Kidnapped by the Werewolf Mafioso

Chapter Eighteen

AKIKO

The warehouse squats on Foster and Nineteenth, a massive brick structure that used to process meat before the industry fled south. Rust bleeds down its walls from broken gutters. Windows stare blank and black, most shattered years ago. The parking lot sprawls empty except for seventeen vehicles I count from our position—panel vans, SUVs with tinted windows, two motorcycles tucked against the loading dock.

"Security's light for someone expecting us." Marco drums fingers against the steering wheel, a nervous habit he's developed since becoming an uncle-to-be.

"That's what worries me." I study the building through binoculars, catching no movement behind the broken glass. "Vivienne survived seventeen years playing shadow games with my father. She doesn't make tactical errors."

Giancarlo checks his Glock for the third time, silver-core bullets gleaming dull in the dawn light. Through our bond, his emotions bleed into mine—controlled fury from seeing Rafael bleeding, satisfaction at Harrison's breakdown, and underneath it all, a gnawing worry he's trying to hide. Worry for me.

"Quinn, report." His voice carries command even through the crackling comm unit.

"Perimeter's too quiet. No birds, no rats, even the roaches avoid this place." Quinn's breathing sounds labored. "Whatever's inside has been here long enough that nature learned to stay away."

Eddie shifts in the back of the van, making the vehicle rock on its suspension. His massive frame barely fits even with the seats removed. "The shadows taste like old death mixed with... anticipation? Like the building itself is waiting for something."

My yokai manifest around me without being called. Noriko's frost spreads across the inside of the windshield, forming characters in a language that predates Japanese. Yui and Rei perch on the dashboard, their usual playfulness subdued. But it's Kazuki who concerns me most—his oni mask cycles through expressions too quickly to track, as if he can't decide which face fits what's coming.

"We could wait for backup," Marco suggests. "Call in more soldiers, get Isabella here with medical—"

"No." I cut him off. "Every minute we wait gives Vivienne more time to refine whatever she's prepared. She's had seventeen years. We move now."

Giancarlo's hand finds mine, callused fingers interlacing with my smaller ones. Heat travels up my arm from the contact, the bond humming between us like a live wire. "Stay close. Whatever she's planned, it's designed for you coming alone."

"I'm never alone anymore." The truth of it warms me more than his touch. Pack, mate, yokai—I carry armies in my bones now.

We exit the van in practiced formation. Dawn paints everything in washed-out grays, making the warehouse look like a wound in the city's flesh. No guards at the entrance. No wards that I can detect. Just a door standing open, revealing darkness beyond.

The smell hits me first—old blood, rotting meat, and something chemical that burns my nostrils. The killing floor opens before us, massive and wrong. The space stretches wider than the building's exterior walls should allow. Meat hooks dangle from ceiling tracks, swaying in air currents that don't exist. Drainage grates dot the floor in patterns that make my eyes water if I stare too long.

"Welcome." Vivienne's voice echoes from deeper inside, cultured French accent making the word sound like a threat. "I was beginning to worry you'd gotten lost."

Emergency lighting flickers on, revealing the full scope of the trap. She stands in the center of the killing floor, inside a ritual circle drawn with materials that make my enhanced senses recoil. Salt mixed with ground bone, mercury that shifts and flows, darker things that writhe until iron nails pin them in place. She wears white—a designer dress that belongs at charity galas, not slaughterhouses. Her blonde hair falls in perfect waves despite the humidity and stench.

"Where are your helpers?" I scan the catwalks and shadowed corners. "Harrison mentioned three witches. Mercenaries."

"Oh, darling." Her smile belongs on a mother explaining why pets die. "Did you really think I'd trust something this personal to hired help? They served their purpose—made you think you understood my plan."

The candles around her circle flare, flames shifting from orange to green to a color that hurts to perceive. Between one heartbeat and the next, the warehouse fills.

Not with people. With constructs that step out of shadows like nightmares given substance. They wear faces from my past, each one carved from memory and given flesh through seventeen years of stolen blood. Sister Evangeline holds her discipline cane, the one that left scars across my back. The Liu enforcer grins with gold teeth that caught the light as he died. Guards from the convent who watched too long when they thought I was sleeping.

"Every blood draw told me more." Vivienne's conversational tone clashes with the horror surrounding us. "Your DNA carries memory, did you know that? Every fear, every trauma, every person who ever hurt you—I can give them flesh."

The constructs don't attack randomly. They move in coordinated patterns, surrounding us with tactical precision. The Sister Evangeline construct tilts her head at the exact angle the real one did before striking. The guards spread out to flank, knowing our blind spots.

"f**k me," Marco mutters, drawing his weapon.

The first wave hits like a tsunami of meat and memory. I bury my karambit in the throat of a guard whose face I remember from when I was twelve, when he cornered me in the laundry room before Sister Evangeline intervened. My own blood sprays from the wound, hot and copper-sweet. The smell—jasmine and ozone that marks me as surely as fingerprints—fills the air.

Giancarlo fights beside me with brutal efficiency, but even he struggles against opponents who predict his movements. The Liu construct dodges his strike, already moving before Giancarlo commits to the angle. These things learned us through my blood, know our patterns through seventeen years of study.

Eddie roars, his form shifting and expanding as shadows pour from him like living things. He swallows two constructs whole, but they reform from his darkness, crawling out with my blood still dripping from their wounds.

