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He killed them fast. It was almost difficult to look at their faces after.
Kong Si-Woo scrutinized the dead body, then the ones that weren't listed to die today, then tilted his chin towards the compound entrance, wood arc and traditional flatter. "You good with soju and medium rare?"
Toji flicked his dead dark eyes to him. Bloodying the target's bed where he must've spent the past night, bullying the lushness with his hands. Or not: he got cleaner and cleaner with every face and death tally Kong Si-Woo sent his way. Going by the limpness of his face: not well rested, or feeling the residual homesickness that came flagging with self mandated homelessness. A man out of his war country.
Starved of more than just water. "Do I look like a case to ya?"
The sound out of his throat would be enough to invite a wince from Kong Si-Woo if he hadn't busied his mouth and teeth and forefinger and thumb with a smoke. Paid through the nose for foresight in this line of work.
"You look like you could use some meat," said Kong Si-Woo, choosing to lose the cigarette and choke it under his left heel, the smell on him strong enough to last him till his car. "It's fine if you don't want the lift. It was coming out of my cut, but if that's still poor for you, then."
He didn't need a photo for this commission. The client had handwaved the ask and said his word was enough. It was a decent milestone to lose money on. He was a few feet clear of the compound's ghost path out, sentries dead where they stood, when the air of a mythology razored past the hairs of his wrist.
He looked: Toji was shadowing him a meter behind, eyes minced thin by the length of his bangs, crowding his face. The Zen'ins must look like the paintings they hung over their altars, making meat of their children. Their faces were split between the kind of stillness the Gojos mastered centuries ago and the animosity of whatever crawls off an mountain, gnarled and spitting and cursed from blood to root with being alive.
Kong Si-Woo faced forward again, hand in his jacket cupped around his silver car keys. His pockets could use a new man, fresh blood to flush its deep velvet.
And he was hungry.
The establishment was second to his usual haunt; slightly classier, use of oil comparable to those in war machines, with alcohol that went even through him. He liked the dark wood look and the dimness of all its cut down corners, shrouded like on an old woman's back, the geometric sounds of each room's sliding doors, the murmurs that were never clear despite the walls, the faces he didn't care to remember but with voices he did.
"For two," he told the woman at the front, and her voice went towards knowing when she replied, "Of course. This way, mister."
Kong Si-Woo took the seat closer to the innards of the room. Toji took the one by the door, the thin papered wall where the folks slide to push trays of their meals inside. Kong Si-Woo graded his eyes down to the darkness by Toji's hips and back up to his face.
A Zen'in that kept his knives on him was probably dressed down. He learned not to trust the lean of shadow down a jacket when he was surrounded by cops for as long as he had been.
But with them it was easier: they feared for their lives more than civilians did, and the bulletproof vests gave them up. Toji spread himself open over the mats and crossed his left ankle over a knee and watched him until their welcome tea came, slid in with a servant's grace.
Toji looked like he cared even less for his life than the ones that charged him with death once they knew how he was. Impossible to redeem for the likes of his birthright.
No glory would offer itself to a black hole.
He didn't know if that made Toji's blades slicker to draw. He preferred a dark wood place for the better, redder checks. When the woman slid the door flush so that it made no sound, and there was no change of air, still no minute shift down Toji's arms, Kong Si-Woo poured them both a cup of fresh brewed oolong.
Toji didn't take it. Kong Si-Woo didn't offer recommendations and Toji didn't ask, either. When she came to collect, Kong Si-Woo got double of the same and a side of soju: neat, off instinct. The eyes stayed when she went and until another man appeared with their meals plated full, chopsticks propped onto their china. Kong Si-Woo felt rather than saw the attention leave him for a slice of a second.
Kong Si-Woo draped his sleeve over the low table and gestured.
Toji's eyes were on him again. Fire if fire were cold, and spoke as if to riddle the paper walled room with tears with the stones from his voice. "You here for my mouth or yours?"
