past 48 hours. A third monitored every digital whisper—text threads, deleted messages, cloud pings, dummy accounts, burner phones, QR codes, crypto wallets.

Nothing stuck.

By afternoon, she’d gotten multiple grocery deliveries. Tons of bags and boxes that she would not let her guards go through or help her take up. Regardless, the amount of them suggested a small gathering.

For a moment, I thought she might be hosting the date at Zo’s apartment. Maybe something cozy, something she couldcontrol. I wondered if she was cooking for me. That thought alone twisted something low in my stomach. Not just arousal, but dangerous hope.

Women didn’t cook for me.

They dressed up for five-star menus and handed me the bill.

But her?

What if she was in that apartment rolling up her sleeves and cooking for me?

I tried not to get too excited. Tried not to imagine her barefoot in Zo’s little kitchen, humming while she tasted sauces and thought of me.

But fuck, it was difficult to not wonder.

That fantasy was what began to get me hard.

Her friends moved like people with nothing to hide. They laughed. They strolled.They wastedourtime.

Aimi, a sculptor with cobalt blue braids and a fetish for antique weaponry, had an art installation opening in Nakameguro. She spent the afternoon on livestream talking about “erotic violence and feminine myth” with a whiskey in one hand and a steel blade in the other.

Mai, a quiet powerhouse who taught Pilates and coded blockchain apps in the evenings, went to a silent retreat in Setagaya, then showed up at her grandmother’s house with lemon tea and a book about grief.

And then there was Zo. He’d been the one that I knew would truly give us some clues. But all he’d done was disappear into a podcast studio in Shibuya for over an hour. When he finally came out with two producers, they went to grab a slice of cheesecake and chat for another hour.

Even Reo—who could profile someone with three minutes of audio and a heartbeat—had come up empty.

“The friends are clean. Too clean. If they’re hiding something for her, they’re doing it at a level I’ve never seen.”

Reo wasn’t angry—he was impressed.

But I was aggravated.

My focus was supposed to be on the war and the cargo.

Chiba had gone off without a hitch. The cargo was offloaded to a fleet of decoy seafood trucks—ice-packed and swarming with the stench of mackerel, shrimp, and salt brine. No one questioned them. The labels were perfect, the manifests clean. Drivers stuck to coastal access roads and slipped through Tokyo’s east side undisturbed.

The warehouse they parked at was legally registered to a shell company under one of my wine distributors. The seafood smell masked the gunpowder. No one blinked.

Saitama was more complex but Reo had run the play like a symphony. The crates were split between two convoys—each made up of luxury vans registered to one of our front-facing escort services. Suits. Silk. Lipstick. Even the women didn’t know they were sitting above enough C4 to flatten six blocks. Each van had its own path into Tokyo, entering as if enroute to pleasure appointments.

Meanwhile, Reo’s men hacked the traffic grid to greenlight every corner.