I Indicted the Yakuza Heir, Then Married Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
At the registry office the yakuza heir she indicted last year slides a ring on her and whispers that she still owes him a year; in the elevator he tells her page 212 of her indictment is wrong.
Tatsuya signed his name beside Shiori's in black ink, took the ring from the clerk's tray, and slid it onto her finger.
His hand covered her whole hand.
Shiori was twenty-eight years old, she had a law degree and a prosecutor's badge, and she was married.
"You still owe me a year, Prosecutor," Tatsuya Kuzunoki murmured, so low the clerk couldn't hear.
His mouth was next to her ear.
She had last stood this close to him in Courtroom 803, when the judge read the word "acquitted."
He had bowed to her that day.
Politely, from the waist, the way a man bows to a colleague.
The clerk stamped the form and pushed it across the counter.
She did not look at either of them, because Tatsuya was six foot six and tattooed up both wrists under his white cuffs.
The black sedans outside the glass doors were lined up bumper to bumper down the street.
"Congratulations," the clerk whispered to the counter.
"Thank you," Tatsuya said gently.
He took Shiori's left hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm.
His forearm was as thick as her thigh.
She could feel his pulse through two layers of suit, slow and steady.
Her own pulse was pounding.
"You can breathe," he said. "Nobody is going to hurt you today."
"That's not what's worrying me."
"I know."
The glass doors opened, and the sound outside stopped Shiori on the top step.
A hundred men in black suits stood on the pavement in two rows.
They bowed together, all at once, from the waist.
"Ane-san," they said.
It means big sister, and it is what yakuza call the boss's wife.
Shiori had put eleven of those men in her case files.
She knew the man in the front row by his shaved head and the long scar across it, because she had read his statement twice.
Daisuke Sakaki straightened and opened the sedan's back door for her.
"Madam," he said.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket.
KYOKO HIRANO.
"You're on family leave for a year," her section chief said, with no hello. "Your file is closed. I have no idea what you are doing today, and I want to keep it that way."
"Chief..."
"Bring me the ledger, Takamura. Nothing else. Not one more word about it on this phone."
Hirano hung up.
Shiori got into the car.
The leather was cold, and Tatsuya folded his huge frame in beside her and made the whole seat tilt toward him.
Sakaki closed the door.
They pulled out into the traffic of Shinjuku, and the neon was just coming on.
Eleven days ago, her star witness had walked out of his apartment in a green raincoat and had not come home.
Koji Aizawa, forty-five, was the Kuzunoki family's accountant.
He had agreed to testify against fourteen men.
Without him, Shiori's case died on the court date, and all fourteen men walked free.
Three days ago, a courier had left a photograph at her office.
It showed Aizawa, unshaven, holding that morning's newspaper.
There was no note.
The next day Tatsuya's lawyer had called with a very simple offer.
One year of marriage to the man she had failed to convict.
At the end of it, Aizawa walks into court, alive.
"I want to hear him," Shiori said now. "Before I go one step into your house."
"Of course."
Tatsuya took a phone from his inside pocket and held it out, already dialed.
She put it to her ear.
She heard wind, and a television somewhere.
"Takamura-san?" The voice was thin and tired, but it was his. "I'm all right. They feed me. Please do what he says."
"Koji, where..."
The line went dead.
Tatsuya took the phone back out of her hand.
His fingers were warm.
He kept hold of her wrist a half second too long, and his thumb lay across the inside of it, right where the pulse was.
"That's twice in one minute," he said.
"What is?"
"Your heart. It was doing the same thing at the counter."
Shiori pulled her hand back.
"Don't flatter yourself. I'm afraid of you."
"You are not," Tatsuya said, so gently that it was worse.
He looked out of the window at the red signs sliding by, and a muscle moved at the corner of his jaw.
"You walked into that courtroom last year and read out my name and the word 'extortion' to a room of two hundred people," he said. "You didn't blink once. I have thought about it every day for a year."
"I lost."
"You were magnificent."
Shiori had no answer to that.
They rode up in a private elevator to the top floor of a glass tower, forty-one floors above the neon.
He stood so close beside her that she could feel his body heat along her whole left side.
The numbers climbed.
"Prosecutor Takamura," he said, to the brushed steel doors.
"Mrs. Kuzunoki now, I suppose."
"Not in this elevator." He turned his head, and his dark eyes found hers. "I've read your indictment against me nine times. All four hundred pages."
"And?"
"Page 212 is wrong."
The elevator chimed.
"You wrote that the money went through the trading company in Yokohama," he said. "It never touched Yokohama."
The doors opened on his front hall.
He stepped out and held them for her.
"Ask me nicely," said her husband, "and I'll tell you where it did go."
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