Protection for Hire (24 page)

T
essa decided that Charles must have blown a fuse up in the brain box. Otherwise, why would he willingly be here? The sea air sliced into her lungs when she got out of the car, but she approached the front door slowly. She still felt the weight of Uncle Teruo’s disappointment from the last time she’d been here. Coupled with what they’d discovered tonight, she was surprised she could walk upright. If his anger came down on her again, he’d crush her into the ground.

Yet even as she felt the dread of failing her uncle again, she had a slim sliver of hope. Maybe uncle had found a way to solve this situation. Surely he loved her enough to want to do this for her, as well as for himself. Surely there was something she could do to salvage this horrible, horrible situation.

Uncle Teruo met her again in his den, but instead of the intimate gathering around the
irori
open fireplace, he sat behind his massive teakwood desk. Gone were the turtle pajamas and instead he wore his black business suit like
sokutai
imperial court attire.

He didn’t look up right away when they entered the room — Kenta leading, Charles and Tessa following. He finished writing
on a paper in front of him while they waited patiently, then pushed the pen aside and glanced up. He nodded to Kenta, then looked behind him to see Tessa and Charles.

On the drive here, she had called him, told him she was bringing the man she’d gone to the party with to help explain the business deal to him. He hadn’t objected, so she didn’t expect him to react with more than a hard look at the stranger.

But Uncle Teruo’s shoulders went back and down, his jaw became tight, and he shot to his feet, sending his padded teakwood chair crashing backward. “How dare you come here?” he thundered at Charles.

Tessa took a step backward. She’d seen her uncle angry many times, but this was a fierce anger that roared like a lioness over her cub. It was wild, emotional and protective, not the harsh and judgmental anger he displayed to his
kobuns.

Uncle’s eyes darted to Tessa’s face, searching. “He never told you, did he?”

The shaking started deep in her bones, a vibration that made her entire frame hum. Then her muscles twitched, and twitched again, and began trembling with growing force. “Tell me what?”

She looked at Charles frantically, willing him to explain what was going on, but his face was marble as he faced Uncle Teruo’s burning eyes.

“He was the law clerk at your trial.”

One of her gut muscles relaxed. “He told me that. How did you know?”

“I investigated everyone involved. I could do no less for you. His role was to research the case for the judge.”

“Yes, he told me,” she said.

Still Charles didn’t say anything.

Kenta’s face was neutral, but his eyes found Tessa’s, crowded with questions she had no answers to.

“He made recommendations,” Uncle said in a low, terrible voice. “He wrote the judge a memo.”

“How did you get hold of that?” Charles demanded.

“You dare ask me that?” Uncle said. “Here in my own house? She is my niece. That was her trial. She has no father to protect her. I had more right than
you
to know what happened.”

Her shaking was making the room swim in front of her eyes. “What happened?” she whispered.

“He recommended the judge go beyond the maximum sentence for you. Because your known associates were suspected in other crimes, which you might have been intimately involved in, he recommended that you not be allowed back into society so soon.”

It was harder than she thought it would be to hear her crimes, to hear her case in those specific words, and to think Charles wrote them.

“He is responsible for the seven years instead of five that you served.”

Those two years, hateful because at the end of her sixth year …

After Aunt Kayoko’s heart attack, Tessa had applied to be allowed to go see her in the hospital under guard. But she’d been denied because it was an aunt, not a mother or father or child. Her aunt had been alert for a week — Tessa could have seen her one last time. Then her aunt had had another heart attack and died. Tessa hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral either.

The missed opportunity had eaten away at her because Aunt Kayoko had been the brightest light in her world, the sweetest
fragrance, the softest touch to a girl who felt unimportant to anyone else.

Tessa turned to Charles in a flurry, slapping him, punching at him with arms weighed down like steel rods. She wanted to hurt him, she knew she could break him if she focused her energy enough, but she found that she was crying too hard, she couldn’t draw a breath, and her head swam with the lack of oxygen.

And then she realized that Kenta had stepped behind her and grabbed her arms, trying to pin them to her sides. “Let me go!” She fought him.

“Don’t kill him,” Kenta said to her in a low voice. “You’ve never killed a man. Don’t do it now.”

She’d been to jail. She’d go to prison again. She didn’t care. But then her tears started heaving up from her diaphragm, squeezing her lungs, pounding at her heart. She couldn’t stop screaming. She dropped to her knees. Through her blurred vision, she saw her tears dripping to stain the wooden floor, the same way they’d stained the inside-out paper crane the day of her aunt’s funeral.

The bitterness engulfed her like black flames. “Because of you,” she hurled at Charles. “Because of you I never got a chance to say goodbye to her.”

That this betrayal should come from Charles stabbed her again and again and again. She hated him. After she wrote that letter to Kenta, she had hardened the protection around her heart because she thought she had lost any chance for a relationship with someone — and then Charles had come along. She had wanted to love him. She had wanted to believe she had a chance for something more.

But he had deceived her.

Her nails dug into the wood of the floor. She willed her tears
to stop. Her uncle wouldn’t appreciate the hysterical emotion.

She could take care of herself because no one would take care of her. She could find her center and let no one else in.

She willed herself to breathe deeply. Then she rose to her feet, feeling empty and brittle. Kenta helped her with a hand on her elbow, but she gently shrugged him aside.

Her uncle passed her a linen handkerchief, and she realized Charles was gone.

For a moment, she wanted to cry all over again.

You hardly knew him.

True. But something deep inside her had seemed to know him like an old friend.

“Kenta.” Uncle Teruo nodded toward the door.

Kenta bowed and left them.

She had a moment of panic. “You let Charles walk out?”

