Page 26 of The Dragon 2 (Tokyo Empire #2)

Chapter twenty-three

The Mystery Date

Kenji

My Rolls-Royce glided through the Tokyo night with the grace of a panther. The engine purred low, a sound so luxurious it barely registered as mechanical.

Outside, Tokyo burned in motion—neon lights smeared across the windows in wild, chaotic brushstrokes. Crimson kanji. Electric blue streetlamps. Flashing pink signage that danced.

Tokyo didn’t sleep—it shimmered, thrummed, and lured.

It was a living poem written in neon and breathless desire.

And tonight, it felt like the entire city was blurring just to usher me toward whatever madness my Tiger had designed in secret.

I can’t wait to taste her.

The only thing that drove me crazy was the fact that I still didn’t know the location.

I was the Dragon, I should have already known.

Not because I needed to vet it myself.

Not because I didn’t trust Reo.

But because I owned this city and I wanted to be there already. To have her in front of me. To watch whatever unhinged little plan she’d been cooking up blossom on my time.

And more than anything?

I wanted to fuck the surprise out of her.

Naughty tiger.

But I waited.

Impatient.

On edge.

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 could control. 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 wasted our time.

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.

Tochigi was the most delicate. The cargo traveled in weathered agricultural trucks, the kind used to haul rice or compost. Stamped with a farming permit tied to a fake company. The crates were wrapped in burlap and mulch.

They crossed into Tokyo’s outskirts just before dawn. My allies in the city council had made sure inspections were suspended for “soil health testing” that morning.

Everything had moved.

Perfectly.

Flawlessly.

And yet here I was… distracted.

Agitated.

Chasing a woman who knew how to make my entire crew pivot around a single unanswered question: Where the fuck is she taking me?

I went back to her guards and demanded a full list of every person she’d physically come into contact with over the last twenty-four hours—delivery drivers, neighbors, passing strangers.

Anything.

All checked out, there was only one anomaly.

One of the guards mentioned an older woman. She’d visited the apartment the afternoon before. Stayed twenty, maybe thirty minutes.

Had tea.

That was it.

When she left the building, she wore a veil made of lace. The guard swore he couldn’t make out her face—just a pair of narrow eyes and the soft click of a cane as she moved down the hallway.

No car picked her up.

No camera caught her coming or going.

She just. . .arrived and then vanished.

They hadn’t searched her. Had no reason to. She was slow-moving. Polite. Elderly. She even bowed three times at one of them, looking like someone’s grieving aunt, not a variable in an active operation.

But I knew better.

I told Reo to assemble a full team to track the woman down.

He refused, citing that it was now close to an hour before the date.

Pissed, I accepted my defeat, and he left to meet her.

Still, while dressing, I’d called Reo seven times to get the address.

He didn’t answer.

Which told me everything.

Nyomi had ordered him not to.

And Reo—my most trusted, my most disciplined, my coldest in command—had obeyed her .

I laughed out loud when I realized that.

Fucking Roar.

Did Reo not know exactly what kind of chaos he was enabling?

Regardless, I was impressed. Shocked, even. Reo didn’t bend easily. And never had he shown this kind of quiet respect for anyone I dated.

Until now.

My chauffeur moved us along.

I sat in the back with my fingers drumming along my thigh. The gift I’d gotten her in Paris rested beside me and was wrapped in thick black paper. A pink bow topped it.

I looked at the window and stared at my reflection. Charcoal Tom Ford suit. Open collar. No tie. Hair styled. Rings gleaming. The edge of a tattoo peeking just barely along my neck.

The steel-eyed gaze of a predator smiled back at me.

Tora, are you ready?

My body thrummed with the kind of hunger that bordered on dangerous. It wasn’t just arousal—it was a taut, animal ache that lived deep in my bones.

My cock had been half-hard for hours, pulsing with every thought of her—every imagined sound she might make when I showed up, when I stripped her of that smug, secretive power she’d been holding over me for the past days.

