Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I don't know what you’re about to say, but it better be respectful. Or I'll have Kenji take your other fucking ear.
The cousin cleared his throat. “I would like to speak with you today.”
I stared at him and remained silent.
“I need to relay a message from the mother of the Dragon's heirs." His voice grew tight as if sore from rehearsing this in a mirror over and over. "Kiko heard that you are hosting a celebration tonight for the Dragon's inner circle. She believes that as the mother of the Dragon's children, it is only appropriate and expected that she attend. She would like the time for the event and to RSVP her team as well—"
“No.”
The two women exchanged awkward glances.
Kiko’s cousin raised his eyebrows. “No?”
I turned and walked away.
My guards moved with me, smooth, synchronized, and forming a wall of bodies around me.
He called after me, “Excuse me! What does no mean?!”
I could have given him more of an explanation. Could have broken it down and listed the reasons as well as explained the politics. I could have even been diplomatic, polite, and careful.
But I didn't have time to stand on a garden path and justify my decisions to a man who was missing an ear because he couldn't keep his mouth shut the first time.
I had a party to build. I had a chef waiting for me. I had oxtails and macaroni and cheese and a ballroom to transform and cocktails to taste-test and a dress code to finalize.
I had a best friend in a villa grieving and a man I loved in a war room planning the next battle and a whole crew of his men counting on tonight to feel like something good in the middle of something terrible.
I didn't owe Kiko's cousin a single word beyond the one I gave him. And if he showed up at the party tonight, he better cover his good ear and pray because I wouldn’t be dealing with him. It would be Hiro and the Claws.
About ten steps down the path, I looked back.
They were still standing right there. All three of them. Frozen. The cousin's mouth hung open. One of the two women scratched her head.
The other scowled at me and I could see the sentence in her head, ‘Who the hell does she think she is?’
I turned back around and kept on walking.
I’m the Tiger, bitch. That’s who I am. And if you don’t understand that, then call me the Heart and watch your fucking mouth.
Chapter six
The Hunt
Kenji
Today was about hunting.
Searching for my father.
Looking for my enemies.
Seeking out my Tiger.
Exploring the other side of my DNA where my mother’s bloodline lived.
Each hour represented an unfolded map with worn creases and fading ink.
We never took Akiro’s phone back to the island. Reo suspected that Akiro may have left the phone on purpose.
Therefore, Reo routed it through three dead channels—burner couriers who didn’t know each other nor us and never asked questions. By the time the device reached my hackers, it had passed through enough hands to bury its origin six feet under.
The first thing my hackers found wasn’t data, but a tracker.
High-end.
Deeply embedded.
Designed to stay dormant until it mattered.
As Reo suspected, Akiro hadn’t lost the phone. He’d planted it to later find us.
His biggest mistake was that the phone was actually his. The hardware signature matched his custom builds with modified firmware and reinforced encryption layers.
Before planting the phone, Akiro had done his part. He’d wiped everything that could be wiped.
Messages.
Call logs.
Contact trees.
Even the secret caches most people didn’t know existed.
But nothing was ever truly erased. Not from a device that had lived this long in his hands.
My hackers didn’t look for what was there. They probed for what had been there. Residual heat signatures in the memory banks. Fragmented packet trails buried in system logs. Ghost pings from towers the phone had whispered to before the wipes. Tiny inconsistencies in the clock cycles—fractions of seconds that didn’t line up unless something had been deleted.
They rebuilt his silence.
Piece by piece.
Akiro was smart, careful, and patient enough to think three moves ahead. But my team of hackers lived ten moves beyond that. And through the cracks he thought he’d sealed, his world started bleeding open for me.
They didn’t just unlock his phone.
They dissected it.
Akiro had encrypted the surface—standard biometric locks, layered passcodes, false partitions meant to stall amateurs.
My hackers mirrored the device at a kernel level, bypassed the OS entirely, and built a ghost environment to run the phone without triggering its internal alarms.
Every keystroke Akiro had ever made was reconstructed from residual memory.
Deleted messages weren’t recovered—they were reassembled.
Even the battery logs were useful. Tiny fluctuations mapped against tower pings gave us movement patterns down to the minute.
They pulled the baseband data and forced the modem to confess every handshake it had made in the last six months.