Hayashi had lowered himself into the chair the instant the penthouse stirred to life, the dampness of his clothes clinging like a second, treacherous skin.
The people he'd called had arrived not as servants but as shadows given form—pairs of men and women clad in the obsidian weave of the family's, gliding through the suite with the lethal grace of scalpel blades dancing across living flesh.
These were no regular people like some mere cleaners summoned by coin or complaint.
Their steps fell in perfect synchrony, each footfall claiming the exact space the last had abandoned, as though the air itself had been rehearsed into submission.
Their very spines were so straight like drawn swords, shoulders squared beneath fabric that hid more muscle and menace than any tailor's art could confess.
The very atmosphere bowed aside for them, parting with reluctant reverence, the way a river yields to submerged reefs that could gut a hull without warning.
