No Ordinary Love by Kenya Wright Page A

go.
    He approached and paused right in front of me. Just like last night, only a few inches rested between us. But unlike last night, something charged from him to me. It pulsed and throbbed back and forth as he stared into my eyes.
    “Tora.” His voice vibrated through my body.
    I edged back and did a half-bow. “Hi, Kenji.”
    He smiled. I hoped it wasn’t due to my pitiful attempt at respecting his culture. I always felt stupid trying to follow a country’s traditions.
    “I read your letter several times today.” He walked around me in slow, deliberate steps, circling me like a prowling beast. “I apologize for the unwanted groping last night. I like to touch my woman. We’ll need to figure out a compromise like you said.”
    My woman? All that dragon smoke must have muddled his brain.
    “Wait a minute. I think we have a misunderstanding,” I said. “A compromise on the touching? That’s not what I said. No way. That’s not what I even meant. I wanted to compromise on researching the district and—”
    “Doesn’t matter. We should compromise on the touching too.”
    “I disagree.”
    “We have time for that later.”
    “For what?”
    “Compromising.”
    “I doubt we’ll have time for that,” I muttered as he chuckled.
    “I told you yesterday that you should always know who you’re meeting with, before you greet them.” He stopped behind me.
    I had to glance over my shoulder to see him as he drank in my curves. Everything about him was intense. He snared all of my attention. I could focus on nothing else. A flicker of something journeyed between us. If I could, I would've named it something grand and bold, but I had no name for it, just this sensation of lust mingling with yearning and all of that slamming into my chest as he continued to watch me.
    Why am I always off my game with him?
    “Do you know who I am now?” he asked.
    More than I should’ve known. Zo had been right. Kenji was the second son of the leader who ran the biggest yakuza syndicate in Japan. The Yamaguchi. It was a group that boasted well over twenty thousand members in the country, and even more around the world. Many lived in my state of New York. Others stayed in California and Hawaii. It freaked me out. The only reason I kept the date was because the reports claimed that the yakuza were supposed to be different than the Italian mafia.
    Apparently, they were more a business that thrived on old customs. Gang leaders in suits. They'd formed a deep connection to the Japanese community. I just hadn't figured out if it was a good or bad union.
    There were the good things about them. When the tsunami hit Japan in 2011, the yakuza represented some of the first groups to provide aid and supplies to their residents.
    Then there was the bad. A few articles mentioned a term called sokaiya . It was a yakuza method for obtaining bribes. They would buy shares in companies, attend shareholders’ meetings, and then discover any dirt on the leadership. Once they found enough wicked little secrets, they threatened to reveal them. According to several articles, sokaiya worked due to the Japanese’s fear of shame over anything else.
    And I can’t forget about that other thing. What was it? Yubitsume, I think.
    Yakuza members that violated particular rules were disciplined by getting a part of their finger chopped off. One news documentary explained that they started at the tip of their pinkie, however as further problems appeared, more mutilation continued.
    I'll have to tread carefully with this one. Anybody who deals with discipline through knives and brute force is someone I better be cautious around. But how much of the yakuza is in Kenji’s veins?
    Kenji hadn’t been involved with the yakuza until after his surprise retiring from soccer at the young age of twenty-five. Not a soccer fan myself, I was still impressed by his stats. He’d won Asian Football Confederation Player of the Year for each year he’d played. It totaled five.