Uncle nodded slowly. “Is that what you wanted?”

Relief rushed in like a chill ocean wave. “Yes.”

“But you wanted to kill him.”

“For a moment.”

“But you are not Fred.” He sighed heavily, and went to right his chair and sink into it.

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing at all. She sat in the large teakwood chair opposite him, sliding against the smooth, cool leather.

“I wish you had been a boy,” her uncle said. Then in a lower voice, “I wish you had been my son.”

She couldn’t breathe for a moment. But her lungs burned and she forced them to open again.

He had never before paid her a compliment as deep as that.

And yet, while she was honored by his words, she also realized that while they would have fed her thirsty soul three years
ago, they didn’t now. She had found another father. She loved her uncle, but there were things he did that she couldn’t condone any longer, things she couldn’t help him with any more. Their relationship had changed.

She
had changed.

Even as she thought it, she cringed. She hadn’t changed, not when she had been willing to kill a man only a few minutes before. She hadn’t changed at all.

And suddenly, God her Father seemed far away too. She felt alone.

“Tell me about your client and this company,” he commanded.

So she did, telling him about Elizabeth, Stillwater Group, the Triad. His brow contracted in confusion over some parts about the business deal, but he didn’t ask for clarification — which she wouldn’t have been able to give anyway.

When she was done, Uncle Teruo didn’t respond for a long time. Then when he did, it was what she expected him to say:

“Come back and work for me.”

When she began to shake her head, he said, “You must. I can’t save you any other way.”

She had never heard that desperate thread in his voice before.

“If you can stop investigating that firm, if you can dissociate yourself from it, then they will kill Elizabeth and the deal will go through.”

Everything inside her cringed. No, she couldn’t do that.

“The business transaction will not be damaged, and the Triad will not blame us for interfering,” he continued. “We can save face and avoid a potential war.”

Yes, he had seen that aspect of it, as well.

“She’s an innocent woman,” Tessa said weakly. “She has a three-year-old boy.”

“Innocent people will be hurt or killed if the Triad is angered,” he replied. “What is one life compared to many? Even your religion teaches that.”

“It would be
murder
.”

“Wouldn’t a war be many murders?”

Was this how Eve felt in the Garden? So reasonable, so wrong, so tempting. All her problems solved.

“You’ve had many shocks today.” He rose, walked around his desk, and touched her cheek with his large, square hand. His skin was papery and leathery at the same time. His touch was gentle. “Go to your mother’s house and rest. And think.”

Rest was at Charles’s house, with Elizabeth and Vivian.

She nodded and rose to her feet. And then he embraced her, filling her senses with that distinctive cigar brand, brushed with a touch of seaweed from the outside air.

She put her arms around him and knew he loved her.

As she opened the door to his office, he said, “I know you will make the right choice. You will not choose strangers over your family.” There was a hint of steel in his voice as he said it, the
oyabun
giving a command.

She let herself out, feeling like she was walking into a dark, yawning pit.

Tessa froze as a figure moved in the darkened living room.

She had just let herself in and disabled and re-enabled the alarm for Charles’s house. She hadn’t even checked to see that the quiet home she was entering was safe.

She peered through the gloom, her heart pulsing strong in her ears, her skin tingling. Could they see her in the shadowed
foyer? What she wouldn’t give for a gun, or a knife to throw. She snatched up the umbrella resting against the wall by the door, tested the heft of the wooden knob at the end, the flexible strength of the metal skeleton.

“Tessa?”

Vivian.

For a second, her blood pounded hard in relief, then she set down the umbrella, took a deep breath, and she was calm again.

Vivian flipped on a lamp. She was lying on the sofa, a blanket over her. She yawned. “I hoped I’d wake up when you came home.” She paused. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come back.”

“Elizabeth’s my client, no matter what Charles has done.” But she didn’t feel any anger in her words. She would have expected more bitterness, more sorrow, more pain.

And really, was Elizabeth her client if she chose as her uncle wanted her to? She felt like a hypocrite as she spoke the words to Vivian.

“He feels guilty,” Vivian said.

“I don’t care.”

But Vivian wasn’t offended by the harsh reply. She looked at Tessa with her lovely blue eyes, and then she opened her arms to her.

Tessa walked to the sofa and fell into her embrace.

It was a mother’s embrace, cuddling her close, nonjudgmental, with only the desire to comfort and love. Tessa had no more tears, but she filled her heart with that embrace, and she filled her lungs with the scent of freshly baked bread, a hint of chocolate, and a bite of chili pepper.

“You made bread, cannoli, and something Thai,” Tessa guessed.

She laughed, and Tessa heard it deep in her chest as her head
rested on Vivian’s shoulder. “Thai red curry. It didn’t go that well with the pepper parmesan bread.”

“Try rice next time.”

“Rice is boring. And I’m never boring.”

“No, you aren’t.” Tessa sat up, and Vivian also sat up on the sofa, tucking her legs under her so Tessa would have room to sit.

Vivian’s hand reached out to touch Tessa’s cheek. She’d been touched there twice tonight.

“Your eyes are full of pain,” she said to Tessa.

Tessa didn’t respond.

“But there’s also pain at yourself.” Vivian’s gaze penetrated deeper than the surface.

Tessa closed her eyes and savored the feel of Vivian’s fingers, the slight tremble from the two broken ones. “He’s ruthless,” she said into Vivian’s hand.

“Your uncle? You knew that.”

“But I’m ruthless too.”

“No —”

“You can’t tell me I’m not. I almost killed your son tonight.”

She said it to make Vivian drop her hand from her face, but she didn’t. Instead, the fingers cupped her chin, forcing her to open her eyes and look at her. “But you didn’t.”