"The blood!" Quinn's voice crackles through comms. "She's using it to—"

Vivienne's chanting drowns out the warning. The words scrape against reality, syllables that human throats shouldn't shape. The ritual circle begins glowing, and I understand with sick certainty what she's done. This isn't about capture. It's about connection.

Every drop of blood the constructs spill feeds her working. My blood, returned to the source through violence. She's building a sympathetic link between what was stolen over seventeen years and what remains in my veins. A chain forged from my own essence.

The ninth tail writhes between my heartbeats, recognizing the trap. It tries to hide deeper in my flesh, but Vivienne's magic hooks into it with precision born from almost two decades of preparation. Pain flares along pathways I didn't know existed—not nerves but something more fundamental.

"No!" Kazuki manifests fully beside me, grabbing my shoulders with hands that burn cold. "The fox's inheritance must be protected."

"The bond," Noriko adds urgently, ice erupting from the floor to create a barrier between us and the constructs. "Hide it in the mate bond. The French woman's magic follows blood, not spirit connections."

Understanding crashes through me. The yokai begin working without waiting for permission, flowing through me like water through a sieve. They carry the ninth tail on currents of power I can barely comprehend, threading it along the connection between Giancarlo and me.

"What are you doing?" Vivienne's chanting falters. "That's not—the bindings don't allow—"

But she adapts with the speed of someone who's survived in the shadows between human and supernatural worlds. The chanting shifts, becomes something with serrated edges. If she can't extract the ninth tail, she'll shred everything connected to it.

The constructs melt simultaneously, their forms collapsing into puddles of my blood. But instead of pooling randomly, the blood flows along channels carved into the floor—channels hidden until now by debris and shadow. The entire warehouse floor is one massive binding matrix, and I'm standing at its center.

"Everyone out!" I scream, but it's too late.

The blood ignites with something worse than fire. Each drop remembers being part of me, remembers the body it came from, and now it wants to return home. The sympathetic magic hits like a sledgehammer to my nervous system. Every cell in my body screams as seventeen years of stolen essence tries to force itself back inside me.

I've been shot, stabbed, beaten with Sister Evangeline's cane until I couldn't walk. None of it compares to this. This is violation on a cellular level, like being turned inside out while every pain receptor fires at maximum. Blood runs from my nose, my ears, my eyes. I taste copper and jasmine and the bitter tang of magic gone wrong.

My legs give out. Giancarlo catches me before I hit the floor, his arms wrapping around me like he can shield me from magic with muscle and determination. Through our bond, I feel his desperation, his fury at being outplayed, his wolf howling for violence that can't fix this.

"Stop this!" He snarls at Vivienne, and I've never heard that tone from him before—not commanding but pleading. "Name your price. The territory, money, whatever you want—"

"I want what should have been mine." Sweat beads on Vivienne's forehead, the only sign that maintaining this working costs her. "The power Matsuki hid rather than share. But if I can't extract it..." Her smile turns cruel. "Then I'll sever her connection to it. Leave her an empty shell, neither human nor kitsune nor wolf. Nothing."

The yokai work frantically around me, pulling at the essential threads that make me who I am. My consciousness stretches like pulled taffy, part of me in Giancarlo's arms feeling every nerve burn, part of me floating somewhere above watching my body convulse.

"Trust us," Kazuki commands. "The mind must be preserved intact. The body endures, but the mind must remain whole."

"Don't—" Blood fills my mouth, choking off protests. I don't want to leave, don't want to abandon my body even if it means escaping the pain. Through the bond, I feel Giancarlo's heart hammering against my back, feel his wolf raging beneath his skin.

"Let go, Aki-chan." Yui's light dims with sorrow. "Let us carry you somewhere safe until this passes."

"Just for a little while," Rei adds. "We promise to bring you back."

But I don't want safety. I want to fight beside my mate, want to tear Vivienne's throat out with my teeth. Want to watch her perfect blonde hair stain red with her own blood instead of mine.

The warehouse shakes as Giancarlo's control fractures. His power rolls out in waves, making constructs stumble and reform slower. Marco fights to reach us, half-shifted and snarling. Eddie has become something massive and terrible, shadow given hunger. Even Quinn has abandoned human shapes, cycling through forms trying to find one that can break the binding.

"Stay with me." Giancarlo's voice breaks on the words. "Don't you dare leave me, Akiko."

"Not leaving." The words come out broken, more blood than sound. "Just... sideways. Just for now."

Vivienne's working builds toward crescendo. The stolen blood burns through me like acid, trying to rewrite my DNA through sheer force. But the ninth tail is gone, safely hidden in the mate bond where blood magic can't follow. She's winning and losing simultaneously—destroying me without gaining her prize.

The yokai pull harder at my consciousness. The world splits and doubles. I see my body convulsing in Giancarlo's arms, blood running from every orifice. See tears on his face—when did the winter wolf learn to cry? See Marco finally break through, his claws tearing through constructs. See Eddie swallow three attackers at once. See Quinn shift into something with too many teeth, biting through iron and salt.

"I love you," I whisper against Giancarlo's throat. Words that taste like copper and truth and goodbye even though I mean them as promise. "I love you."

His arms tighten hard enough to crack ribs if I was fully in my body. "Akiko, please—"

But the yokai pull me under, away from the agony, away from my flesh, into darkness that tastes like the space between heartbeats. The last sensation is our bond stretching like elastic pulled to its limit but not snapping. Never snapping. A lifeline in the void.

I hear Giancarlo roar my name. Feel his rage shake the warehouse until windows shatter and walls crack.

Then nothing but the quiet dark where yokai keep their secrets and foxes wait to be reborn.