Page 1 of The Oyabun's Boy

Chapter One

~ Kenji ~

The rain started as a suggestion, a nervous tapping at the glass, as if the city itself questioned whether it was worth the effort to get wet. By dusk it was relentless, slicing sideways through the neon haze of the city lights, hitting the floor-to-ceiling windows of my office until even the doubly-laminated glass shivered with each fresh gust.

I watched as the world below blurred into watercolors, every light a streak of yellow or red, every pedestrian an unremarkable shadow. Third floor, Kotei Tower, not the top, but high enough that no one could see in, not even if they cared to look.

My reflection was etched between the lights of the city and the black of the rain. Immaculate suit, dark as engine oil. Starched shirt, single cufflink visible beneath the tailored sleeve.

My eyes—cold, unreadable—were the only thing about me I hadn’t paid someone to perfect. They belonged to my mother, or so I’d been told.

The rest of me was borrowed, carefully created and assembled from pieces that belonged to other men—a watch worth more than most families made in a year, shoes that had never felt the grit of a public street, and a knife in the boot that no tailor had managed to spot.

I watched myself watch the city, feeling nothing except the ache of my own hunger.

The tea room was a shrine to minimalism. Bamboo mats lay perfectly spaced on the floor. A low table of black lacquer, untouched by fingerprints sat in the middle of the room.

One scroll—ink on rice paper—hung on the far wall, a fragment of a death poem, the kanji blurred at the edges so you had to lean in, nose almost touching, to make sense of the lines.

There were no chairs. There were no shoes. Even the air was filtered and recirculated so that not a trace of outside entered without my permission.

On the sideboard sat a white orchid in a faceted vase. That was Chen’s doing; he believed every room needed something alive in it. He said it kept the ghosts away. The blossom was obscene in its perfection, petals so sharp-edged they looked artificial, almost engineered.

It was the only thing in the room that didn’t answer to me, didn’t care if I noticed or ignored it. Most days I ignored it. Today I felt its presence like a staring child.

Across from the orchid, embedded in the wall, a bank of monitors displayed the guts of my world. Six camera feeds from the ground floor, each one cycling between lobby, parking, and the unmarked delivery entrance that no one but me and Chen used.

Two more feeds from the loading docks—one color, one infrared, to catch the idiots who thought darkness equaled invisibility. The rest of the screens showed live views from my businesses—the front counter at the sushi place in Midtown, the back room at the Chinatown gambling parlor, the dim corridor behind a brothel where everyone eventually ended up crying.

Every person on every screen owed me something. Most didn’t know it yet. Some would die never knowing.

I moved a hand to the inside of my left wrist and pressed a thumb into the faded scar that lived there. The gesture was involuntary, muscle memory from another life.

I’d trained myself to keep my hands visible, still, unless violence was necessary. But tonight, the itch was back, the need to remind myself that even this shell of a body was at one time soft, mortal, breakable.

My reflection did not flinch when I traced the line of puckered skin, but the memory of pain bloomed with undiminished clarity.

The rain came harder, turning the world outside to static. For a moment, I was eight again, standing in my father’s study as he stripped the flesh from my back with his favorite whip.

“You must never show the world your wounds,” he’d spat, blood flecking his perfect tie. “Only your teeth.”

He was dead now, the old bastard, and I’d inherited his cruelty, but none of his cowardice. If he could see me now, surrounded by all this glass and steel, he’d have wept for how little his sacrifice had bought him.

The intercom chirped—a noise so soft most would have missed it. Chen’s voice, a deliberate monotone: “It’s time,Oyabun.”

“Five minutes,” I said. The words ghosted against the glass, barely disturbing the silence.

I stood, stretching my neck until it cracked. Movement on the monitors drew my eye—one of the new security hires, a Vietnamese kid with hands too soft for violence, walking rounds in the lobby. He’d last maybe a week before someone offered him a better deal, or a bullet.

Loyalty was expensive, and no one could afford it for long.

At the orchid, I hesitated. It stood rigid, a blade of white against the soft focus of the city beyond. I thought of snapping the stem, just to see if anyone would notice.

Instead, I leaned in, letting my breath fog the petals. The scent—faint, almost medicinal—reminded me of funerals. My mouth twisted. I took the vase and turned it until the blossom faced the window, not me.

The room, the building, his part of the city itself, all of it belonged to me, and yet the emptiness gnawed. Power meant nothing without something to consume, something to fill the hours between now and the next kill. I looked at my hands—steady, precise—and waited for the hunger to pass.

On the screen, the world marched on. On the glass, my face blurred and sharpened with each pulse of lightning, always watching, always wanting. Outside, the storm reached its crescendo, and for a moment, I imagined the sound of it drowning out every other noise in the world.