Chapter Text
The worldwide hunt had ended in the least likely place—his own backyard. Not in the vaults of Moscow or the backrooms of New Delhi, not in the auction houses of Havana or the private salons in Lagos’ Banana Island. No, it was in a tawdry, overlit card shop in Domino City; the kind of place that still smelled faintly of dust and vending machine coffee.
An old man—Sugoroku Mutou—had the fourth Blue-Eyes. He’d kept it in a yellowing plastic sleeve behind the counter, refusing every offer that passed over it. Seto had not offered, he’d demanded. When that didn’t work, he’d badgered him into a duel. The outcome had been inevitable.
When the last of the old man’s life points ticked away, Seto reached for the card, and before anyone could stop him, tore it cleanly in half. The sound of it—paper fibres straining, splitting… He felt afire with his cruelty, honed sharp across continents, knowing now exactly how to wedge his will through reality until it parted for him. Sugoroku had crumpled under the strain, folding down to the floor as if suddenly boneless.
And then his grandson Yugi had come to avenge him.
The duel was quick to heat. The first creatures they summoned were scraps compared to what would follow—low-tier muscle thrown into the grinder. Seto’s Hitotsu-Me Giant fell to a fireball from the boy’s Winged Dragon, its body breaking into a spray of amber light before the shards dissolved into nothing. The SolidVision system was working flawlessly; each flicker of light on the monsters’ armor plates, each shadow thrown against the arena floor, was real enough to touch.
From the sidelines, the boy’s friends shouted encouragement. Anzu with her steady voice, Honda trying to sound confident, the mutt barking blunt orders. Mokuba’s voice cut through them all cheering for him, but the sound only passed through Seto like breeze through a window. Even when he’d wanted it, his brother’s comfort had stopped meaning anything to him years ago.
Saggi the Dark Clown, a weakling in attack points but a knife waiting for the right angle, swept the Winged Dragon from the field under the boost of Seto’s Negative Energy Generator. Yugi’s defenses came down in layers—Sangan, Battle Steer, Torike—each obliterated in turn. When the boy tried to rally with Gaia the Fierce Knight, Seto met it with his first Blue-Eyes White Dragon, the beast’s roar rattling the walls before its attack split Gaia’s shield in two.
The second dragon followed soon after, summoned into place like another piece falling into an inevitable pattern. By the time the boy’s Dark Magician managed to take Judge Man off the field, Seto was already holding the third. The blue-white light of their wings filled the arena. Only the Swords of Revealing Light kept them at bay: three lances of radiance suspended in the air, trapping his monsters in a cage of pure geometry. One turn left before they fell.
And then—
The hologram bled into life above the field—white scales catching and fracturing the arena’s light, wings unfurling in an arc that blotted the rafters. The other two turned toward it, their eyes kindling with the same pale fire. They were not copies so much as siblings—subtle differences in the taper of the horns, the shape of the jawline, the ripple of muscle along the chest plate—but bound by a shared, terrible lineage. Their roars braided together into a single sound, a note that cracked against the dome of SolidVision’s projection field.
They dove as one. Lightning-white bodies slicing through the hexagon prison of Swords of Revealing Light, still hanging in midair like three sunbeams speared into glass.
The swords winked out at the end of the turn, their light collapsing back into the circuitry that birthed them.
“How’s your faith now?” Seto asked. “With my dragons free to attack, you’ve got nothing left. You were never a match for me.”
No one was. He’d crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic and now stewarded these dragons like a private pantheon. He was an empire in and of himself.
The mutt barked from the sidelines: don’t listen to him, Yugi.
Yugi drew. Exodia.
The air changed. Pressure dropping, as if the arena had been unsealed from above. When the titan took form, the light bent away from it. Muscle piled on muscle, skin like old bronze, purple lips pulled into a grin that had nothing human in it. Each chain link around its neck was thick as Seto’s arm. It rose until it seemed to press against the inside of the sky, and the air began to move—not wind, but a slow pumping, as though the thing itself were breathing the oxygen out of the room.
To lose is to die. Gozaburo’s voice: it had been his last gift, his final curse, delivered before he stepped backward from the boardroom and into nothing. And now, across the arena, Yugi made it true, reaching for him through the smoke of the duel, eyes burning, and uttering the simple words—Mind Crush.
It didn’t hit like an impact. It unspooled him. One moment he was on the platform, the next his mind was a box with its hinges blown out, pieces scattering. His mother’s arms first, warm around him on a day already half-forgotten. The smell of her hair, the soft dip of her knee where he sat. Then the hospital room, the fluorescent hum, Mokuba’s wrinkled newborn face—screaming until their eyes met, and then suddenly silent, as if they both understood what was coming. A tree on a roadside. Warped metal wrapped around its trunk like foil. His father’s body still inside.
Nights on a threadbare mattress in the orphanage, separated from his brother by two corridors and what already felt like a lifetime of despair. The other boys jeered at them over it, and Seto was trying to fall asleep tonguing the taste of blood in his mouth after the third fight that week. The orphanage director’s cold voice: keep it up, and no one will ever take you.
