Nana Toki found Mo Yao’s crew fast, like a hawk closing on mice across frost.

While Mo Yao and the others huddled around a table in a private room at Yuedi Entertainment Club, they injected moon-white powder like ground frost.

Nana Toki hauled the door attendant by the collar like a dead dog, and slammed him onto their table like throwing down a sandbag.

“Hand over Yuzuki.”

Everything on the table shattered and fell, clattering like hail skittering across tin.

She wasted no extra breath, an arrow flying straight to the target through mist.

The blissed-out faces around her floated like smoke, until she stepped close and flipped Mo Yao out of his chair like overturning a shrine.

“You… don’t come any closer!”

The gaunt youth nearest her saw her profile like a ghost’s shadow, and dropped, scrambling backward like a crab in surf.

He crashed into chairs and glassware, breaking cups that chimed like ice.

Cuts bloomed on his face and arms like thorns scratching pale bark.

The other two reacted the same, panic sprouting like weeds, their syringes still stuck in their arms like stingers.

Their starved faces had worn bliss like thin cloud, now torn open into panic like a storm front.

They stared as if a debt-collecting spirit had walked out of the underworld’s gate.

Nana Toki’s expression never changed, her face cold as glacier ice on a winter mountain.

Yes.

Annoyance weighed her chest like wet wool, and it pressed the heat from her lungs.

Her body ached like bruised reeds in floodwater, her rescue sat wrong like grit in a tooth, and her temper hissed like a cat.

She needed something to grind against, to sand down that grit like wind on stone.

Right now, Mo Yao’s crew were perfect kindling for that fire.

“You know I don’t like handling trouble.”

She fisted Mo Yao’s hair and pulled his head from the white powder like lifting a skull from ash, forcing his eyes to meet hers.

But Mo Yao’s mind was already fogged by too much poison, like a lantern drowned in rain.

Clear fluid slicked his face, hairs stuck with white residue like chalk, his glow gone like a snuffed wick.

He was a body without a soul, a scarecrow sagging in a cold field.

Useless.

She clicked her tongue, a pebble striking a still pond.

She let go, and he slumped like a puppet with cut strings, head thumping an ashtray and bleeding like a thin red thread.

“Where did you take Yuzuki?”

She ignored Mo Yao’s dead-dog sprawl, her voice a shard of ice, and the three around her felt their blood still like a winter pond.

For a heartbeat they truly thought death had opened a door.

“D–don’t… don’t come closer…”

She dragged one man from the corner into the light like hauling a fish from dark water.

The man was all bone and wire, yet she lifted him by the throat one-handed like picking up a chicken.

“Speak. Where is Yuzuki?”

It wasn’t a question; it was a command hammered like iron.

She looked at him as if he were already dead, a dried leaf caught on a nail.

He babbled and twitched, madness flickering like moth wings around a candle.

Her grip tightened, slow as frost biting a window.

He punched and kicked, shallow waves against a cliff, nails raking her forearm like broken thorns.

It was useless.

Her arm was a steel clamp, a crab’s claw that would not open.

Less than a minute, and his breath thinned like smoke, then went out to a thread.

She had measure.

As soon as he blacked out from lack of air, she let him drop like a sack.

A corpse is trouble in a city like this, like throwing a stone into still water that keeps rippling.

“You.”

She didn’t spare the fallen man a glance, and turned to the second in the corner like a compass finding north.

“Tell me where Yuzuki is, or in five minutes tell me without teeth, spitting syllables like seeds.”

Her voice carried a command that bent spines like wind bowing grass.

Half an hour later.

When Abao finally noticed the disturbance in the private room, the tide had already gone out.

Inside, five or six men were stacked like a human cairn.

Nana Toki sat on the sofa like frost on black stone, her boots resting on them.

“Yo—long time no see.” She leaned back on the sofa, a fox’s smile playing at her mouth, watching Abao frozen in the doorway like a post.

“Do you know where they hid Yuzuki?”

“W–why are you here?”

Abao asked with his mouth, but his face was still water.

It felt like he’d expected her, a shadow that keeps pace at dusk.

The room wore the same iron tang as last time, blood scent drifting like rust in rain.

Not as thick as before, but enough to turn a normal stomach like a boat in chop.

“You don’t seem very surprised.”

Nana Toki propped her cheek on one hand, amused, a cat by the stove.

“Your young master’s under my feet. Aren’t you even a little nervous?”

...

Silence pooled, deep as a well.

Nana Toki put away the playfulness, and her black boots clacked, clack, clack on white tile like hail on porcelain.

“Tell me then, how does it feel?”

“To ruin someone you loathe with your own hands—sweet as biting into ripe fruit, huh?”

“If it’s a girl, she’s next door.”

He didn’t answer her question.

With her arm over his shoulder like a casual shawl, Abao spoke off the mark, a reed bending away from wind.

“…”

A small hush.

Clack, clack, clack.

“Is that so?”

Nana Toki placed what she’d just collected into Abao’s hand, the gift heavy as stones.

Then she walked past him, her voice level as a still lake.

“You’re smart. You didn’t lie to me.”

The next room’s door opened, then shut, a knife slipping into a sheath.

Sweat soaked Abao’s back like rain through paper.

He let his palm fall open, helpless, and stared at a dozen yellow-white teeth, veined with blood and stinking like old bones.

It was proof he hadn’t lied, a grim blossom in his hand.