I checked my gun. “Fuck. Empty.”
One of my men handed me one of theirs.
I took the safety off. “Now let’s find Kiko.”
Chapter twenty-eight
Ruined
Kenji
Weroundedthecorner.
Reo took the lead. My Scales fanned around him in a tight diamond—two ahead with rifles sweeping the corridor in slow arcs, one at each shoulder watching the side doors, one at our rear watching the way we had come.
The formation moved as a single body.
Hiro and I remained safely within it.
Blood dripped from my ear.
The corridor curved. The smoke was thicker here. The east wing's fire had climbed somewhere into the walls, and the heat was starting to push along the ceiling in slow heavy waves.
I could feel it on the side of my face and on the back of my neck.
Something didn’t add up with Kiko’s plan.
She killed everybody to stop the DNA test? No. That doesn’t make sense.
Kiko had a smarter plan, which meant there was more at play here. She was an Eye. Eyes didn’t waste people for nothing. If she killed everyone in this clinic, she did it for something she could not have gotten any other way.
My heart hammered in my chest.
What did she want?
I thought of my Tiger and tensed. “Reo, I need more men around Nyomi and—”
“She’s already been taken back to the mansion and heavily guarded. Yoichi is with her.”
“You told Yoichi to help?”
“No. He was already with her.”
I blinked.
Why?
Yoichi was not a man I had ever fully understood. He had appeared the day after my mother was buried, carrying the artifacts of her bloodline in two cloth bundles at his side. He had handed them to me and then refused to leave. Hiro threatened and even tried to kill him. Reo plotted for weeks.
Yoichi avoided both of their actions and remained around me for two full years like a shadow. Eventually, after he saved me twice, I made him my Fang.
Reo theorized that Yoichi must be one of my mother's people. Some sort of protector planted in my life by a bloodline I had never been allowed to fully meet.
Reo had even interrogated him for ten hours.
Yoichi had sat in the chair, looked at the wall, and never confirmed nor denied it. He had simply outlasted the questions, and my Roar.
If Yoichi was at my Tiger's side tonight, he had chosen to be there due to some sort of instinct to protect her.