It was in those days that something small and tender in him began to splinter, but it hadn’t yet hardened. Not entirely. He still had Mokuba, after all. Still had the stubborn, animal belief that the world would have to be tricked into letting them stay together. And then Gozaburo appeared. Pale light falling through the orphanage’s warped glass, the floorboards creaking under the weight of the man’s slow, surveying stride. His shadow falling across the linoleum like an eclipse, blotting out every sound in the room. The older boys and their teasing went quiet. Mokuba’s grip on his sleeve tightened until Seto could feel the crescent of fingernails through the cloth. Seto had known, in the way an animal knows, that here was power.
When the man had paused before the chessboard in the common room, Seto felt the world narrow into a tunnel between them. This was the moment, though it hadn’t been offered— he had taken it. He’d spoken the challenge before he could measure the risk. The aides had laughed; the director had scowled. But Gozaburo had smiled, the expression indulgent, and sat. The game had been tight, move for move. He opened with e4— not because it was safest, but because it was audacious. Gozaburo answered with c5, the Sicilian, and in that single choice Seto saw the measure of him: aggressive, counterpunching, prepared to punish overextension. They traded theory through the Open Sicilian— Nf3, d6, d4— and the board began to take on the tilted, predatory angles of a Najdorf, black pawns already aiming to unseat his centre.
Seto’s hand moved quickly but not hurriedly, a boy rehearsing maturity. He pushed Be3, queen’s knight to c3, the shape of an English Attack crystallizing— not subtle, but neither was the man opposite him. Gozaburo’s bishop came to e6, his queen rook still dormant, the kind of positional patience that suffocated immature tacticians.
The middle game grew barbed. Gozaburo snapped up a poisoned pawn on b2, forcing his rook into a grim retreat, but Seto anticipated the weakness it left in the king’s shelter. He forced exchanges along the c-file, each trade a question: will you guard the long diagonal or try to break me in the centre? The man preferred pressure. Of course he did. He advanced his f-pawn—a calculated risk—and Seto felt the tempo turn like a key in his palm.
From there it was a scaffolding of threats: a rook battery bearing down the g-file, a knight sunk deep into d5 like a dagger in soft wood. Every piece Seto moved was less a gesture than a lever; every capture a subtraction from the man’s arrogance. But Gozaburo was not careless. His counterplay along the queenside was vicious, his passed pawn on a5 a constant siren warning that any misstep could be the end.
By the fortieth move, both clocks were bleeding seconds. The room had grown close, around two minds circling the same prey. Gozaburo pressed into an endgame that promised a draw: rooks doubled, bishops of opposite colour, and for a moment Seto saw it slipping, the inevitable stalemate that would mean nothing gained, nothing won.
Then the flaw: Gozaburo advanced his rook too soon, chasing a phantom mate. Seto’s eyes cut to the knight on e4, the bishop lurking on h3. The geometry of the board shifted in an instant, the possibility blooming like a bruise. He feinted a rook trade, tempting the man into narrowing his king’s flight squares. A single waiting move with the pawn on h4 disguised the trap’s teeth.
And the closing play… bishop pinning rook, knight forcing the king into a choke point where the only escape was one Seto had already salted. A move illegal if anyone had been watching closely enough. They hadn’t. He’d won. And the adoption papers had followed.
And in the marrow of it, in that split second when his hand left the altered piece and the outcome turned in his favour, something inside him had sealed shut. The wound of that day was not the hunger or the cold or the humiliation of the orphanage director’s fawning once Gozaburo took him and Mokuba away— it was how remorseless he felt. How quickly he had decided that the sin was worth it. How easily the victory felt natural in his hands. That if you wanted Mokuba, safety, anything beyond the mildew stink of the orphanage, you could not afford the luxury of fairness. A stone lodged under the breastbone, perfectly fitted. The bitter knowledge that to win in a rigged world, you had to rig it harder.
And the stone never left. Every choice, every fight, every gambit after that had been built atop this foundation of certainty. His heart, whatever it had been before, had calcified into the same. It hardened in Germany: Kreuzen’s howl two rooms over, ragged and animal, as consciousness slammed back into her. Seto had awoken to follow the wailing to find her naked, wrenching the noose from her own neck, fighting with clumsy hands to lift the slack weight of the other body hanging from the suspension rig. Predicament play, the lovers had called it, laughing. They thought it would always be the play and never the predicament. Wilhelm’s face was shocked at it over the fatal shibari choker tie, blotched purple, the mouth ajar as if trying to finish a sentence. His hosts’ home dungeon reeked of sweat. Kreuzen had patted at her lover’s dark and death-slacked face, whimpering like a child, babbling her denial to Seto senselessly—English fraying into German, German back into English, breath hitching on the syllables. Krankenwagen, bitte schnell. Ambulance, please. Please.
Seto had called der Notruf with a voice calm as if he were placing a room-service order, phone balanced between ear and shoulder. What was the German for suicide, again? Selbstmord. Selbst from “self” coupled to mord– “murder.” He smiled and spoke it confidently to the operator, his other hand sliding into the jacket Wilhelm had left crumpled on a chair. Card sleeve smooth under his fingers, the third Blue-Eyes sliding into his own pocket like it had always belonged there. Only one more, and the set would be complete. The rest—the rope, the pleading, the ambulance—was just noise.