Kong Si-Woo dipped the eating end of his chopsticks into the rest of his tea, steaming, then picked up the fatty meat. "I'm here for a meal. I don't touch homeless men. Much less a man for hire."
The chopstick didn't slice his skin, but the way it razored into the polish and wood by his cuff knew it could, but decided not to. Kong Si-Woo stared at the new hole he would have to pay for, and then at the man who cored it with a minimal curve to his wrist. Toji was aiming his open mouth at him, smiling like he did have something to answer for, and it wasn't for property damage the size of a fish eye.
"Say," he said. "What did ya say your name was?"
Kong Si-Woo tucked the red meat into his cheek. He earned the slide of his card down the table towards Toji's side, saying nothing. This he took. He thumbed it off the wood surface, then stood. Starved and still so tall.
"Good talk, pretty woman," he said, grin gone, body following. Kong Si-Woo drank his soju and ate seconds for breakfast the next day.
The next dead body Kong Si-Woo secured a day and check for was months later at the merge of summer into fall, yellower than before, where cool prickled at night, a mere suggestion for Japanese winter.
Toji was stretching out in the dead woman's mattress when he took off his shoes at the door. Kong Si-Woo thought there might be additional fluids in the sheets, but held up Toji's briefcase, swung it so it graced the foot of the bed. "You'll find a few extra thousand. The client appreciated your speed."
Toji rolled over and popped open the case, long calculated fingers for a large hand, dead dark eyes sliding down the rows of yen. Hard cash and its usual glory. He turned onto his side when he finished, languid and fuller in his shoulders, fed on more than blood these past few months when Kong Si-Woo hadn't looked. The thousand thread count sheets pulled off his hips and Kong Si-Woo looked. Toji clawed a hand over his face and flattened his thighs to the bedding, grime and something else, the catch of his survey down thin and grinning. It looked as it had earlier, now with some heat, like there was something to sneer about. Kong Si-Woo brought his eyes back up and put a stick between his lips.
He wouldn't sleep with come dried under him. Or blood aired right out of the woman he fucked.
It could be enough to turn in his appetite if he hadn't done something similar undercover. Kong Si-Woo lit his smoke and stepped over the disposed clothes, the blood heckling the felt carpet, enough for him to reconsider his socked decorum, and tossed the first sizable shirt he grabbed back at him, rummaging through the woman's walkable closet, and finding sweatpants, sending that over his shoulder too.
"Beer," he told him, wondering if Toji's cock would fit in woman's underwear. "Unless you've acquired the same tastes as the company you've been keeping."
"Not for diamonds on every finger, old man," said Toji, shimmying on the pants without any sweatshop silk underneath.
When they were sheathed in the smokey hole in the wall, slurs leaking out from every table, Kong Si-Woo having loosened his tie to withstand to choked up heat in the place, Toji leaned up against the wall and done with clocking every corner and whatever else he sucked in with that look of his, ungenerous enough to start a barfight in no time, he tapped his wrist.
"Already got your number," he said.
Kong Si-Woo withdrew a few photo prints from under his suit jacket. "New job," he gave, ordering a drink with a finger. "New woman. You any good with a gun?"
Toji closed on him, peaking his back and hanging his head, dragging his dead eyes over the latest black market pinup over Kong Si-Woo's shoulder. Through the blister of men's voices and shouts for bets, Kong Si-Woo swore he heard him lick his lips. "Must be easier than twisting a knife," voice snaked in by his ear.
Kong Si-Woo passed over the photos, inverting them to show off the brief notes scrawled on their backs. Left-handed, location of den, preferred drugs, off work at five, aged four past twenty. "Make it look like a suicide."
Like this, with Toji over him, hand down on the wood of the rotting counter, fresh with recent sex and a paid off murder in one night, he looked marginally more alive. His eyes were simply dark, and they were on him for a long minute, backlit with whatever high Zen'in Toji got from being valued like meat, priced for more than pounds at a time. Mean for a reason. Pretty for reason, too.
