Page 16 of Dragon 7

“I will.” Reo sighed. “Akiro’s private jet is being loaded too. He has not left the hotel yet, but men are loading it.”

“Good. My father will be jumping on that jet with him.” I headed off and barely made it three steps before the war room changed.

The wall of televisions flickered all at once. Every screen. Every channel. The same thing.

A Scale near the monitors went still. Then another. Conversation died across the room as one head after another lifted toward the wall, and I turned with them.

NHK. TBS. Fuji. CNN. BBC. Every feed carried the same orange bloom against the same black Tokyo sky.

Goddamn it, Lion.

Hotel Gajoen burned. My father lay in a bed somewhere inside that elegant old corpse with tubes in his arms, and the Lion had just set it on fire from the heavens. Of course that part was good.

But the Lion had not stopped at the hotel.

The camera pulled wide, and my stomach dropped.

The whole block was gone.

What the fuck?!

A second explosion lit the feed, then a third, walking down the street in a line of fire, and the screens jumped to a different angle—a traffic camera, maybe, or a phone—and I watched a row of shops and apartments fold inward like wet paper. Glass rained down across a crosswalk. A car alarm screamed under the roar.

Then the feed cut to Meguro.

No. Not Meguro too.

The Meguro River, the one tourists photographed under the cherry blossoms every spring, ran past a strip of restaurants and galleries a few blocks from the hotel. Now smoke poured off the water. A famous wedding hall on the bank had its entire face blown out, and people streamed away from it into the street, hundreds of them, running, falling, dragging each other.

My heart broke.

A woman ran past the camera with blood streaking down her cheek.

A man carried a child who was not moving.

The chyron crawled along the bottom of the screen in fast white Japanese. “Multiple coordinated explosions. Central Meguro. Casualties unknown. Authorities urging residents to evacuate.”

The English feed on the next screen over said it colder. “BREAKING: Dozens feared dead in series of Tokyo blasts. Number expected to rise.”

I stared at the screens and did not move.

Bombs only know how to explode, not to differentiate.

The Lion had told me that.

And now a man on the screen was carrying a child who would not wake up.

On the feed, the death count appeared as a small number in the corner. Then it changed. Then it changed again. Each time it climbed, a fresh wave of murmuring moved through the war room, low and uneasy, men who killed for a living watching their city die and finding they still had something left in them to be sickened by.

I felt all of it.

The boy who would not move. The woman with the blood on her face. The surely packed wedding hall. The block that folded like paper. Every soul under that rubble who had done nothing tonight except live in the wrong city near the wrong old hotel where the wrong old man hid in a wrong old bed.

I felt every single one of them land somewhere deep in my chest and lodge there.

And I let none of it reach my face.

The Dragon could not flinch in front of his men on the night of his war. So I held my jaw still. I kept my eyes flat and open on the screens. I made my face into the mask I had not even put on yet—the demon judge, the one who dragged the damned toward hell, the one for whom mercy had already ended.