Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Weiss Kreuz Glow in B Major: The Rose's Knightshade ❯ Two ( Chapter 2 )

II

 

Spotlights pulsed and flashed, painting the dark atmosphere of the club with sudden splashes of colors and brilliance. Heavy rock music shook the rafters, the edgy screams of electric guitar and the frenetic pounding bass driving the mass of heaving and writhing bodies on the dance floor into frenzy. Too many people danced, jammed elbow to elbow on the dance floor, spilling over to other areas of the club until there was no room left for sitting save for the balconies of private alcoves overlooking the dance floor.

 

It was the kind of atmosphere Kudoh Yohji loved - the absolute debauchery and excessiveness being consumed tonight. He was not dancing; he was doing something even better. In his own private alcove on the eastern balcony, he had a youth in his lap - a boy, eighteen, willowy like a girl, wearing a very short fishnet crop top and denim shorts so tiny that it barely covered his ass halfway decent. Yohji had his hand inside those tiny shorts, the boy squirming deliciously in his lap as he fondled the boy's genitals.

 

“You like that?” he nipped against the boy's ear.

 

The boy moaned and writhed again. “More, sir…”

 

Yohji grinned, enjoying the sensual rubbing against his groin. “Blow me off,” he ordered.

 

All too eagerly, his amusement for the moment slid off his lap and knelt down between his legs in front of him. As Yohji watched with heated lust in his eyes, the boy proceeded to unzip his pants and bent to his task. Yohji closed his eyes, sighing heavily as his cock was taken into a warm mouth and enthusiastically sucked. He threaded one hand through the boy's hair, forcing him to deep-throat his erection and began to take his pleasure.

 

For a few precious minutes, Yohji lost himself in the sexual heat and pleasure. Then it was over, like always, in a rush, too soon, and he briefly mourned its loss. Breathing heavily, he grinned down at the boy kneeling between his legs. Whatever he was going to say to the boy, he forgot it when he felt eyes on him. In a club as decadent as this, voyeurism was part and parcel of its scene but the quality of this gaze felt different.

 

Casually he looked up and spotted the watcher straight away.

 

The blond man did not bother to attempt to hide that the fact he was intruding in Yohji's private alcove. But then again, he didn't have to. Yohji recognized him at once and he grinned again, a smirk really, to find him, of all people, in this kind of club. The blond man stepped into his alcove, giving the still-kneeling boy a look of mild distaste despite his embarrassed smile. “Excessiveness is going to kill you one of these days.”

 

Yohji's smirk turned lazy as he deliberately tucked himself back in his pants, getting a kick out of the blond man's obvious discomfort to be seen in this sort of place. He bent down and kissed the boy lightly. “Thank you, pretty.” He tucked a fifty into the boy's shorts.

 

The boy winked at him as he rose. Not bothering to zip up his shorts, he blew Yohji a kiss and sashayed out of the alcove, not before giving the blond man an appreciative look over.

 

“So what brings our white knight down to the arena of debauchery?” Yohji tossed back his shot of whisky.

 

Honshou Yuushi refused to let the barb get to him. “You're needed.”

 

Yohji stared at him for a moment, mentally cursing the man for saying that two very familiar words. Realizing that his night of fun was being abruptly, unexpectedly cut short, he grabbed hold of his jacket and rose to his feet. Yuushi fell into step beside him and together, both men pushed their way to the exit. Along the way, they garnered countless appreciative looks and not quite a few propositions as well. In the faceless crowd, they stood out.

 

Yuushi was clearly, sharply out of place in this club of metal rock and sex. For one, he was decently, primly dressed, in a proper shirt and vest tucked in pressed trousers. A strange-looking belt was the only thing that didn't seem to fit his down-to-earth image.

 

Yohji, on the other hand, was a spot-on denizen of the club. Blond hair cropped short, a pair of shades perched on top of his head while an unlit cigarette dangled between his lips. Emerald green eyes, at once lazy and good-humored, never ceased their visual enjoyment of the nubile bodies all around him. He wore a tight sleeveless tank top of a gray shimmering translucent material, more revealing rather than concealing his wiry-muscled torso and the `sin' tattoo on his bicep. Tight dark red leather pants rode extremely low and clung to his lean long legs. A yellow sports watch graced one wrist while a leather bracelet encircled the other.

 

While Yuushi moved with a well-trained disciplined grace, Yohji, well, oozed sex with every step he took.

 

It took them a while to exit the club. Once outside on the pavement, Yohji lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply, savoring the heavy scent of nicotine. “You're ruining my night, you know.” he remarked lightly.

