"Ryuuji," she said into the phone, rain already starting to soak through her voice. "Clear the gym. I need to hit something."
She didn't wait for an answer. The conversation was over the moment she'd said the words—words she hadn't spoken in six years, words that tasted like coming home and burning bridges in the same breath. Her thumb found the end button and the burner phone went dark and heavy in her palm.
It slipped from her wet fingers. Clattered onto the pavement with a plasticky crack that should have made her wince. She didn't even look down. Just left it there in a puddle reflecting the Imperial Hotel's golden lights, screen-down in the rainwater like a discarded life.
She wouldn't need burner phones anymore. Wouldn't need to hide her calls or her contacts or the fact that she knew people who made other people disappear. That version of Hanae—the one who hid—had died the moment that wedding dress tore open.
The storm had teeth now.
What had been rain when she stepped outside was now something biblical. Water fell in sheets so thick she could barely see the street, hammering the asphalt with a sound like static, like television snow turned up to a roar. It soaked through what was left of her wedding dress in seconds—three thousand dollars of custom silk turning heavy and cold, clinging to her legs like seaweed.
Hanae tilted her head back and closed her eyes.
The water hit her face like a baptism. Ran in rivers down her forehead, over her cheekbones, down the column of her throat. It mixed with the foundation she'd spent an hour applying that morning—the expensive department store kind that promised "all-day coverage" and "natural radiance."
The mask was melting.
She could feel it dissolving, running off her skin in beige-gray streams. The contouring that had softened her jawline. The blush that had made her look sweet and approachable. The highlighter that had caught the light in all the ways magazines said it should. All of it washing away, running down the gutter with the cigarette butts and the wrappers from convenience store snacks.
The false eyelashes went next—those ridiculous things she'd glued on with shaking hands while Kenji's mother watched and tutted about how a bride should look soft and feminine. They peeled away in the rain and she scraped them off with her fingers, rough and impatient, not caring that she probably tore out some of her real lashes with them.
And then she breathed.
Really breathed. Full expansion of her ribcage, diaphragm dropping low, pulling air deep into her lungs the way her body was designed to do. The corset was gone—ripped open by her own hands, boning snapped like kindling—and for the first time in six years there was nothing constraining her, nothing telling her to be smaller, quieter, less.
The relief was so intense it was almost painful.
She opened her eyes and the world looked different. Sharper. Like she'd been seeing everything through frosted glass and someone had finally wiped it clean. The colors were more saturated. The edges more defined. Even through the rain, even in the dark, Tokyo looked more real than it had in years.
Movement caught her eye. A couple huddled under one of those clear umbrellas that Japanese salarymen always seemed to have, stopped maybe five meters away. They were staring. Of course they were staring. A woman standing alone in what was rapidly becoming a typhoon, wearing a destroyed wedding dress that exposed her entire back, was not something you saw every day even in Tokyo.
The man whispered something to the woman. Pointed. But his finger wasn't aimed at the dress or the mud or even her bare feet.
He was pointing at her back.
At the Dragon.
The rain was making the ink glisten, making it seem to move. The Black Dragon of the Kurosawa Clan, scales rendered in obsessive detail by a tattoo artist who'd spent sixty hours bent over her body with needles and ink. Its eyes were burning crimson—the only color in the entire piece—and in the reflection of the Imperial Hotel's golden floodlights, they looked like they were glowing. Like the Dragon was waking up after a long sleep.
The man took a step closer. Curiosity winning over common sense, the way it always did with people who'd never actually encountered real danger.
Hanae turned her head and looked at him.
She didn't snarl. Didn't bare her teeth or make any threatening gesture. She just looked at him. Met his eyes through the falling rain with the flat, empty gaze of something that had stopped pretending to be harmless.
His body understood before his brain did. Some ancient part of his hindbrain—the part that had kept his ancestors alive on the savanna—started screaming. Triggered every alarm evolution had installed in him for detecting predators. His pupils dilated. His breathing went shallow. Fight-or-flight dumped adrenaline into his bloodstream and his body chose flight.
He grabbed his partner's arm. Didn't speak, didn't explain, just pulled her backward, stumbling in his haste to get away, to get back inside the hotel where there were lights and people and the civilized world that didn't include women with dragon tattoos and eyes like death.
Hanae watched them go with complete indifference. No shame at her state of undress. No embarrassment at causing a scene. The Hanae who cared what strangers thought had been left at that altar next to the white roses and her discarded future.
She walked to the curb on bare feet, the pavement rough and cold against her soles.
A taxi sat idling there—one of Tokyo's ubiquitous black sedans, immaculately maintained, the "Vacant" light glowing red through the rain-streaked windshield. The driver was staring at her through the window, mouth slightly open, probably trying to process what he was seeing.
