| [May. 8th, 2014|03:13 am] |
Tsuto Takayoshi's eyes bulged wide and frightened, but Sakako's were wider. She fought for air, manicured fingernails splintering as she raked at the steel-plated back of Ryouma's glove. He tightened his grip.
Two hands would have been faster. He could have broken her neck with a swift jerk. But Intel thought Tsuto Sakako assisted her husband with the business books, and that meant she knew about the flow of money from the Tsuto treasury to Lord Nobunori in Taishin Province, and from there to Hikouto to buy the loyalty of the Daimyou's guards. That meant she had to die slowly, in pain and terror, while her husband watched.
Her face darkened. Her broken nails slipped off the back-plate, skated down his fingers above the hem of the fingerless gloves. He felt his skin catch and tear.
Tsuto was making thin, desperate whimpers of pain and fear, and he'd added the sharp burn of urine to the perfumed scent of the room. Ryouma didn't look up; Kakashi had him covered. He watched Sakako's face instead, as she faded from the struggle for a breath that wouldn't come. A blood vessel had burst in her eye, filling the white with shadow. Her swollen tongue protruded from her mouth, almost black in the moonlight. Her scrabbling, desperate hands relaxed and fell away.
Genma's voice crackled suddenly in his ear. "My clone just took a knife in the side. On my way to assess. Watch your backs."
Ryouma wrapped his other hand around Sakako's throat, fingers sinking into her swollen flesh, and snapped her neck.
There was a noise at the open door: a slide of bare feet on polished boards, breath caught in horror, too late. A teenage girl, dressed for sleep in a loose t-shirt, smart enough not to scream but torn for one fatal moment between helping her parents or saving herself.
Kakashi's kunai took her just above the collarbones. She crumpled, choking on blood. A small, ornamental tanto skittered across the floor.
Tsuto screamed and wrenched at his pinned hands. Kakashi pulled his kodachi back from Tsuto's neck before the man actually killed himself on the edge, reversed his grip on the hilt, and set the tip of the blade just below Tsuto's right eye. His voice iced the air. "Be still."
The money-lender quivered, gulping down sobs. He hadn't screamed for his wife's death: did the daughter matter more? Maybe it was the suddenness of it, the shock. Ryouma eased his hands free from Sakako's corpse and went silently across the floor toward the dying girl. Kakashi's kunai had opened her throat but not penetrated to sever the spinal cord. She was drowning in her own blood.
Her brown eyes caught him as he knelt over her. Begged him, tear-filled. He laid a gloved hand over her eyes and shoved the kunai in. Her body convulsed and was still.
Ryouma spared a quick glance up and down the corridor, then dragged the corpse inside and thumbed his throat-mic back on. His voice came steady. "Mother and daughter dead. Did you get the grandparents and the boy?"
"Grandparents are down," Genma said in his ear. "Just got to the son."
Ryouma glanced back. Kakashi had taken the receiver from his ear and was holding it to the side of Tsuto's head. A trickle of blood ran down the fleshy cheek, under the shadow of Kakashi's blade.
Tsuto was shaking, tears streaming, smearing the blood-trail. "Don't," he begged. "Oh god, please don't. He's just a boy, he didn't do anything. I'll give you whatever you want. I have information, money— You don't need to kill him."
"That's why it's a punishment," Kakashi said. His voice was empty of any emotion that Tsuto could have seized on. He tucked the receiver back in his ear and added, "Hold a second, lieutenant."
"Holding."
Kakashi twisted the blade, very gently, carving a tiny divot beneath Tsuto's eye. The blood-trickle thickened. Tsuto blinked uncontrollably. Kakashi flicked the volume up on the mic at his throat and said, "What information."
"Oh god, oh god," Tsuto said, and spilled words like a man vomiting: names of co-conspirators, places and dates they'd met, payments and the men who'd taken them, the location of his strongboxes, promises and prayers—
Kakashi turned down the volume on his mic. "Lieutenant?"
"Got it. Nothing new. Proceed with the mission as planned." |
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