This same patience, this focus, had carried him through Hong Kong back when he had acquired the second dragon, night after night at the long lacquered table, Weilong’s voice curling through the steam of shark fin and sea cucumber. Listening to the man’s easy confidence, the card in his possession a constant, humming fact between them. Weilong believed in an optimism that sounded like weakness when you stripped it down—how markets rewarded transparency, how partnerships thrived on mutual benefit.
“You have to give people room to win alongside you,” Weilong had said once, refilling Seto’s glass. “Otherwise, they stop playing the game.”
Seto had smiled thinly, not disagreeing. His own belief was cleaner: games were for winning and everything else was theatre.
Later, he had tried, however briefly, to imagine what Weilong would have felt with the double cross. This was a faculty Seto could only reach in pieces now, as if the muscle of his heart had atrophied from disuse. He could recall the idea of it, the shape of empathy, the way a younger self might have grasped at other people’s inner lives before the stone had set in his chest. Occasionally, he could still manage it. He understood why Mokuba pined for him, his well-being, his company—because he’d made himself the boy’s only fixed point in a chaotic orbit. He understood, too, how Gozaburo’s pride must have caved in on itself before he chose to step off the boardroom’s edge and let gravity do the rest.
But Weilong’s heartbreak… that seemed far away. A country past the borders of his own reach. What had it felt like, knowing every principle you’d held in your teeth, every maxim you’d poured into a protégé, had been hollow? That the boy you’d hosted and toasted had played your own philosophy against you? Would Weilong have figured it out in time? Would the recognition have hit him like a rifle crack in the chest, or seeped in slow, a stain he only noticed after it had spread too far to wash out? On the HKEX floor that Bloody Thursday—phones ringing like klaxons, brokers barking “Dump utilities—now, now!” and “Yen carry’s collapsing, get me out!” while the big boards bled red—Weilong had looked at him with the surface-level disappointment Seto had expected, yes, but there had been something else far back in the dark of his eyes, a glint that cut deeper: betrayal. The cold, marrow-deep knowledge that the ruin in front of him was deliberate. Seto had seen it too, in the noise and panic: this wasn’t collapse, it was a controlled descent.
Just like his own nosedive toward the rooftop of Manhattan, in his quest for the first dragon. The helicopter’s cyclic stick was already in his hand, an extension of thought more than limb, small inputs flowing from wrist to rotor head. Feet braced on the anti-torque pedals—left to counter the swing of the tail in the crosswind, right to ease it back when the nose wanted to wander. Collective steady in his other hand, the column rising and falling with the bite of the blades, adjusting the lift one fingertip at a time.
The city rolled beneath him in angles and grids, glass panels flashing sun into his eyes, then vanishing in shadow. Air currents from the canyons between buildings shouldered at the fuselage, trying to shove him off course; he read them like tells, anticipating the gusts by the sway of construction cranes, the shimmer of heat rising from tar roofs.
He dropped altitude in steps—nose forward, collective down—each adjustment deliberate, never chasing the descent, only setting the next point in space and letting the helicopter fall into it. Instrument scan disciplined: altimeter unwinding toward the hundred-foot mark, vertical speed needle just kissing the descent rate he wanted, torque in the green, RPM steady.
The pad came into view: a flat gold square in the middle of the glass crown, outlined in hazard paint, heat distortions rippling above it. The building’s own updraft rolled over the rotors, and the cyclic needed a hair more forward to hold position.
He flared the nose slightly, bleeding airspeed without killing lift. The skyscraper’s edge slid under him, and now there was nothing but the pad, the city’s white noise muffled by the drumming of the blades overhead.
Collective up, cyclic back: arrest the descent before the skids touched. Tail yawed just a breath to square the nose with the pad’s centreline. Hands and feet worked in quiet coordination, one movement setting up the next.
The skids drifted to concrete. He eased the collective down, letting the weight settle until the helicopter was no longer suspended but perched atop the rooftop, at last. Cyclic neutral. Pedals centred. Engine spool-down beginning, turbine whine dropping in pitch.
The helicopter’s blades slowed to a heavy, deliberate churn as it settled onto the helijet pad, wind shearing across the glass crown of the skyscraper. Manhattan stretched out in every direction, the skyline pressed flat and silver under the haze, spires and scaffolds and plumes of steam curling from vents, the whole city alive in that restless mid-afternoon churn.
Seto stepped out, coat cutting a clean line against the wind. She was already there: leaning against the safety rail, sunglasses on, one heel lifted lazily from the ground. Early twenties. Understated designer from head to toe: sand-toned trousers, silk blouse with an open throat, the faint gleam of a belt buckle you’d only recognize if you’d paid enough for one. Broad mouth, dark tan on olive skin, the shade earned rather than bought. The corner of her mouth softened as she straightened and came forward, security detail shifting out of her way.
“Mr. Kaiba,” she called to him. “Thank you for coming all this way.”
He took her in: the contrast of her youth and composure, the way her stillness carried through the chaos of the wind. Turned his gaze to the skyline again for a beat longer than politeness required, then back to her.
“The pleasure,” he said evenly, “is all mine. I’m glad we can both be of assistance to one another.”
Her sunglasses caught a flash of the blades slowing behind him. Then she tipped her head toward the access elevator and strode off, brisk enough to keep things from sliding into ceremony.
