“Miyasato and I had always been close, ever since we were kids. We started to see each other—as a couple, you know—when we were in our late teens. We kept it quiet. His father and my father had fallen out by then. My father didn’t want anything to do with the things that Takashi was getting them into. I don’t know all the details—my father wouldn’t tell me—but I think Takashi wanted to move into drugs, and my father was against it. Anyway—he got out.”

“And did what?”

“He set up a sushi restaurant,” she said.

“And he was unhappy that you were seeing Miyasato?”

She chuckled bitterly. “Disapproving of us was the one thing they still had in common. Takashi said I would take Miyasato away from his responsibilities with the family, and my father thought Miyasato was a bad influence on me.”

“What happened to Miyasato?”

She sighed. “He decided that he wanted to break away from them. Katsuro had done something really bad—Miyasato never told me what it was—and Miyasato said it was the final straw. We started to plan how we could do it. There was no way that Takashi would have let him leave. It had already happened with his own brother, and that was bad enough, but this was his son. Takashi was always desperate to leave a legacy, and Miyasato was the one he thought would take over. Katsuro’s frightening and brutal, but he’s not smart. Miyasato was—he was always the clever one. Takashi knew the family business was finished unless Miyasato agreed to take it over, but Miyasato didn’t want to. We wanted kids and a normal life, not…” She waved her hand in front of her, distaste on her face. “Not that.”

“So he was killed for what—for leaving?”

Sakura laughed, a sound with no humour at all. “No—not that. Takashi was still trying to persuade him to stay. He killed Miyasato because Miyasato stole from him. He took a sword. A very expensive sword that was the pride of Takashi’s collection.” She reached for the water glass and sipped again. “I told him it was crazy, but he said that he could sell it for enough money that we could leave the city and go somewhere else. Ten million yen. Enough to leave the country. Enough to start again.” Her voice cracked. “Far away from Tokyo, somewhere they’d never find us. I told him I didn’t want him to do it, that there had to be a better way—a safer way—but he stole it anyway. He sold it to Satoshi Furokawa.”

“Who is?”