Good Girl

The Underboss demonstrated to Nishikawa what the girl could do. He ordered her to finish the man off, which she wordlessly obeyed. The girl walked over to the prisoner and took his slumped head in her little hands. She stood on her tiptoes to press her forehead against his. It didn’t even take a full minute before she let go.

“Did he stop breathing?” the Underboss asked. The little girl just nodded in confirmation. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the crate. “Good girl. Go back to your home.”

Nishikawa felt his heart pounding as the little girl just stood there, eyeing him curiously. She was the infant, and now she was the dog.

The Underboss grabbed a retractable baton from inside his suit jacket and extended it. He whacked the little girl on the back, then prodded her towards the cage. She didn’t even cry from the pain—just lowered herself to the floor and crawled back inside.

“Sorry about that. Sometimes she doesn’t listen,” the Underboss said, closing the door to the dog crate and putting the lock back on. He readjusted the sheet, then patted the top of the cage. “This here is our little shinigami. I showed you this because you asked, but also to warn you that in our family, a pinky isn’t the price to pay for a fuckup.”

The longer she held on to someone, the more of their life she drained—meaning they could control the process by directing her. They feared her, and rightfully so. It took under five minutes for her to completely kill someone. Because of that, they kept her in that basement, in that cage.

Twice a day, they let her out for food, water, and to use the bathroom. When she started to smell too strongly, they’d hose her down. Her diet was supplemented with multivitamins to prevent deficiencies and keep her as healthy as a prisoner could possibly be.

“Yes, sir.”

Taking her away from the Inukai Family would be more than a simple heist. Nishikawa would need more information to enact a plan.

***

“Honestly, all this trouble started because the family head took on that mistress…”

“Could you blame him? She was a smoke show! The cabaret club she worked at never recovered from that loss when he plucked her outta there.”

Apparently, she had been in an insane amount of debt to multiple loan sharks. The old man, forty years her senior, paid it all off in exchange for her love.

“So was she coerced?” Nishikawa asked, offering the two youngsters cigarettes.

“Does it matter? She got what she wanted,” the kid said, lighting up. “So did the boss.”

She left the club scene and the public eye almost overnight, kept like a caged bird inside the Inukai estate. Maybe he thought it would keep her eyes from wandering if there was no one but his men to look at, or maybe he just wanted her all to himself.

Low-level kids fed him gossip as they worked together, but getting some mid-level guys drunk yielded some more specific details about the Inukai Family.

“So the son and the mistress cuckolded the father?” Nishikawa asked, pouring sake into the cup of his boss.

He’d heard it first from the younger guys—the mistress and the son started seeing each other right under the old man’s nose, and he was none the wiser for a long time.

“To that captive princess, he musta looked like a knight in shining armor compared to the old tyrant…” chimed in the boss’s underling.

The boss knocked back the sake, then put the cup down for more. He looked like he realized he said too much, because he suddenly lowered his voice as he gestured to Nishikawa and the underling. “Oh, but none of this leaves this room. Y’hear? The big guy doesn’t like bein’ reminded of it.”

“Who would?” the underling muttered, shaking his head. “But, seriously, Nishikawa, that man flew into a rage when he found out the broad was pregnant.”

“What did he do?” Nishikawa asked, serving the boss more alcohol.

“He cursed her,” the boss said, offering a reciprocal pour to his underlings.

Evidently, the two lovers started planning to run away together as soon as they found out she was pregnant, but got caught as soon as she started to show. The boss let them go, but not without uttering those ill-fated words first.

“That child will never know love. It is a parasite that will consume that woman’s life. When it’s born, its existence will be like a plague that weakens and ravages everything in its path until nothing is left.”

The head of the Inukai Family was a sorcerer—not a particularly strong one, but not entirely a weak one either. When a sorcerer puts intent behind words, they become incantations. Whether the old man meant to or not, the vitriol and hatred behind his words were powerful enough to place a spell on the unborn child with sorcerer blood running through her.

“Anyway, they came crawling back on their hands and knees later…”

“No, they didn’t! They got captured! Remember?” the underling insisted.

“No way!” the boss waved his hand. “The woman got sick, so they came back to grovel for help…”

“But the son–!”

The old man cut down his own son. He took delight in watching the mistress waste away, so he kept her prisoner for the remainder of her pregnancy.

“But why not kill them both?” asked Nishikawa.

“Maybe he thought the blood of his blood—his grandchild—could serve as a replacement,” the boss said with a shrug.

