Page 13 of Dragon 7

Twenty-eight seconds.

Thirty.

The phone lit.

It rang once.

I let it ring.

It rang twice.

I let it ring.

It rang a third time.

I picked it up and did not speak.

The Lion's voice came through low. The growl was still there, sanded down at the edges into something colder. "You can stand in the room when I make the deals with them, but you have no percentage in it."

He's saving face. He thinks he's taken something from me. Good.

I didn't care about the fee. I'd never collect it. But if I folded too easily on the second call, the Lion would lose respect for me before the ash had cooled in Tokyo.

The Lion needed to feel he was wrestling.

“No.” I shook my head. "I get a fee for being in the room. My presence at those tables is the only thing that makes you valuable to whoever you sit across from. That has a price."

"Careful, Little Dragon. I have more options than you.”

“Do you?”

“Why just bomb the hotel when I could also bomb the island? Then, I walk into the Coalition with both bodies in my arms."

Tension gathered at my shoulders.

“You could.” I let the threat hang for one full breath, and then I played the card he could never argue with. "But, no white man will ever rule a country in Asia, Kazimir. You know that. That's why we're all still alive."

A long, slow exhale came on the line. It was the sound of him pulling on a cigar. He exhaled and I imagined a large plume of gray smoke leaving his nostrils and distorting his face. "Hmmm."

The silence that followed was different from the silences before it.

The Lion was reconsidering, and that was much better than his roar.

Okay. It’s time.

I let out a dramatic exhale. "I'll give up my fee."

"Then I'll bomb the hotel."

“So this is a deal?”

“It is. Do you want your father dead? Or. . .do you simply want him scared enough to get on the plane with Akiro?”

I kept my face straight and my shoulders stiff, but that question. . .it told me that the Mosquito had been giving the Lion a feed of my war room.

One day, I will swat out that annoying bug.

“I want the Fox so terrified that he comes to the island.”