Seto joined her and her security inside the lift car, glass and wide enough for them to all stand feet apart. There was a beat before the drop and the city ticked past floor by floor in silent sequence.
When the doors opened to the private lobby, her driver was already there, holding the rear door of a black town car open. Teresa slid in first and Seto followed behind, the security detail folding himself into the front passenger seat.
She leaned forward. “Stop at the studio first,” she told the chauffeur, “then we’ll head to the sauna.”
The car pulled into the river of traffic. Seto looked at her, the faintest edge of curiosity sharpening his gaze. He didn’t ask what kind of studio. In his experience, the answers worth having revealed themselves soon enough.
He remembered—again and against his own will—how Gozaburo had stared at him in that last moment, wind flailing his tie to frenzied ribbons, his dark eyes riding the balance of deranged and lucid. The day Seto had taken the company, Gozaburo chose a permanent exit. To lose is to die. He’d stepped backward into air, disappearing from the frame of the building as easy as a fallen stone.
KaibaCorp’s creditors were circling in a slow, carnivorous orbit, and every bank note with Gozaburo’s signature was coming due. He had no interest in propping up the military-industrial circus his predecessor had built—no appetite for tank contracts, missile deals, surveillance satellites—none of it. But his pivot to entertainment, the grand design that had been fermenting in his mind for years, needed capital. Fast. And not the kind beholden to questions of where it came from.
It proved convenient, then, that he already kept a presence in certain corners of the dark web. Quiet, clinical listings—never under his real name—auctioning all manner of unsavoury things: counter-intelligence packages he’d pilfered from statesmen with poor infosec, hacked patents for greedily pay-gated pharmaceuticals. He also kept a request thread dedicated solely to sightings of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon card. So when the message arrived, buried under encrypted headers and anonymous relays, it was less the content than the presumption of his identity that startled him.
The sender claimed to have a foolproof way to move an arsenal of KaibaCorp-manufactured rifles out of Japan—through Los Angeles, onward to New York—skimming some for local sale before the rest hit its final buyers. The profit margins were obscene, the timeline clean.
Her name, at least the one she signed with, was Teresa. She admitted in her second message that she was working with air-thin liquidity. Her network was in shambles. Dario, the head of her family, had been taken down for tax evasion alongside underboss Lucca. (The deputy was nicknamed “Lucky” in the papers, despite being unlucky enough to have the FBI breathing down his neck). Their arrests had ripped the skin off the Genovese operation and left a hemorrhaging empire of frozen bank accounts, shuttered fronts and every foot soldier under surveillance.
Seto had expected someone grizzled, steeped in the trade. But here in the Lincoln back seat sat a young woman who looked like she’d be more at home in a nail salon chair than at the head of one of the most influential crime families in the country. And yet, they were paired: a corporate usurper fresh off the blood of a coup, and an interim mob boss looking for a way to keep the lights on. Two people inheriting worlds they had no intention of running the way they’d been built.
The town car pulled out into midtown traffic, heading west and dipping south toward Hell’s Kitchen. The driver took a line that hugged 50th Street, skirting theatre marquees awaiting the matinee crowd, before cutting down Tenth Avenue where the avenues opened up wider and the street noise flattened into a steady roar. Teresa sat angled toward the window, sunglasses still on, while Seto let his gaze track the geometry of the city.
America—at least this version of it—was dense where Domino City was clean-lined, its vertical planes broken by old brick and painted ads peeling into hieroglyphs. The few times he’d been to the States had been to Nevada, the barren flats of the desert test ranges where KaibaCorp ordnance tore itself apart under the sanction of the U.S. Department of Defence. Loyal customers, the DoD—always eager for the next iteration of precision guidance or theatre ballistic missiles. In those days he’d landed with Gozaburo at McCarran, where they drove to the proving grounds under an unbroken sky, nothing between the road and the horizon but dust and a warmonger’s conscience.
Once, they’d stayed a single night in Las Vegas proper, at the Bellagio. He remembered the chandelier of Chihuly glass flowers blooming across the lobby ceiling, each one lit from within, and the conservatory garden behind glass where the air smelled like manufactured spring. Outside, the Strip had been a concussion of light: billboards stacked in feverish verticals, giant LCDs cycling shows and jackpots, the whole street a cathedral to spectacle.
New York had its own version of that gaudiness, though compressed and sweating: LED tickers bleeding stock numbers and breaking headlines across entire facades; a half-naked man painted silver strumming a guitar; bodegas crammed between wine bars and pawn shops; scaffolding like exoskeletons over half the block. He caught the flash of a halal cart’s chrome canopy, the smell of roasting chestnuts from a vendor in a wool cap. A cyclist wove between a garbage truck and an M11 bus, cursing without breaking pace.
The car slowed at a red light on the corner, a curbside pizza cart staked at the intersection’s edge. Teresa tapped twice on the glass divider. “Hold here.”
Before Seto could register the movement, she had the back door open and was striding into the crosswalk, dodging a taxi as if she’d done it a hundred times. She went straight to the man behind the cart, folded him into a hug across the steel counter, said something that made him laugh. A minute later she was walking back, a paper plate in each hand, the tip of a slice already dripping orange grease onto the parchment.