Hanae grabbed the rear door handle and pulled.
Too hard. She hadn't calibrated for her real strength in years. The door opened with a groan of protest, hinges complaining, and she felt the adrenaline still singing through her system—cortisol and norepinephrine turning everything sharp and immediate and more.
She threw herself into the backseat, water immediately pooling on the pristine leather.
"Drive," she said.
The driver jumped like she'd slapped him. His eyes found hers in the rearview mirror, then dropped to take in the ruined dress, the mud, the water already soaking into his upholstery.
"Miss." His voice was apologetic but firm, the tone of a man who'd had to refuse difficult customers before. "I'm sorry, but I can't—you're soaking wet. The seats, they're leather, and—"
Hanae met his eyes in the mirror.
"Kabukicho," she said. Her voice came out lower than she'd meant it to, roughened by six years of disuse. It rumbled in the small space, seemed to vibrate through the seats. "District 2. The alley behind the Golden Gai. You know the one."
The driver's throat worked as he swallowed. Everyone in Tokyo knew that alley. It was the kind of place you only went if you were looking for something illegal or if you were trying to disappear. The kind of place that didn't appear on tourist maps.
"Miss, please." His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel now. "I really think you should go to a hospital. Or the police. You look like—"
Hanae leaned forward. Slowly, deliberately. She placed one hand on the plexiglass divider that separated the front seat from the back. Didn't hit it. Didn't pound on it. Just rested her palm flat against it and squeezed.
The thick plastic began to creak. A hairline fracture appeared under her thumb, spreading like frost on a window. It grew with sharp, distinct clicks—crack, crack, crack—spiderwebbing outward from the point of pressure.
"Drive," she repeated, voice flat and final. "Or I will drive. And I don't have a license."
The driver put the car in gear so fast he almost stalled it. Pulled away from the curb without another word about the upholstery or the mud or the water damage that would probably cost him a day's wages.
Smart man.
Tokyo slid past the windows in streaks of color and light, everything blurred by rain and speed.
Hanae stared out at the city she'd been born in, the city she'd bled for, the city she'd tried to leave behind for a life of normalcy that had been a lie from the start.
They were still in Marunouchi. Clean. Sterile. All glass towers and corporate headquarters, banks and international firms and buildings where violence was done with contracts and leveraged buyouts. Kenji's world. A world where power was measured in quarterly earnings and connections, where battles were fought in boardrooms and the casualties were careers instead of bodies.
She'd tried so hard to belong there. Had spent six years attempting to sand down all her sharp edges until she fit into that smooth, professional, utterly bloodless world.
God, she'd hated every minute of it.
She remembered the dinners she'd cooked. Hours spent in that pristine kitchen with its imported appliances and marble countertops, chopping vegetables with precision that came from different kinds of cutting. Slice, slice, slice. Julienned carrots and perfectly diced onions and fish prepared according to recipes from cooking websites because Kenji said her instincts were "too heavy-handed."
She remembered him coming home. The sound of his keys hitting the counter—never a "hello," never "how was your day," just the expectation that dinner would be ready and the apartment would be spotless and she would be appropriately grateful that he'd come home at all.
She remembered the way he'd critique her cooking. Too spicy. Too rich. Too much. Always too much.
You're too much, Hanae. Be less.
She looked down at her hands resting on her knees. The rain from her hair had soaked the white satin gloves until they were translucent, clinging to her skin like a second layer. She peeled them off with slow, deliberate movements.
Her hands were pale underneath, but the structure was undeniable. Knuckles thick from breaking through resistance. Tendons standing out like steel cables under skin. Calluses that no amount of expensive hand cream had ever been able to soften.
She flexed her fingers. Pop. Pop. Pop. Joints cracking with the sound of a body remembering what it was built for.
The taxi crossed some invisible border and everything changed.
The buildings suddenly crowded closer together, jagged and irregular, packed in tight like teeth in a mouth that had seen too many fights. The light shifted from the cold white of corporate districts to something feverish—neon in every color, pink and purple and electric blue, reflecting off wet pavement and the rain-slicked sides of buildings.
Kabukicho. The Sleepless Town. Tokyo's id made manifest.
Here, the rain didn't wash anything clean. It just made the grime slicker, made the gutters overflow with cigarette butts and torn flyers advertising hostess clubs and "massage parlors" that provided services the government pretended not to notice. The neon bled into puddles and made everything look surreal, hyperreal, like a fever dream of what a city should be.
This was her world. Had been since she was twelve years old and had broken her first bone in a fight over territory that didn't matter to anyone except the men willing to die for it. This was where she'd earned the name Asura. Where she'd learned that violence, applied correctly, was the most honest form of communication.
"Stop here," she commanded.