In the morning, we woke up together with Ito's alarm. I got dressed in my suit while she got into the shower, uninterested in washing the scent of her off of me. We had slept wrapped together along with the blankets on her bed, and it was difficult to get my body moving again, stiff from holding her so tightly against me all night. It was something I would either get used to, I thought, or something that would loose its novelty. It was natural, uneventful, and it was how I wanted to spend every morning.

I had one of my men drive my car so I could sit in the back seat with her. We relaxed together, as she pressed herself close to me and laid her head on my shoulder, I put my arm around her to hold her there, and we were silent. It was a rare opportunity to experience mutual love.

The car stopped so suspiciously in front of the university that it was obvious. Obvious that it was in fact a car belonging to a Yakuza, and yet obvious enough in plain sight, not trying to hide, that it couldn't actually be a Yakuza inside. It was a trick I used often, standing out in places where I shouldn't be, hiding in plain sight. I leaned over Ito to kiss her goodbye for the day without a word. I had told her I would be watching her to keep her safe, and to experience her day as normally as possible. Interact with any person she pleased, eat where she wanted, and at the end of her day, I would be there to take her home. She sounded all too delighted about the fact that she was my full time job, and that we would be inseparable for some time.

I arrived at the headquarters house at noon, finding Oda-sama sitting neatly in the side garden with his tea set. Wordlessly, I sat with him, and he poured a cup for me. "It's a nice day." He said. "And you have a different energy about you."

I took a polite sip of the tea, at first not fully convinced that I wanted to drink it, but I found it more delicious than expected. The whole world, then, even the tea seemed to know that I was in love, and painted itself quite a different colour suddenly from what I was used to seeing. "I won't even try to lie to you today, Old Man."

"Things advanced then." He pretended not to smile into his tea cup, and looked at me expectantly from the side of his gaze. "With your girl."

I ignored his insight. "One of our problems was taken care of. It was an easy fix to send a message."

"We discovered Abe-kai's strategy for retaliation is not against us." Oda-sama was slow to speak, deliberate in delivering the point he was trying to make. It made me realize how quick to draw conclusions I was still, and maybe still more immature than I thought of myself. "They are hiring the bikers that frequent the clubs to take out the top earning hostesses. The girls are familiar with them, so they have a certain level of trust for them, and are easily manipulated into dangerous situations."

"I'll have a few of my men guard."

"No. I don't want a blatant Yakuza presence. The knowledge that we exist there is enough." He sounded as if he didn't believe himself. Like he had other intel he wasn't sharing that contradicted what he was saying out loud. He was rooted in his old traditions, without any change from the way his father ran the syndicate, and how generations before had run it. I wanted out. But I saw more and more of need for myself to stay.

"Thing don't have to be done the same way as we've always done them." I tried to be gentle with my offer. "If we don't shift with the times, we'll be labeled as an enemy to the public, because we've become more of a threat to them than a help."

"We can't defend ourselves if we shift." He was definitive. He was good at making decisions, but I could tell his reason for defending his point so rigidly was because he was scared. "We are divided. We've created an empire for ourselves here that has given Abe-kai too many targets." He was scared, and he was angry with himself for not realizing sooner. "They have control of the bike gangs. They started with larger numbers than we have, and now we are outnumbered to a point we can no longer defend our borders. They're coming for me, and they're coming for our businesses. They're going to starve us so we take ourselves out, instead of retaliating against our success."

"We only have one thing to protect ourselves against, and that's Abe-kai. They own everything else." There were too few of us too scattered to make any type of stand against them if they decided to start making moves. "We need to be business men about their strategy, not thugs. It's money that does the talking."

I hoped I was getting through to him, but I managed to bite my tongue when I disagreed with him. It was a situation that was becoming more frequent as we both grew older and gain separate understandings of the world. But he was angry, and his world had turned him hard. "You met a college girl, and suddenly you're ready to take over and change the way the entire Yakuza does business." His voice was a barely contained shout. "The entire Yakuza isn't listening. You're going to pretend to be ignorant until we're all dead."

I walked out, through the gates to the side of the road. I lit a cigarette hoping that the ignition would somehow channel the flames in my head. Fuming anger was unbecoming of a gentleman. I paced the road in front of the headquarters house, feeling the presence of a few of my men looming a few yards away from me inside the gate.

My mind was racing. Abe-kai had to go. They had taken control of the biker gangs in the West side, where we had control. We were outnumbered. They weren't coming after us, they were targeting people and businesses under our protection. I had a particular interest in a hostess who worked in our newly acquired chain of clubs. She had a connection to the leader of one of the biker gangs under Abe-kai's control. What was even more puzzling was that somehow Genji was using his position as gang leader and hostess club frequenter to track down anyone who knew me. He somehow wanted a connection to me very badly, even though he had one as a childhood friend. It was a tangled mess of a web that I couldn't figure out. Where did the spider live?

My phone rang. "Akari." I answered it after the first ring.

"Kazu! I didn't expect you to answer." Her voice was playful, which I was thankful for. The last time I had spoken to her on the phone, she was frantic. "I'm sorry if you're busy, I just called to say hi, because I'm on a break."

I smiled to myself at the sound of her voice. "I'm not busy. But I'm going to start a meeting soon." Suddenly, none of the subjects that had been running the track in my head seemed to matter much. "Is everything okay?"

"Everything is fine, I just missed you." She laughed lightly, and I imagined what her smile looked like on the other end of the phone.

"Are you alone?" My instincts made me wonder if someone had seen my name in her phone, if someone forced her to call me to confirm whatever relationship it was we had.

She made a sound of affirmation. "Yes, I'm alone. I'm in the classroom where the class just finished. Everyone is gone." I needed to relax. "I wouldn't call if I thought someone could hear."

She had only called me by my first name. If someone was forcing her to call me, to prove that she had a connection to me, she would be forced to call me by my last name. "Akari, I have to go inside and start this meeting. I'll be there to pick you up after." I left bait, just in case. It was also a warning. I would be there, and I would protect her.