My jaw tightened.

My fingers flexed against the gift box like I was gripping her waist instead.

Every nerve buzzed every breath I took burned with hunger.

I didn’t just want to see her. I wanted to devour her—slowly until the taste of her rewired my insides.

Finally, I will know what your plans are this evening.

I took note of where we were going, trying to figure out the location with each turn.

Tokyo changed in layers.

First came the gleam—Ginza's reflective, opulent hush. Where the streets whispered in luxury, and the buildings held old money. The lights here were tasteful and curated.

Aww. It’s here.

But we continued, and the shine began to smear.

Okay. . .it is somewhere else. . .

Glass towers gave way to chaos. The roads narrowed. Crowds thickened. Signs began to scream instead of speak.

Where the fuck are we going now?

Neon turned vulgar—hot pinks, bruised purples, acid greens—and the quiet elegance of earlier blocks mutated into the wild, erotic pulse of Shinjuku.

Oh.

My lids lowered, and I smirked.

Shinjuku? Really, Tora? Where could we be going here?

This was a direction I had not anticipated us taking tonight.

My Tiger wasn’t just planning a surprise—she was leading me into one of the only parts of Tokyo where the walls themselves had stories they didn’t dare repeat in daylight.

Well. . .I’m already more surprised than I thought I would be, Tora.

We slid past love hotels disguised as temples, hostess clubs built like floating lanterns, bars without names—just doorbells and shadows.

Steam curled from vents in the sidewalks. Laughter, drunken and lascivious, filtered through cracked windows and karaoke slats.

It smelled like mischief and latex.

Perfume and heat.

We began to head toward Shinjuku’s kinkier veins, where everything you weren’t supposed to want was sold.

I blinked.

Tora?

While this world paid tribute to me in many quiet ways—through hush money, loyalty, and the need for my protection, I had never walked into any of the places around here for pleasure.

Not once.

Until now.

A strange stillness settled over me as the Rolls continued.

Neon signs flickered above us—not with words, but different symbols. A bitten lip. A leather collar. A bare foot pressed to frosted glass.

I quirked my brows.

One building had nothing but a single red dot glowing over its doorway like an eye that never closed.

Another flashed the word Obey in English, over and over, as if casting a spell.

I stirred in my seat.

Then, a billboard flickered to life just as we passed beneath it—two masked lovers suspended mid-air in a Shibari rig, ropes burning gold under UV light. Their limbs trembled.

I caught a glimpse of a domme in stilettos standing on a balcony, smoking a cigarette while a man in a collar knelt beside her, holding her handbag in his teeth.

My throat tightened with a strange hunger.

My pulse surged with an emotion I hadn’t tasted since I was a boy clutching a ticket to my first amusement park. Giddy, breath-catching excitement climbed up my spine.

I nervously ran my fingers through my hair and couldn’t help but chuckle to myself.

What is she planning? I really have no fucking idea. . .

This was unnatural for me to experience with any woman.

I was always the puppeteer.

I remained the god behind the curtain.

Tonight, she had all the control, and that unsettled something in me so deeply that it. . . thrilled me.

Tora, I already knew I would never let you go. . .but now. . .the cage around you may close sooner than we both expected.

My lips curved.

It didn’t matter what came next.

Whether the club she chose was silk-and-champagne or chains-and-shadow. Whether the lights dimmed or the world exploded. Whether there was food or music there. It didn’t matter.

She had already won tonight because she gave me this moment.

This rush.

This foreign, electric high that no amount of wealth, blood, or legacy had been able to buy me.

I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen.

But I knew this; I was going to fuck her like I had never fucked anyone in my life.

Not just because I wanted her.

Not just because she was mine.

But because she had given me back something I didn’t even know I’d lost—wonder.

Naughty Tiger.

I leaned forward just as the car turned a dark corner and rolled into a private alley that’s path was shaded by thick walls of wisteria vines.

Tora, what is this place?