According to them, it had been a little over four years since a healthy baby girl was born to that mistress. However, on that night, both the mother and the midwife perished. The mother had grown so weak and frail by the end of her pregnancy that she didn’t even make it through birth.

“But nobody could figure out how the midwife passed…”

One by one, the nurses brought in to care for the infant died. Like the midwife, they’d all just dropped dead from no obvious cause.

“How did they figure it out?”

“Well, someone started standing guard. When one of them broads brought in to nanny picked up the baby like this…” the underling made the motion of cradling a baby as he talked. “She dropped dead in a matter of minutes.”

That was when the child’s grandfather, the very individual who cursed her, realized what he’d done. The old man had created the perfect assassin.

***

“The timing has to be perfect,” Ryouma explained to Xiǎomíng. “When I complete the first phase, that’s when it’s up to you to make sure phase two is set in motion.”

Ryouma planned to do what he did best—steal. Only this time, he wanted to get caught.

After learning all he could about the Inukai girl and growing tired of suppressing his rage, he decided to enact his plan to free the little girl from her hell. Nishikawa Tatsumi would enter the torture chamber known as “The Kennel” as a prisoner.

“What do I do after the package is delivered?” asked Xiǎomíng.

“Then you’re on standby at the house until I get back.”

From the Inukai estate, he planned to steal the family head’s prized Muramasa sword along with some money from his personal safe—just to add insult to injury. A replica of the sword would then be delivered to a Yokohama-based triad as a gift from Nishikawa Tatsumi. The triad would then offer it up as a bargaining chip for territory to the Inukai Family while selling out Nishikawa.

It went off without a hitch. Ryouma dumped the real sword at his home in England, then hid out in the open in Yokohama as Nishikawa, waiting for the Inukai Family to come for him. Much to his surprise, it happened sooner than he thought.

“You must have enormous balls to show yourself here.”

They’d ambushed him as he was leaving a pachinko arcade run by the family. Using their best sorcerers, they incapacitated him with a seal stuck to his back. It was something Ryouma could have easily overpowered to escape the situation, but things were going according to his plan.

What he hadn’t anticipated, though, was that it would be discovered that the replica sword was a fake.

“I’m not gonna ask you again! Where’s the sword!” An interrogator whacked Nishikawa across the face with a baton.

He had been brought to “The Kennel,” but they hadn’t threatened him with the girl yet. They’d only been beating him mercilessly.

Nishikawa spat blood at the feet of the interrogator. “I already told you, the triad has it.”

“Bullshit! They returned it already, but it was fake!” he yelled, bringing down the baton onto Nishikawa’s collarbone. “Where’s the real one?!”

“Ugh!” He gritted his teeth through the pain. “Then they gave you a fake…”

It was such a good replica. Had they been able to tell the difference that easily? Either way, he said something they needed to investigate, so the beatings paused.

It was hard to maintain the glamour in this state, so when he was left alone with the girl, he dropped the disguise.

“Hey, little girl, are you in here?” His back was facing the dog crate, so he couldn’t see her, but could hear the rustling of her movements. “Can you talk?”

There was no response. She was so quiet that he wasn’t sure if they’d put some kind of spell on her for silence or if she was just mute. Ryouma continued talking to her regardless. “I’m going to get you out of here, but I need your help to do it.”

He heard more rustling, then the volume on the TV got louder. She turned it up to drown me out, he thought to himself. Ryouma couldn’t help but chuckle at his predicament. Why did he think he’d be the first person to bargain with her?

He had no sense of time in the room, save for what was playing on the TV. Judging by the old news broadcast, someone had just let a blank tape record from a live broadcast until it ran out. Even without knowing what day or time it was, he could keep track of the hours from the length of each show.

Just when he’d started getting sick of the Enka musician performing on the tape, it cut out and went to static. Ryouma tried bargaining again.

“Little girl, are you afraid they might hurt you if you help me?” He heard some rustling as she moved around. “You are, aren’t you? Don’t you know you’re stronger than them?”

“...I’m…not…”

For a second, Ryouma had thought that those words had come from the TV. He strained to turn his head around. From the corner of his eye, he could see her looking directly at him.

“But you are! You’re super strong!” he said encouragingly. If he could just help her understand what she was capable of, then he could use her power to get both of them out of there. “They’re all afraid of you!”

“...Really?”

It was only after she could walk, talk, and use the bathroom on her own that “The Nursery” became “The Kennel.” They made her into their dog so they could break her before she understood the strength of her own powers. Too bad for them, it didn’t work.

“It’s true! So listen to me…” He quickly explained his plan to her, not knowing when The Interrogator would return.