She handed one to him as she slid into her seat.
Seto looked at it—triangle of thin dough blistered at the crust, wide enough to cover his palm. “I—”
“The word is thank you, by the way,” she said, setting her slice beside her and motioning for the driver to go. “And you must be hungry. This is the best pizza this side of the bridge.”
He picked at it, if only to keep his hand from being idle. The cheese stretched in long white threads when he bit it, salt and heat and oil saturating the paper in seconds.
She leaned back, eating hers neatly, sunglasses still on.
Seto chewed, already calculating. When were they going to talk through the shipment? He had no idea how she was planning to pull off what she’d described—moving the kind of stock she wanted through two cities under federal scrutiny without shedding product or getting half her people locked up.
The town car eased up to the curb outside a converted brick warehouse, four floors tall with fire escapes zigzagging the facade. A discreet brass plaque by the door read only Sutton Properties.
He glanced at the slice in his hand. The paper plate was already translucent with oil. He’d taken maybe three bites. Teresa caught his eye, a small sympathetic twist to her mouth, and reached over without comment, plucking the plate from his grip as she stepped out. She finished the last of her slice in two clean bites, dropped his into a roadside bin without breaking stride.
The chauffeur and bodyguard moved like bookends, one opening her door, the other his. She turned on them, one hand lifting her sunglasses just enough to meet their eyes. “I don’t need to be followed everywhere. Jeez. All you do is scare the girls. Just stay put.”
They looked genuinely disappointed, though Seto couldn’t parse why—not yet.
“Come on,” Teresa said to him, already halfway to the door. “Really quick, then we’ll get to business. Promise.”
Inside, the elevator opened directly into a loft that was both home and hive. Sunlight from west-facing windows cut long angles over hardwood floors polished to a muted gloss. Persian rugs layered in rich reds and blues absorbed the echo. The walls were painted a warm cream, punctuated by gilded frames—some holding actual oil portraits, others framing flat-screens looping soft visuals.
The space was cleverly partitioned: carved wooden screens, freestanding bookcases, and velvet curtains creating pockets of intimacy. In each, a girl was perched on a bed or gaming chair, lingerie in every shade of satin and lace—or nothing at all—backlit by the glow of iMac screens. Headsets and ring lights haloed them, and in the quiet between keystrokes you could hear the faint trill of tip alerts and subscription chimes from a dozen open cam sites.
A model in teal silk shorts and a bralette spotted them and crossed the room, her bare feet silent on the rugs. She hugged Teresa with both arms, the silk riding up to reveal a flash of hip.
“Oh my God, I heard about Dario and Lucca,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Teresa said, smiling faintly. “Aside from having new stalkers follow my every move.” She tilted her head to the window overlooking the roadside where her driver and guard awaited. “They’re parked out front.”
The girl glanced past her to Seto, then back to Teresa. “Um… is he here to work with one of the girls?”
Teresa barked out a laugh. “No, he’s a bit too young for that. Giulia, this is an associate of mine.”
Giulia looked at Seto again, a flicker of skepticism. “He doesn’t look Italian.”
Seto’s mouth curved just enough to be deliberate. “I’ll try not to hold that against myself.”
Teresa’s laugh was warmer this time. “Pasqua, Feast of the Seven Fishes, the boardwalk—life’s more than Sicily and Jersey, cara. I know no one believes me, but we’re allowed to talk to people who aren’t Italian.”
Seto caught the note in her voice: an exasperated half-joke. He thought—not without irony—that KaibaCorp had its own unspoken rules about who could be considered one of us. In either world, legitimacy was a closed circle.
Guilia looped back into business mode, rattling off the day’s numbers: active streams, new subscribers, top earners, a note about a performer whose ring light had shorted mid-show. Teresa listened, head tilted, and nodded once.
“Get a new burner,” she said finally. “The feds are tapping the family right now. I don’t want you taking calls on the old number.”
Her eyes widened just slightly, then she nodded and slipped away toward one of the curtained alcoves.
Seto didn’t say anything, but the line in Teresa’s voice made more sense now. The taps weren’t cursory—if she didn’t want business over the phone, that meant the feds had gone deep, maybe even into dormant accounts or second-tier associates. Federal pressure was like floodwater; once it got in the walls, it swelled and warped everything. Whoever was running the op would have blanket warrants on the family’s numbers, the in-laws, the shell companies. They wouldn’t be picking up on tone and innuendo alone—they’d be flagging connections, building flowcharts, looking for the same name in two different area codes.
He supposed he admired the thoroughness in a purely procedural sense. America had a particular genius for surveillance. Not just in the alphabet-soup agencies, but culturally. It was a country that believed in having eyes everywhere, storing every transaction, running predictive models on human impulse like it was weather. A nation that assumed if you weren’t doing something wrong now, you eventually would be.
Laughter broke through the beaded partition to their right, followed by the strangest blend of filth Seto had ever heard delivered in an accent that could have come from a Midwestern chain diner waitress. Something about kneeling with one heel in a fishbowl while calling someone “Senator.” He glanced sideways.
Teresa caught the look and smiled without warmth. “You’d be surprised what sells on these sites. Don’t knock it till you try it.”
