Page 2 of The Oyabun's Boy

Most people faded into the city’s noise—at best, a momentary flash of motion on the screens, a face pressed to a phone, the ambient life that fed my enterprises without ever touching me directly.

Even in the rain, the sidewalks of the waterfront district thinned out but never emptied. I rarely looked at the living anymore. They had so little to offer.

That night, as the city drowned under the storm something in the pressure of the weather made the building feel like a submarine, sealed tight, every creak and whisper magnified.

The orchid looked even more artificial in the cold light. On the street three floors down, umbrellas popped and shivered, colors dulled by wet and wind. Gray on gray, as always.

I almost turned away.

Then something moved—no, spun—through the crosswalk. A smear of color, audacious, not just out of place but wholly ungoverned. I leaned forward, abandoning the practiced stillness that had served me so well.

The glass fogged from my breath, a detail I might have obsessed over, but now my focus narrowed to the impossible—a boy, maybe twenty, possibly younger, dashing through the rain as if it existed only for him.

He was slender, slight, built for speed or maybe for dodging blows. His hair—impossible, really—was auburn, not red, not brown, but the color of old pennies and firelight and autumn leaves ground under boot.

It clung to his cheeks in wet ropes.

He wore a white T-shirt, soaked and almost translucent, and the kind of skinny jeans that suggested either poverty or confidence. His sneakers were blue, bright as pool tiles, and he’d already lost the laces.

He didn’t run; he danced. He spun in circles, arms out, face tilted up so the rain could drench his closed eyelids and his open mouth. He pivoted, careened, slipped, caught himself with a gymnast’s grace, and then—God—he laughed.

Not a polite noise, not something manufactured for a friend, but a full-bodied sound that carried up through the wet and the glass and punched me square in the chest. He looked free. He looked fucking invincible.

I pressed my hand to the window, palm flat, feeling the tremble in my own wrist. The scar burned, a line of heat that matched the line of the boy’s throat as he arched it, swallowing rain. I tried to slow my breathing, failed, tried again.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a caged animal, utterly foreign in its insistence. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had made me feel this way. Had anyone ever?

He dropped into a crouch, splashing through a filthy puddle with a childish delight that made my teeth ache. When he rose, the shirt clung to him like a lover—nipples sharp, the ripple of young muscle under pale skin, a constellation of freckles across his neck and arms.

He didn’t care who watched; maybe he wanted to be seen. Most people would call it beautiful, but there was something more.

He was fucking alive.

My pupils dilated. I could see every twitch in his hands, every shiver of laughter. He belonged to the rain, to the storm, to himself. I wanted to rip him out of the city and keep him forever.

I wanted to own him.

The desire was so strong it stunned me—something old and predatory, laced with a need that was almost painful. I didn’t just want to possess him. I wanted to own the part of him that refused to be owned.

He stopped, mid-spin, and caught me. Not my reflection, not the city—me. For one second, maybe two, his gaze met the window. It couldn’t have. He couldn’t have seen through the tint, the double glass, the shield of height and shadow.

But I knew the way you know a fist is coming, pure animal certainty. He looked directly at me, lips parted, hair plastered to his forehead, water running down his face.

I froze.

He grinned—a wild, reckless thing—and bowed, just enough to turn the moment into theater. Then he dashed across the street, vaulting the curb with a practiced ease, and vanished under the flickering light of a corner bodega.

Gone.

I didn’t move for a full minute, maybe longer. I stared at the place he’d been, willing him back, feeling the lack of him as a throb in my stomach and a pulse between my legs.

I pressed harder on the glass, as if I could force myself out into the storm by will alone. My jaw hurt; I realized I’d been grinding my teeth. My palm was sweating, even as the rest of me had gone cold.

On the monitors, nothing had changed. The world continued. The guards continued their circuits, the restaurants served their last tables, and the cleaners mopped blood from the alley behind the gambling parlor.

But the city itself had shifted. There was a rupture, a fault line, and I was standing on the edge of it.

I let my eyes drift shut and replayed the moment—the laughter, the hair, the flash of green eyes. I wanted to taste the rain on his skin, to pin him against the window and see if that wildness could survive my touch. The fantasy was so vivid I nearly said his name aloud—if I’d known it.