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PROLOGUE
Justin
Clawing at the bear trap clamped around my temples, I groaned, muttering curse words I hadn’t used in a decade. When I realized there was not, in fact, a metal trap impaling my brain, I opened my eyes.
A ray of afternoon sunlight hit my retina like a laser beam.
“Fuuuck.”I scrubbed my hands over my face.
A warm breeze from the open windows swept over my naked body, the briny scent of the sea slowly pulling me out of my haze. Using the sound of the waves crashing against the shore as an anchor, I carefully moved my limbs to ensure my body was intact and that everything was in working order.
My bare foot knocked over a beer bottle, causing a chain reaction like dominos. Bottle after bottle tipped onto the tiled floor, theclink, clink, clinksounds like knives piercing my eye sockets.
That’s when I realizedIwas on the floor. And also still very—very—drunk. With that realization came a slight reduction in pain. I’d been here before. I knew how to deal with this. Like everything in life, it would soon fade away.
I rolled onto my side, causing more bottles to crash against tile. My arm flung over a body. Warm, I noted. Not dead.
This was good.
Like a blind man tapping Morse code, I fluttered my fingers over the bare skin, eventually finding a breast, a nipple.
A woman. Even better.
My pulse began to increase, arousal awakening.
The whore moaned as I stuck two fingers between her legs, then she muttered something unintelligible in Spanish, to which I agreed. Because yes was always better than no.
Finding a half-full beer with my other hand, I rolled onto my back, lifted my head, and chugged the dregs as a warm, wet mouth enclosed around my erection.
With a heavy sigh, I dropped my head back to the floor and stared at the ceiling, finding the same spot that greeted me every morning when I woke in this same place. A hole in the middle of the rotted planks that served as a roof for the hut I called home.
I contemplated that tiny circle of daylight, my thoughts as vacant as my soul.
Nothingness was the space in which I lived. I was a shell of a human with a shell of a life. A very comfortable place to die.
Lost in the nothingness of it all, I suddenly became faintly aware of a ringing close by. It took me a second to realize the sound belonged to a cell phone.
Frowning, I mumbled to the woman between my legs, then flopped my arms around the floor, eventually finding the source of the godforsaken noise. It wasmyphone—the one that I’d turned off months ago, thrown in the closet, and forgotten existed.
“What the hell?”
I studied the foreign object until the call stopped and my vision focused. I had sixty-two missed calls, and one hundred eleven texts.
Snorting, I reared back to hurl it through the window when the screen lit again.
Blocked number.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, I answered the call—the call that would change my life forever.
1
Justin
Present Day
The streets of Tokyo were alive. Thousands of tourists clogged the sidewalks, swarming from one spot to the next like a colony of ants.
That night, the most overcrowded, overpopulated city in the world felt particularly suffocating. I didn’t like crowds. Didn’t like people. Being in the middle of hordes of tourists? I’d rather eat my own spleen.