From the curtained stations along the wall, a few of the girls leaned out—hair pinned back, eyes rimmed in the iridescent shimmer of stage makeup, curiosity frank. One waved at Teresa. Another eavesdropped coyly, leaning on her elbow. She pinked and went back to her patrons when Seto’s eyes found her staring.
Teresa took it in stride, her heels clicking on worn floorboards as she led him toward the back of the loft. The space opened into a cool, high-ceilinged room. Light came from a row of narrow clerestory windows, each distorted by textured glass that turned the city beyond into a shifting, colourless blur. One wall was still raw brick, but another was fitted entirely with shallow, antique glass-front cabinets, salvaged from a defunct library or apothecary, each drawer and cubby holding neat rows of labeled binders, old lockboxes, and file envelopes.
She crossed to a low steel desk with a locked side drawer, fished out a key from the chain at her throat, and turned it. Inside was a cascade of rubber-banded hundreds, packed in the familiar blue-and-white bank straps. There was also a heavy ledger, its spine worn soft. Teresa flipped past columns of tight script until she reached the current page, glanced between the totals and the bundles, and made a small, satisfied noise. She took what Seto guessed—judging by the weight in her hand—was forty thousand, stuffed it without ceremony into her purse, and marked a clean withdrawal in the ledger before snapping it shut.
“Come on,” she said. “Now we can talk business.”
They made it back down to the street where the car idled. The chauffeur glanced up in the rearview as they slid inside.
“Did Giulia ask about me?” he said, not quite managing to sound casual.
“No one asked after you,” Teresa said, buckling in. Then, with a faint roll of her eyes: “Keep being thirsty like that, and you’ll die of dehydration before she ever offers you a drink.”
He muttered something into the wheel. Teresa leaned back, already pulling her phone from her bag, and the car eased into traffic, heading south through the choked artery of Eighth Avenue toward Flatiron. Hell’s Kitchen peeled away in the mirrors, neon and scaffolding giving over to the steel-and-glass shuffle of Midtown.
They cut east, catching a gap in the grid, and the angular prow of the Flatiron Building slid into view—its limestone face glowing pale against the late afternoon haze, tapering to that improbable wedge where Broadway split from Fifth.
“You know,” Teresa said, glancing at it, “when it went up, people used to call it the Fuller Building. ‘Flatiron’ was just the nickname. And everyone swore the wind that whipped around the corner would send women’s skirts flying, so the cops had to shoo away all the men who’d stand there to watch.”
Seto filed that away. He could pair it with all the other fragments of New York lodged in his mind from Gozaburo’s educational regimen—maps of the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 with its rigid grid slicing through old cow paths; diagrams of subterranean utility lines and subway tunnels; casualty estimates from the draft riots of 1863.
From a city planning perspective, he’d always found it interesting that Manhattan’s stubborn grid met Broadway at an angle, creating irregular lots like this one. Spaces that demanded architectural improvisation. Gozaburo had used it as a lecture point once: how the intersection of two systems—one imposed from above, one organic—created tension that could be exploited for profit or control.
Militarily, New York was a nightmare and a fortress all at once. The bridges and tunnels were choke points; the waterways made natural moats. Its density was an advantage for dispersal of resources and a liability in evacuation. Gozaburo had delighted in the war-gaming of it, tracing invasion routes, blockade strategies. All well and good—until the lessons turned inward, and the coup was his, and the old man went out the window.
“Your English is perfect, by the way.” Teresa said, still looking at the building as they rolled past. “You been to New York before?”
It didn’t feel like flattery, not in that condescending American way—where “perfect English” meant “better than we expected from someone like you.” And not the sidelong curiosity of people who saw how young he was and wondered how he could speak multiple languages at all. Americans, in his experience, rarely noticed fluency in anything outside their own narrow sphere.
But he was fluent—in German, learned under Nietzsche’s exacting instruction, and in classical Chinese, taught through his study of The Art of War. Another gift from Gozaburo that had backfired spectacularly; the book had only taught him enough spite and cunning to maneuver his guardian out of both a company and a pulse.
“I haven’t been here,” Seto said. “But I know a lot about it from my studies. For example: the city’s grid was laid out before most of it was even built, which means the streets were imposed over hills, streams, farmland… even cemeteries. The plan came first, the reality had to fit around it.”
Teresa smiled faintly. “Nothing beats going to a place. Reading about it is one thing. But going is another. Or at least that’s what people in my family tell me every time I say I’ve looked at Italy enough on Instagram it’s like I’ve been there.”
He turned to her. “You haven’t been to Italy?”
“No,” she said. “And I have no plans to. If I want Gucci or Versace I can go right to my girls on Canal Street.” She rolled her eyes.
He studied her for a moment: there was a flatness under the quip. “Hm,” he said. “That’s clearly some kind of sore spot.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, glancing out the window. “I get a lot of disrespect from certain people in the family, in the community, in business deals—not only because I’m a woman, and young, but because I haven’t been back to Italy. That’s why they think I’m not qualified to make decisions. And why they fight me on every one.” She let out a short laugh. “They go to Sicily like they go to the fucking toilet. Probably why their ideas stink like shit while I’m trying to run a modern business.”
Seto regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “Ah yes. The stubbornness of regime.”
