Th-um-p… p… p.
“They spat in our face and stole watashi nokawaii musume-chan.”
Thump… thump… thump.
I clench my teeth, fisting my hands at my sides as I manage to rein in the errant slip in control when my father’s words switch from English to Japanese.
“On my honor, I will find and eviscerate everyone involved with Emi’sdisappearance,” I vow, choosing my words carefully. In this world, a missing person not found immediately is a dead person, but I don’t want to think of my sister in the past tense. Barely twenty-three, her life is just beginning.
Three successive taps at the door cut our conversation short. Our gazes lock before my father nods his approval.
“Come in,” I order, and a woman I’ve never seen before strides into the room with such lethal precision, I know she’s a reaper. Her sleek black pantsuit is tailored to conceal weapons to the untrained eye. Even the hair sticks used to hold her hair in a neat bun—deadly.
I want to study her for longer, but she bows in my father’s direction, then pivots to bow in mine. Then, she drops a flash drive on the desk. “Nyx sends her regards,” is all she says before bowing and turning to exit the room.
What’s more intriguing is the way my father nods, unfazed, picking up the flash drive and plugging it into the laptop. I have so many questions, but those all evaporate when the video begins and a blood-curdling scream ping-pongs off the walls.
“I swear that’s all I know,” a very familiar face pleads.
My eyes double in size at the sight of my cousin, Masamune’s, arm in a commercial-sized automatic dough roller up to his elbow. Fragments of his bones stick out of whatever is left of his forearm.
“I don’t think radius and ulna bones are supposed to be twisted like that,” I mumble, angling my head to get a better look. Blood pulsates as it pumps out of a vein that doesn’t realize it’s no longer connected.
“Wrong fucking answer,” a sultry rasp hisses while flicking a switch and whirring the machine back to life.
A woman?I don’t want to assume the interrogator is a woman based solely on a voice. I’ve seen greater tacticsused to mislead.
“Who did he piss off this time?” I ask my father without looking away.
“I honestly don’t know,” he replies.
After Masamune was exiled from the family—from the Asian continent, no one has heard from or seen him. After helping that fucking skin peddling pedo, Serge Volkov, traffic kids as young as five from Kyushu, Masamune is lucky even to be alive.
The crunch of bone as Masamune’s arm is torn from its socket pales in comparison to his shrieking wails.
“Shall we continue to play this game, Masamune, because I can think of one place in particular you wouldn’t want to go through, Patty?”
I snort at the name when a small gloved hand pats the roller. Whoever they are, the Patty Cake spin on the name is a chef’s kiss.Pun absolutely intended.
“Plthhese, I sw-w-wear it,” Masamune chokes out, determined to keep this secret. It’s only then that I realize, I’m not even sure what he’s hiding. The video started after the interrogation had obviously begun.
“Your time’s up, Masamune. This is the final time I’ll ask you where. You know from very personal experience that what comes after this will be far worse,” they state, finger ready to flip on the machine again.
There’s the longest moment of silence before I watch the switch flipped. And like a madman, my cousin tries to pull away, using everything in his power to fight an at least four-hundred-pound machine. Just as his collarbone is about to be crushed, he shouts, “Perth, Vermont. They took them to Perth.”
The roller’s stopped. “And your cousin was one of the girls?”
Sitting up straighter, I process the question at least a dozen times before Masamune answers. “Yes, Emi Oshiro,my cousin, was in the batch delivered last Halloween. It’s their hunting ground. Over 200 acres of rural farmland,” he wheezes.
Red—is all I see when his response reaches the part of my brain that’s supposed to accept what’s being remitted, but it rejects it.
White noise—is all I hear until he brags, “And she’s dead.” My eye twitches at the sick satisfaction in my cousin’s voice. “I saw the video, you know.” His eyes shift to where he knows one of the cameras is located. “I saw her,Ossan—Your precious daughter. The way shecried as they tore through her hymen with an electric drill before ha?—”
The smug smile melts from his face as he’s yanked through the roller at warped speed. I don’t think he even has a chance to register his death.
“Anata no shi wa amarini mo kantandatta—”Your death came too easily,I spit out through clenched teeth.
Standing, I walk around my father’s desk, and as I wipe the errant tears from his eyes, I witness part of his soul shatter.