 

“You'll live,” Yuushi replied equally lightly. “I'm parked on the opposite. Your place or mine?”

 

Yohji briefly considered the options. “Mine.” Yuushi seldom searched him out but when he did, well, Yohji had the feeling he would want to keep the option of kicking the man out of his apartment - just to express his displeasure.

 

Yuushi nodded. “Meet you there, Kudoh.”

 

Yohji turned and headed for his car - a vintage classic he named Seven. As it was summer in Tokyo, he had put the top down. Without checking to see if Yuushi had left, Yohji backed out of the parking lot and cruised into the night traffic of the city. His apartment was in the quieter districts of Tokyo, a long way from the club. It gave him time to think and wonder, much to his chagrin, what his bosses want from him now.

 

Like Yuushi, Yohji too belonged to the same secret organization that monitor and fight the underside world of society, where the yakuza and other unmentionables prowled and hunt the innocents. `Belonged', though wasn't quite accurate. He could never forget how he was `recruited': he was drunk when he accidentally stumbled onto one of their raids - nearly got shot at and was caught by their investigators. They interrogated him until the investigators were satisfied that he was simply an innocent passer-by. Yohji, however, wasn't impressed by their arrogance and `holier-than-thou' attitude. He was even less impressed when they gave him two choices of freedom: death or join them.

 

He joined them. Anyone with a shred of self-preservation would.

 

For all these years, he stayed with Kritiker because they effectively ensured that he didn't have anywhere else to go by faking his death. They turned him into a living ghost and trained him. But unlike the White Knight of Crashers, Yohji wasn't a member of any specialized groups within Kritiker. He wasn't an investigator, an entrapper or an assassin, though he did his own share of it. His laidback, irreverent, non-conforming attitude made him a problematic member of any group they put him in. What he was good at was doing whatever it took to get the job done. He quickly became Kritiker's black knight or, as Yuushi put it more accurately, the one who does the dirtiest job.

 

The last time Yuushi came to look for him, he was gone for nearly six months and…well, nobody expected him to make it back alive.

 

He couldn't help but wonder just how the bad the new job was going to be.

 

______

 

“Take a seat,” Yohji tossed over his shoulder as he led the way into his cozy, if messy, loft - a luxury in a city where most people could only offer a cramped boxlike apartment. He flicked the lights on, tossed his keys onto the coffee table before proceeding to the kitchen. “Beer?”

 

“Only if you have Heineken.”

 

Yohji rolled his eyes. “What's wrong with Asahi?” He didn't have the brand stocked in his fridge, as he wasn't expecting Yuushi's visit. Instead he fished out one can of the Japanese beer and a small bottle of juice.

 

“Nothing. I just like Heineken.” Yuushi had already made himself comfortable on the couch, vest removed and tossed over the back of the couch. On the coffee table were several folders he brought from his car - all of them rather thick. “Thanks,” he accepted the juice from Yohji.

 

Yohji flopped down in his favourite armchair and popped the tab on his beer can. “What does King want me to do now?”

 

“Have you been keeping track of the news?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Why am I not surprised? You did spend more time surfing porn than reading the news.” Yohji grinned unrepentantly at him. “If you had, then you should know that Morikawa Kodo was murdered three weeks ago.”

 

“Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?”

 

“Morikawa Kodo is the CEO of Boseki Logistics Ltd, one of Kritiker's front companies.”

 

Yohji's blank expression did not change.

 

The White Knight sighed in exasperation and elaborated, “within Kritiker, Morikawa Kodo is also one of the aliases for Anatolian.”

 

“The Kritiker head of Tokyo sector?” Despite himself, Yohji couldn't help but straighten up in his armchair.

 

“At least you know something.”

 

“How was he killed?”

 

“Poisoned, probably by a dart of some kind, into the back of his neck.”

 

“Close contact.”

 

“Very close contact. You know what that means.”

 

Of course Yohji did. Anatolian knew his murderer, probably even trusted him to the point of lowering his guard around the killer. Whoever the assassin was, he was good. The senior heads of Kritiker were heavily defended. To be able to target one of them without alerting Kritiker intelligence and assassinate him by literally walking right up to him…the assassin probably already knew who and what Anatolian was beforehand. It also meant there was a leak or traitor, even both, somewhere in Kritiker - someone within Anatolian's immediate sphere of influence.

 

“Am I supposed to find his killer?”

 

“Yes and no.” Yuushi looked at him seriously. “Anatolian's murder caught us all by surprise. Intelligence did not uncover any hint whatsoever that he was being targeted prior to his death. As you can predict, King is understandably alarmed over it. So yes, you are to find Anatolian's killer.”

