Free Tokyo Ink (Gay SF Erotica) by Ann Vremont Page A

Iyashii.
    It was a façade of normality, but for the pacing Magnus Valnyk and the presence of a security guard in the room. Tetsu could ignore Magnus with a few polite responses, but the guard, only a few years older than Gabe, made him nervous. The man was jittery, subconsciously checking his poorly concealed gun every few minutes for the five hours he’d been in the room.
    “I would have expected more from you -- god damn head of Iyashii’s security can’t deal with one…” Magnus didn’t finish the sentence, just gestured wildly in his son’s direction.
    Gabe opened his eyes, hiccoughed. “Regional head.”
    “Shh…” Tetsu stroked his head, hoping that the pill Gabe had taken that morning to counteract the sedative was beginning to take effect. If everything went to shit, he’d rather not have to carry a drugged Gabe out.
    “I was undone by his behavior… it’s not like stopping a stranger.” Tetsu returned to scrolling through the files, watching Magnus from the corner of his eyes.
    Magnus turned and directed his cold stare at Gabe. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”
    “Mmm.” Gabe grabbed the back of the couch and pulled himself into a sitting position. “I love you, too, Daddy.”
    “Don’t start --”
    “No, really.” Gabe rose onto unsteady feet and made his way to the bar. “I want to make this up to you. Surely there’s someone’s cock you’d like me to suck?”
    “After you’ve advertised it to the world?” Magnus turned his back on Gabe, shuffled through papers on his desk. “No, you’re absolutely worthless to me now.”
    “I’m worth twenty-seven percent of ValCo,” Gabe corrected. “Without me, the rabble would be running your company.”
    Tetsu caught the glance Magnus threw at the guard. There was something familiar in the look and his gut clenched instinctively. He recognized the distinct chance that the guard wasn’t there for anyone’s protection and he was in a bad position to monitor the situation. Messing with the laptop’s power cord, Tetsu jerked his head at the guard.
    “Jerry, right?”
    The guard nodded.
    “Can you switch plugs for me?” He tossed the cord and power supply over then watched Jerry plug it in, confirming placement of the man’s gun. Jerry turned to hand Tetsu the other end and came up a foot short. Tetsu forced a frown. “Shit, change seats with me.”
    He could see Jerry didn’t want to, but the man said nothing and moved to the couch. The position minimized Jerry’s access to his gun and disadvantaged him in keeping a watchful eye on Gabe. Jerry had just made a rookie mistake, and Tetsu silently thanked the gods for Magnus having picked an inexperienced shooter if the man was indeed here for a hit.
    “We’ll need to move things up.” Tetsu spoke to the room at large but his words were meant for his lover. He dug another layer deeper into ValCo’s server, taking a back door into the building’s security system and making sure there were no live vid feeds for the room. He was surprised the pass codes, embedded so many years ago, still worked.
    Magnus tossed a folder onto his desk. “Why is that?”
    “Iyashii’s running server maintenance at midnight, core access will be offline.” He glanced at Gabe, hoped he wasn’t too drugged to remember the signal for trouble and to wait for Tetsu to make the first move.
    Tetsu hit a few keys, opened the personnel files and searched through them for Jerry. Nothing. “Iyashii’s transport will go offline first, the rail into Pyramid Prison,” he said and opened the accounting files to look for unusual transfers. There were a couple dozen inter-corporate facilitators -- men and women who would place an anonymous kill bounty regardless of the target. As head of Iyashii’s security for Japan, he’d placed enough fund transfers to recognize their various account numbers.
    He set the search parameter at under a million doyen. A hit on Gabe would be easy enough and thus low value. It