Chapter 1219: A Cleaner Death

Blood meant considerably less to people like Harold Maxton once blood began threatening the family plans itself.

Ryuzen tilted his head slightly.

Something spoke to him, his expression sharpened.

"Yes, father, Danny is here," he said quietly. "The assassination has already been prepared."

Silence followed as he listened... Ryuzen’s eyes drifted toward the private bar where several bottles waited there beside crystal glasses, one of which had already been prepared for Danny’s next drink.

Understanding settled.

"No. They are keeping it quiet, Father. They’re using poison in his drink. There will be no open assassination."

Another pause followed before Ryuzen gave a faint nod.

"Yes. I understand."

The three women heard none of it and Danny heard even less before Ryuzen took one step:

And reality folded.

There was no explosion of power or flash of Qi before distance between the shadows and sofa simply ceased to possess meaning for one impossible instant.

Ryuzen appeared beside Danny.

The Demigod had not yet fully placed his foot upon the marble when one hand closed around the back of Danny’s collar.

Danny’s drunken smile did not even have time to disappear.

Ryuzen looked at him with approximately the same enthusiasm one might reserve for lifting something unpleasant and disgusting from the bottom of a shoe.

Then both men vanished.

The three women remained frozen.

For half a heartbeat, none of them moved.

The woman nearest Danny stared at the empty portion of sofa where a grown man had been sitting a fraction of a second earlier. The second woman’s mouth slowly opened. The third looked toward the door, then toward the untouched drink sitting near the bar.

"What the fuck...?"

That was all before all three scrambled for their belongings and fled the booth with considerably less grace than they had entered it. The great black doors slammed behind them.

Danny Maxton returned to existence several kilometers away with none of the dignity expected from a Legacy heir.

He dropped directly onto his backside: "OW!"

The cry bounced around the unfamiliar chamber as Danny rolled onto one hip with both hands clutching his offended rear, face twisted in pain as he looked around wildly.

"Fuck! What the hell?"

There was nobody there.

The room surrounding him was enormous and expensive, although its luxury felt very different from Elysium’s sensual excess. Dark wood lined the walls. Ancient carpets covered the stone floor. Several couches sat arranged around a low table, and old paintings rested inside elaborate frames beneath warm golden lamps.

There should have been windows.

Instead, every opening had been sealed and heavy black panels covered the walls where glass ought to have been, each surface carrying thin formations that prevented even a thread of outside light from entering. Danny could hear nothing beyond the room either. No footsteps. No vehicles. No voices.

He pushed himself upright, still rubbing his aching backside.

"Hello?"

Nothing answered.

His breathing changed.

Danny turned toward the door.

It closed and a deep lock settled somewhere inside the frame with the heavy finality of a prison gate.

Danny stared.

His drunkenness began evaporating rapidly.

Someone had entered Elysium, bypassed one of the most secure private floors on the island, reached into a warded booth without triggering a single alarm and removed him before he could even understand another person had arrived.

His face went pale.

’I have been kidnapped.’

Or so Danny Maxton thought.

Eira had told Phei that Danny’s problem was already handled but she had never bothered telling her Master exactly how.

The answer had been Melissa.

Long before tonight, Eira had revealed herself to Melissa, enough for the two women to establish the strange little bridge of trust required whenever protecting Phei demanded movements he did not need to know about until after they were complete. Tonight, during the time Eira had spent away from her Master, she had made two important visits.

One of them had been to Melissa.

Eira did not possess direct command over any hidden blade gathered around the Ryujin Tiamat family, but Melissa did not need such command written into law. She was the Second Princess, and there were people who would move the moment her will reached them.

The Hayashi’s were among them.

So were several of Chaos’s shadows.

For Danny, however, Melissa had required only one blade.

Ryuzen Raizen Hayashi.

A Demigod did not require an army to retrieve a drunken Maxton from a private booth and after removing Danny from Elysium, Ryuzen reported the success of the mission to his father. His father, in turn, passed the result upward to the Second Princess. Everything had occurred so quickly that the Maxtons remained completely unaware their intended corpse had disappeared before their poison ever reached his lips.

That was perhaps the ugliest part.

Danny had a wife and children; a family of his own who would have awakened tomorrow to the news that he had somehow died inside one of Elysium’s private booths, probably with enough scandal surrounding the circumstances to ensure the truth drowned beneath public disgust without a care about how his family were left.

The Maxtons had not cared.

Danny had become a loose thread connecting them to the murder they had hidden beneath the name of an accident ten years ago, and once that thread became dangerous, blood relation apparently carried no greater sacredness than an old ribbon waiting for scissors.

Eira discovered later that Danny had not been the only loose end they had moved to erase.

The anchor Marcus had bribed for the interview had already been dealt with:

The man named Noah.

But unlike Danny, Noah had not been granted poison, privacy and a death that could easily pass for the final consequence of an indulgent evening.

His killers had entered his home before a sword had gone through his heart.

It had been quick, ruthless and final.

Eira found that distinction almost funny when she eventually learned the details.

Almost.

Apparently the conspirators still possessed enough familial tenderness to arrange an elegant and cleaner death for one of their own.

Danny would have died drunk, surrounded by beautiful women, with poison quietly closing his eyes before he understood anyone had sentenced him.

Noah had received steel through the heart.

That had to count for something, did it not?

Well.

That depended entirely upon the point of view.