 

“But not to kill him,” Yohjo guessed.

 

“No. Granted that the assassin is good and we would like very much to eliminate him, but the person behind him is more important. We want to know who sent the assassin.”

 

“After three weeks, Crashers must found something.”

 

“Very little to follow on,” Yuushi conceded. “But we did find this.” From one of the brown folders, he took out a plain white envelope and from it, shook out its sole content onto the coffee table.

 

Curious, Yohji picked it up and examined it. It was a business card made of aluminum, with rounded corners and edges. On one side was a lovely engraved and highly realistic picture of a blossoming rose. Whoever did the engraving was a genuine artist. Yohji could see every wrinkle and folds in the petals and the minute thorns on the stalk. He flipped it over. Only two words were engraved in stylized cursive but that two words were enough to make his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

 

Castle Rialto.

 

“I take it you've heard of the place?”

 

Yohji gave the Crasher a withering look.

 

Castle Rialto was something of an urban legend to those outside the `know' - a fantasy place that could only flourish in the imaginations of people. Depending on which version, Castle Rialto was a hellhole of sexual slavery where pretty women, men and children were abducted and forced into prostitution, whoring under the threat of death or torture until they were all used up and discarded like garbage. But to those whose tastes run in that direction, Castle Rialto was a modern-day Eden of decadence because they could indulge in whatever sexual fantasy they liked and get away with it.

 

To those in the `know', however, Castle Rialto was very real and, for a brothel, possessed a very sinister reputation. It had been frequently proven that the only way to leave the `employment' of Rialto was in a body bag. It was one of Kritiker's main goals to shut down Rialto's operations once and for all, but their efforts were constantly thwarted. The brothel possessed defenses worthy of a king's castle.

 

“What was he doing there?” Yohji mused aloud. He tapped the edge of the aluminum business card against an armrest. “The heads of Kritiker are not field-active and they have no business being in that kind place.”

 

“That's what we want to know too.”

 

“There's no way of finding out how long he had been visiting Rialto?”

 

Yuushi shook his head. “That piece of metal is our only clue. We couldn't find a trace of anything that would give us a hint why he visits Rialto. Most obvious bet is that he was visiting one of their prostitutes but even then, we do not know for sure. Anatolian's reputation wasn't of that sort. If Rialto is somehow connected to Anatolian's murder…”

 

“Then the only way to find it is to plant an undercover agent,” Yohji finished for him.

 

“Yes.”

 

“You want me to be that agent.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“How deep?”

 

“As deep as you can go.”

 

“You want me to go in as a Sleeper then. It's not going to be easy.”

 

“It's the only way.”

 

“Who else knows about this plan?”

 

“You, me and King. Not even Queen knows I'm here.”

 

“If anything happens to King and you, I'm pretty much dead in the water.”

 

Yuushi's silence was a clear admission. They were going to send Yohji into the lions' den on his own without any Kritiker support. His mission would never be recorded or acknowledged. If anything went wrong, neither King nor the White Knight would be able to pull the black knight out of the fire.

 

The worst thing was, Yohji knew he was the only one most ideally suited for such a job. Crashers, as good as they were, would be completely out of their collective depths in this mission. They were used to the support Kritiker provided in the background and there were certain lines they would not and could not cross. The black knight, however, had no such qualms or restrictions.

 

Hell, if that didn't leave such a bad taste in his mouth. “Get out,” he ordered flatly.

 

Wisely, Yuushi did not protest. He rose to his feet and gathered his vest. “I'll leave the files here for you to go over. When can I expect a reply?”

 

Yohji pulled out his cigarette pack and shook out a cancer stick. “Come back in two days.”

 

Yuushi nodded his understanding. As he stepped out of the apartment, his last look was of Yohji slouched lazily in the armchair, gazing blankly into a cloud of cigarette smoke.

 

______

 

Yuushi returned two days later.

 

He found an empty apartment. There were no sign of Yohji anywhere. He looked in the closet and was not surprised to find that Yohji had not taken any clothes with him.

 

There was a note on the coffee table, next to the empty can of Asahi and empty juice bottle, weighed down by a bunch of keys.

 

Don't call me. I'll call you. In the meantime, you can keep my apartment clean. Look after Seven and don't you drive it. If I find a single scratch on it, you're dead. P.S: the files are where you-know-it.

 

Yuushi couldn't help but smile at the near-whimsical note. Pocketing it, he looked around and heaved a sigh when he found the kitchen sink filled with dirty dishes at least a day old. Taking out his cellphone, Yuushi dialed for his housekeeper. Like hell he was going to touch those dishes.