He was in Chicago for Thanksgiving, which meant half the city was pretending not to notice that one of the most powerful men in the country had crossed into our house like it was nothing. Head of the West Coast and, in practice, the man who carried more influence over the American yakuza than anyone else alive, Hoka had never felt like a distant legend to me.
To me, he was first the man who trained me without mercy.
The man who kept the doors shut while I cursed him, sweated, shook, and pushed past pain I would once have accepted as the limit of my body. The man who ignored my anger, ignored my pride, ignored every weakness I tried to hide behind until there was nothing left to do but fight through all of it. More than once, I had known my father was on the other side of the door, wanting to stop him, wanting to stop me, wanting to drag me out before the lesson went too far.
Hoka never let him.
And if I stood here now as something far more dangerous than the boy I once was, if men thought twice before underestimating me, a great deal of that was due to him.
It also meant he was one of the very few people in the world capable of taking one look at my face and knowing exactly when something had changed.
Which was unfortunate.
Joint operations between the Italians and the Yakuza were no longer unusual, not since blood had turned alliance into family. For the last two years, I had been brought further and further into strategy meetings, negotiations, and the machinery behind our power. That part came easily to me. Patterns, leverage, timing, risk, I had always understood those better than most.
Emily Hart, however, had turned out to be an area of study for which I was considerably less prepared.
“He’s got the look,” Matteo said.
“He does,” Hoka agreed.
I exhaled slowly. “If either of you says the words ‘mafia curse,’ I’m leaving.”
Matteo’s mouth twitched. Hoka, predictably, looked totally unashamed.
Before either of them could continue, I set my phone face down on the table and stirred the conversation where it belonged.
“The shipment issue in New Jersey,” I said. “Has anyone checked whether the delays are actually customs or if someone’s paying to keep the containers sitting there long enough to bleed us?”
That got the room’s attention immediately.
My father, who had been half listening while speaking quietly to Luca near the fire, turned his head. “Go on.”
I leaned back in my chair, the irritation of the last five minutes settling into something more useful. “Three delays in six weeks, all on routes that should be routine. That’s either incompetence, which I don’t believe, or pressure. If it’s pressure, then it’s not about the cargo itself. It’s about forcing reroutes, costing us money, and making us look unreliable to the people downstream.”
Matteo lowered his glass. “You think it’s deliberate.”
“I think if it were random, it wouldn’t be so consistent.” I looked between them. “Start with port staff, not customs. Customs is too visible. Someone lower down is more likely to get paid to create the bottleneck while keeping his own hands clean.”
Hoka gave the smallest nod. “And if the ports are clean?”
“Then it’s the buyers,” I said. “Someone testing how fast we shift before they escalate to something more expensive.”
A brief silence followed, measuring my words.My father finally stepped closer, his expression blank in the way it always was when he was pleased and refusing to make that easy for anyone.
“That,” he said, “is exactly where my head was.”
“Then I’m glad one of us is predictable.”
Matteo let out a low laugh. “There he is.”
I ignored him.
“If you want,” I said, looking at my father, “I can handle this.”
That changed the air a little.
Not enough to make anyone visibly react, but enough.
