“Yes, the smoke bubble on top. You look at it and you think it's just a dark drink. Then you break the bubble and smoke pours out." I flexed my drawing hand because my fingers were already starting to cramp. "You don't see it coming until it hits."
“But, Nyomi, how do you put a smoke bubble in a drink?”
“Easy peasy. Once the cocktail is finished, then you use this little cocktail bubble gun. It blows a bubble that sits right on top.”
“A bubble gun?”
“Yeah. But the bubble isn’t air. It’s smoke. We’ll call the drink, Hinoki Veil.”
Hiro’s mouth twitched. “How do you get smoke inside a bubble?”
“You hook the bubble gun to a smoker. Hinoki wood if we want it Japanese-clean, or cedar if we want it darker. You fill the bubble with smoke, settle it over the rim like a glass lid, and it just. . .waits there.”
“And then?”
“And then the guest pops it.” I mimed a soft tap with an invisible spoon. “And the smoke spills out over the drink like it was hiding. Like it was never there—until it is.”
Super pleased, Hiro exhaled. “That’s Daisuke.”
“Good.”
“How the hell do you know this?”
“I dated a bartender in college. He worked for this Michelin star restaurant. He would always sneak me in the back at night and do different private presentations.”
“Interesting.”
“He has his own chain of high-end bars now. Three locations in New York. Doing really well for himself." I shrugged. "We're still cool. He actually sends me videos sometimes—new cocktails he's working on, breakdowns of his techniques, that kind of thing."
Hiro watched me. "You should tell him to stop."
I blinked. "Why? It's friendly. We dated many years ago."
"You wouldn’t want him to send a friendly video and then the Dragon visit him."
The words landed flat.
Final.
A shiver ran through me. “No. I wouldn’t want that.”
I made a mental note to text Jamison later. The Dragon would not be visiting anyone on my behalf.
Hiro moved on. “Next is Toma.”
“True.” I shoved my discomfort away and flipped the page. Next, I thought of Toma. Both sides of his head were shaved, leaving a single unruly strip of bright purple hair running down the center like a wild flame. “Hmm. My guess is that Toma kills in a loud way.”
“Correct. Why do you say that?"
"Everything about him is loud, right? The tattoos, the purple hair, the way he talks."
"You've met him once and you read him well."
“I was searching for spies last night when I was sizing the Claws up, but that reading came through easily for Toma. So why is he so loud?”
"He grew up in a house with eleven siblings. Somewhere in the middle—not the oldest, not the youngest, not the smartest, not the cutest. Just. . .there."
My chest ached. "So, he made himself impossible to ignore?"
