“I’ll take you,” Victoria said. “I haven’t been to one for a couple of days.”

She looked at Milton as if expecting a sponsor’s disapproval.

“I’m not going to tell you off,” he said. “I’m hardly one to talk—I haven’t been to a meeting for a lot longer than that.”

“Be outside the hotel in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’ll pick you up.”

48

Katsuro stood, naked, regarding himself in the full-length mirror in his hotel room. He had taken more damage than he had first thought from his dive out of the way of the truck last night. He was bruised down his right-hand side, all the way from his flank to his knee. The bruising was almost scarlet over the bony prominence of his hip. He took a couple of steps toward the mirror and raised a hand to the scar on his neck, running his fingers over the keloid tissue. Then he stepped back again to look at his full-length reflection.

His powerful torso was covered with tattoos; almost every inch apart from his face and neck and hands had been inked. The tattoos had taken almost ten years to complete. Ten years of painful sessions sitting on a hard floor, with an elderly irezumi master repeatedly poking his skin with a sharpened piece of bamboo that had been dipped in ink. Above each breast was a shisa, a depiction of a beast that was a cross between dog and lion. The shisa on his left breast had its mouth closed to guard the good spirits, and its open-mouthed brother on the opposite breast would protect him from the evil ones. Each beast had taken hours with the irezumi master, but both were beautiful, as were the lotus flowers from which they emerged. The old man had described it as beauty emerging from the mud of life, just as the clans had done hundreds of years ago. Katsuro’s back was similarly decorated and, when he had the time and money, he was planning on continuing the artwork to his buttocks and legs.

Other than the prostitutes that he visited and other members of the clan who saw him at Sauna Shikiji, hardly anyone had seen them.

But she had seen them.

Sakura.

The thought of the moment he had removed his clothes before her for the first time—the memory of her look of befuddlement, which had swiftly changed to horror—angered him afresh. Sakura was his. She belonged to him. The man who had taken her and was keeping her from him now would pay for his presumption.

* * *