He remembered the gauntlet of anti-war protestors he used to pass just to get into the Kaiba estate—signs painted with red dripping letters, chanting that cut through the winter air like a knife. Back then, he’d still believed Gozaburo might be persuaded by reason. He’d presented it like a military briefing: the arms trade was scandal-ridden, under Diet scrutiny, its profit margins narrowing under embargoes and shifting alliances. The pivot to consumer electronics would be simple— he’d prepared a proposal that would allow KaibaCorp to retrofit the existing manufacturing plants for circuit boards instead of guidance chips, house VR processors where once they’d milled scope lenses, and use the metallurgy division for console casings instead of missile bodies, all in six months and without an interruption to shareholder earnings. It would be cleaner, faster, and far more scalable.
Gozaburo had laughed at him—long and loud, the kind of laugh that belonged more to humiliation than amusement. If you want to make something of your own, boy, build it yourself.
Seto smiled faintly at the memory. I am. Right over your grave.
He continued aloud, “You’ll find I understand modern business quite well.”
Teresa grinned. “I had a feeling.”
The town car stopped in front of an understated facade—tall arched windows framed in iron, their glass frosted to a soft translucence. Inside, the air was a different temperature altogether: warmer, perfumed faintly with eucalyptus and something mineral, like wet stone.
AIRE Ancient Baths was part bathhouse, part temple. The reception area was lit low, the floors dark slate that seemed to drink in sound. Along one wall, a channel of running water traced over a bed of smooth river stones, the sound threading through the hush.
“Teresa,” the concierge said, his voice pitching up at the sight of her. “Always a pleasure.” His gaze shifted to Seto. “And welcome to you as well, sir.”
She asked for the private sauna for two.Robes and towels were brought—thick cotton, neatly rolled—and they were guided down a hallway lit by lantern niches. Seto noted the way the sound of water deepened as they walked. They passed through a set of carved wooden doors just as a group of friends came in behind them, laughing, their voices carrying up to the front desk. He caught the sound of cards tapping against the counter, the metallic beep of the payment terminal. As they moved away, Seto said quietly, “You’re not paying.”
“We own it,” Teresa replied, tightening the belt of her robe. “And anyway, my Chase and Wells Fargo are all frozen.”
The private changing room was spacious but without internal partitions—long benches in pale cedar, hooks set into the walls, a low platform for stacking clothes.
Seto hesitated. Teresa was immediately impatient with his reluctance.
“You don’t have anything I haven’t seen,” she said, matter-of-fact, shrugging out of her jacket. “And if we’re gonna talk shop, this is how I know you’re not wired. So, get down to it.”
She peeled her blouse over her head with the unselfconscious efficiency of someone stripping for a doctor’s appointment. Her body was shapely, skin burnished from sun.
Seto observed this clinically. She was, by conventional measures, the kind of woman people were attracted to. If he’d been someone else, he might have been. But there had never been a moment in his life where sexual attraction—of any kind, to anyone—had moved the needle. Carnal desire was something he recognized in others, not in himself.
Still, he found himself looking: not out of interest, but from the same curiosity he brought to anything well-engineered. She caught him at it, rolled her eyes, and reached for the robe. She walked ahead, robe belted loose at the waist, into the dry sauna—a long wood-paneled chamber with benches tiered like an amphitheatre. The air was thick with the baked scent of resin, the faint ghost of eucalyptus drifting in from the baths beyond. Heat pressed close from all sides, dry enough to sting in the back of the throat.
Seto followed her in, taking the upper bench opposite her. Within moments he could see the pale pink rising under his collarbones, skin reacting faster than he’d expected. He rolled his eyes inwardly—at himself, at his body’s instinct to flag heat as weakness—and then caught the thought before it could run too far. That was Gozaburo’s voice, the old conditioning that treated every natural limitation as a flaw to be shamed out of existence. The man was gone, and perspiration was normal.
Teresa had already taken on a faint sheen, the light catching on her shoulder as she sat back, legs stretched in front of her. She read the look as an invitation, or at least a cue.
“Obviously with the feds all over the accounts, remuneration’s going to be… difficult. I’m working on leveraging some favours from friends of the family to get some capital for the purchase. I have leads in Buffalo and Philadelphia. And I’ve got cash on hand as a marker of good faith.”
Finally, he thought. The conversation that mattered. All the detours—pizza, loft, baths—had been scaffolding leading here.
He’d been surprised, when he started looking into her, to confirm what the rumours on the dark web and the tournament circuit had been saying for months: the Consigliere-turned-acting boss had the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Won it in Atlantic City, a year back, from a steel magnate known up and down the Jersey Shore for benders that ended with him dropping Rolexes into champagne flutes. Teresa didn’t seem like a Duel Monsters obsessive—his own digging showed she ran a few low-tier tournament dens out of her gambling houses, but she’d entered only two or three events herself. Not once had she played the card.
“Liquidity aside,” he said, “we can work something out. You have something of interest to me. The Blue-Eyes White Dragon. That’s collateral I can work with. As long as it’s part of the compensation, I’m flexible on your financial timeline.”
She laughed. “Oh, that thing? Sure. No problem.”
