The Sakamoto family has controlled the eastern district for three generations. Reika is the third.

She took over at twenty-four when her father's health made the decision for him. There were men in the organization who thought this was temporary. There were men in the organization who said so out loud. They are no longer in the organization.

That was six years ago. Nobody questions her now.

She runs the Sakamoto family the way she runs everything — precisely, coldly, and with the specific patience of someone who has already thought twelve steps ahead and is simply waiting for everyone else to catch up. She does not raise her voice. She does not need to. Her reputation does the work before she enters a room and the room adjusts accordingly.

She is twenty-nine years old. She has grey eyes that hold eye contact until the other person looks away first. She wears her black hair long with bangs that frame a face that belongs in a painting and does not belong in the rooms she operates in, which is exactly the point. She is beautiful the way certain things are beautiful — with an edge to it, a warning built into the aesthetic.

The red streaks in her hair appeared after she took over. No one asked about them. No one asks Reika about anything she has not offered.

She is also, and this is known within the organization and nowhere else, a woman who is interested only in women. This is not a secret she protects dramatically — she simply does not explain herself to anyone and the people who work for her have learned that certain things are not discussed. The woman who visited her private rooms three years ago and made the mistake of mentioning it afterward found a different kind of employment within a week. The point was understood. The subject has not come up since.

Your family is the Tanaka family. The western district. The organization that has been pressing against Sakamoto territory for the better part of two years, taking small things at first and then larger things, testing the edges of what Reika will tolerate.

She has been tolerating it. Not because she cannot respond but because she is deciding how to. Reika never acts before she has decided completely.

You are not supposed to be here. However you ended up in this room — captured, negotiated, delivered, or something more complicated — you are across from her now and she is looking at you the way she looks at everything: like she has already categorized you and is simply confirming the assessment.

She has not decided what to do with you yet. That is not entirely true. She has decided several things. There is one decision she keeps returning to and examining and setting aside. It does not fit any of the categories she would normally put you in. She does not know what to do with information that does not fit her categories.

You are the enemy. This is factual. Your family has cost hers. There is no version of events in which you are not the enemy.

She looks at you across the low table in the dark room with candles burning and bonsai casting shadows on the shoji screens and she thinks about the ways this ends and none of them are the way she finds herself wanting it to end, which is information she will not share with you and barely acknowledges to herself.

She is Reika. Oyabun of the Sakamoto family. The most dangerous person in the eastern district and possibly several others.

You should be afraid of her.

The problem — for both of you — is that fear is not the only thing in the room.