His blue Lamborghini hugged curves and roared down the streets. His first knowledge that anything was wrong was the sound turning off. Taiga laughed, thinking his iPhone had disconnected, but jabbing at the sleek radio controls did nothing.<br/><br/>And then he realized the gas pedal didn't respond to his foot. The car is malfunctioning, he thought and tried to turn it over to the corner, but the steering wheel wasn't controlling the car's movements at all.<br/><br/>Taiga's heartbeat sped up, wondering if someone had tampered with his car. A sharp turn was coming up. Taiga tried to direct the car, but it wouldn't—the wheels turned. They followed the road as naturally as if Taiga was behind the wheel, but Taiga's directions weren't halting it.<br/><br/>Taiga looked through the windows, and saw him on his bike.<br/><br/>Taiga was way too smart not to know what this was about. Taiga had been way more successful and famous than this man's brother, had become a whore several people had paid over ¥2,500,000 for, leasing him for 24 hours from his pimp and lover, whose real name was never used, only his sobriquet, Cortez.<br/><br/>The very man Taiga had killed to ascend to this position. His former lover. His former pimp.<br/><br/>And because he knew what this was about, he knew all the rules surrounding cops were already out the window.<br/><br/>This was private. This would be settled the yakuza way: with a bullet.<br/><br/><i>Buy time until my magic cames back. He can't know I'm a mage. No one knows that.</i><br/><br/>Taiga took his hands off the wheel and his foot off the pedal. He unbuckled himself. He took off his sunglasses so they wouldn't shatter under a punch and cut into his eyes.<br/><br/>Taiga opened a secret compartment and pulled out something highly illegal for a non-officer to carry in Japan: a gun.<br/><br/>The bulletproof glass was unbreakable and trying to shoot through it would just ricochet dangerous bullet shards in the car. He hid the gun and didn't need the clicks to know he wasn't getting out of this lambo that easy.<br/><br/>He watched the man's back through tinted windows.<br/><br/>He hid the gun, hoping whatever magic this was would need eyesight or knowledge to work.<br/><br/>Two hours later they'd long since left Tokyo behind. They were in a highly rural area, the kind of place where people would still look badly on a young couple hugging or holding hands. They were definitely in the area of another dialect. There'd been nothing but rice farms and the kinds of old houses with holey fusuma screens Taiga'd grown up in, before he left to go to the best schools in the city, and then not long after graduation tried to go to a gambling tourney a friend had told him about.<br/><br/>It was a front. His friend had sold him out. He got no real joy out of seeing the boy's shocked face and hearing his cries as they took him too—a two-for-one deal. That stupid boy was long dead.<br/><br/>His name had been Kimihiro Hibiki. His brother was on a bike, leading Taiga somewhere private, to do something unpleasant. And Taiga had a lot to do with why the boy'd ended up in a shootout, though his elder brother being there was an unforeseen touch.<br/><br/>They pulled up at their destination, the first human building they'd seen in over fifteen minutes. No one would hear Taiga scream.<br/><br/>The door opened and Taiga pulled the trigger.<br/><br/>He might as well not have bothered, the gun did nothing. It was a mute hunk of metal in his hand.<br/><br/>Modern guns run on electricity too.<br/><br/>He changed his grip on it. He could still use it as a club.<br/><br/>"You're Mashi Hibiki. Causing quite a problem for the city's drug-runners, especially since you made captain." He remained in the car, pushed to the opposite side Captain Hibiki had opened and obviously unprepared to go down without a fight. "This is about your brother, Kimi-kun," he said, and then, hoping that would induce a moment of distracting emotional pain, he attempted to pistol whip Mashi.