The heat had his temples damp now, but it wasn’t just the sauna. The prospect of getting the card was its own kind of fever. He thought, abstractly, that maybe this was what people felt when they were attracted to someone: the narrowing of focus, the itch to possess. Power, embodied.
He’d read about this card for years in the fringes of online forums in posts filled with grainy photos and unverifiable stories. He thought back to the first time he’d found Duel Monsters. Gozaburo had permitted only games that served as “tutelage” in strategy and war—Go, chess, Dunsany’s and Capablanca chess, alongside horde and atomic variants. Battleship, and Monopoly made the curriculum because they trained probabilistic thinking and resource control. But then Seto had found Duel Monsters, studied the meta, recognized immediately how much more layered it could be than any of those, if you played for dominance instead of spectacle.
He could still hear Gozaburo saying, If you want something of your own, boy, build it yourself. And so he had. He’d burned through the Japanese circuit, a perfect win streak that built him a monster’s arsenal of spells and traps and heavy hitters. And he’d heard whispers about the most powerful monster of them all: four copies scattered to the corners of the world. One in New York. One in Hong Kong. The other two… unknown. For now.
But he was close. And all he had to do was give the Genovese family the weapons they needed.
“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked. “You said rifles in your message. I’ve got other stock I’m interested in offloading.” He listed them—precision-machined pistols, compact SMGs, surplus night-vision rigs, crates of ammunition in calibers most civilians couldn’t source legally.
She nodded along, then tilted her head. “What about the Sako TRGs? Or the Steyr AUGs?”
He was surprised she knew the models. “Yes. But those will be more difficult to ship.”
Teresa leaned forward, elbows on her knees, robe falling just enough to show the tan line cut sharp along her collarbone. The key necklace to her cashbox back in Hell’s Kitchen glinted at the hollow of her neck, the metal heating a way that must have stung at the thin skin spread of the smooth divot of her throat. Her eyes were honed in on him, focused in a way that was obvious she was free from any distraction—pain included. She launched into the plan, and she watched to ensure that he followed. The shipment would leave from Japan disguised under an electronics bill of lading, transferred to a friendly warehouse in Los Angeles. The rest would vanish in plain sight: broken down into smaller loads, each one contracted to a different independent trucking outfit with no shared ownership, no mutual payroll and no reason to cross paths. Staggered schedules. Separate manifests. Routes picked for anonymity rather than speed. Three weeks, door to door. No bottlenecks or overlap, with nothing for anyone to tie together unless they already knew what they were looking for.
“Should be fine as long as no one gets sloppy,” she added, a faint smile curling at the edge of her broad mouth. The world was pared down to heat and wood and her eyes on him.
The facts were sound, a clean spine of risk managed by redundancies and spoke well of the mind that had arranged them. She spoke like someone who had been in the room when things went wrong before, who had walked away knowing exactly which gear had seized and how to replace it without stopping the machine. Her tells were faint: the flicker of her gaze down and right when she mentioned “trusted buyers,” the fractional pause before naming the city, like she was testing whether the word would land clean in the air or reveal some invisible fault line. Not hesitations… calibrations. And it was there he felt it: the difference between a competent operator and a peer. She was already thinking two collapses ahead, where contingencies bled into contingencies. In another life, she could have run a division for him, or against him, with equal success.
He already knew his next move. Three weeks, she’d said. He would remain stateside then, tracking the tail of her operation under his own cover. He thought of the room already waiting for him at the Aman Manhattan, the landmark Crown Building’s corner suite: the one with the solitary tree on its wraparound stone balcony. From that height, the people below would look like nothing, mere movement. He would not think of what it would be like to lose the way Gozaburo had lost, in the long, terminal drop before the final shock of pavement.
No, he would think instead of New York itself. The markets opening and closing in a rhythm older than he was, the churn of capital, the crush of 8.5 million lives pushing against each other for space, survival, dominance. Steel and glass thrown skyward on the strength of ideas and leveraged debt. Every block its own hierarchy, every corner a contested prize. His empire was like the tree on the balcony—planted in a shallow bowl of imported soil, roots bound by stone, yet impossibly alive, rising above it all. Strong not because it was untouchable, but because it had been made to survive in a place that should have killed it.
From up there, he could look east toward the river, west toward the Hudson, north into the grid that never truly slept. He could watch the city play itself like a market simulation, a theatre of appetite and collapse, and know that somewhere inside it—between the warehouses and the hotel lobbies, the boardrooms and the loading docks—was his next move.
“Alright,” he said at last.
“Great. We’ll get burner phones, stay in touch. Then I’ll drop you wherever you need to be.” She stood, the movement smooth and unhurried despite the oppressive heat, and looked down at him with a level gaze. “I appreciate you coming to meet me so soon after your father…” She trailed off. “I read about it in the paper. I’m sorry.”
He met her eyes without a pause. “I’m not. He didn’t know how to get out of the way—until the end.”
Something shifted in her expression—not sympathy, not shock, just… a recognition that sat deeper than either. It told him she’d known men like that. She had likely worked under them and buried them in equal measure.
She reached for the handle and pulled the heavy cedar door open, letting a ribbon of cooler air snake into the sauna. For a moment, the draft broke the baked-wood smell with a thread of eucalyptus from the baths outside.