"That all?" He said, with his hair dripping over his face in Kong Si-Woo's peripheral. "No ban on having a good time?"
Kong Si-Woo turned his head to face him. They were close. Another six inches and he would be able to tell if he ate her out. "Get rid of any extraneous fluid," he said, then considered. He could wait til he took a drink, but moving the back of his hand to graze the air down the front of Toji's collarbone sober had its own levity. He hung his row of knuckle there without touching unwashed skin, sweated over a dead woman's kitten licks, and continued, "Clean up everything but blood. A few dirty secrets down the drain won't be difficult if you fuck the way you end a life."
His drink pushed against his arm, browned and yellowed like piss, and Toji closed his fingers around the glass the moment Kong Si-Woo dropped his hand to do the same. Eyes on him. Sparing heat. He could be wrong, but the deadness was still gone, and the hand he had over Kong Si-Woo's fingers flexed, deliberate.
"Something tells me this isn't your first time," Toji said, which could mean anything.
Kong Si-Woo bared his eyes over the rim of his drink as he brought it, willed, to his mouth, Toji still gripping it with a thumb and two fingers. He could be wrong, but the deadness was still gone, and what was flat in its place, like the sawing side of a something cutting, burned a lot like interest.
"Name's Kong Si-Woo," he said, and inhaled his mouthful.
There were three dead in the main house, the master's wing, and one was underage under Japanese law.
Ten, and twitching in bed. Kong Si-Woo passed the heir's room.
Toji was leaned up against the window post, legs slung over the deep cherry wood, growing out of his choice of shirt and sweatpants that would earn another month's dirty history, grinding the teeth of a regular knife over another more used knife. When he was done he turned it on his knuckles like he knew exactly where he ended and it began, with a childhood's kind of price.
"The mother and father weren't in the commission," Kong Si-Woo said at the door.
Zen'ins rarely lost their young to outsiders. They charged themselves to their individual disappearances by the age of seven, litmus age for cursed energy techniques and their consequent inheritance, and whether the pit under their house would see another cursed spirit. No fight between heirs in the hardest sorcerer clan for the first time in a century in the last ten years. Convenience if convenience was earned in the basement and the suicide of the woman who grew him.
"Force of habit," said the one, eyes gored in morning's silver, one knife gone. There was a thin streak of what looked raked across Toji's jaw, like some other animal in the room put up a fight. Kong Si-Woo hadn't seen the rigor mortis strain of their hands. The red swamp of carpet between them was wet enough to suggest there was a pool earlier that had since matted down to the roots, flush and sucking at heel. Toji tracked them fresh to the front of the room.
Face glinting like dice, over him like he was used to rope. "Get me a price for each of their heads."
"That's not how this works," said Kong Si-Woo. A black hole for a man. A grudge in there must grind itself up to keep going.
Toji curled his marred top lip. There was that knife, and there was the Belgium sort of metal warmed from Kong Si-Woo's back. "You're a dealer. Get some use out of that mouth."
"You killed them in close quarters," said Kong Si-Woo. "When I gave you a gun you never gave back."
Toji's face grinned. The other knife was gone now, too. "Force of habit," he said again, as lean as packaged meat.
Cursed from blood to root with being alive. Seething from withstanding a vision that should not exist in the first place. Kong Si-Woo studied the scar lining his mouth as if gifted from the nail of a mother for a minute longer before missing the tiger's length of his body by an inch, going towards the twin bodies. On the way he stripped off his suit jacket and choked his dress shirt by his elbows, drew the switchblade from his pants pocket and earned its sharp slide out from between the steel dividers, kneeling. "The quote will be the same rate as your last head except double."
She put up the fight. Kong Si-Woo could see it now, clawed fist in his hand. He stuck his knife between the bones locking up her ring finger and collected the first joint, then hair from the man's scalp. Blood was thin and starved of oxygen on the underside of his wrist.
"You'll get your amended check by the end of the night." He got on his feet, wiping his hands dry with the insides of his suit jacket, feeling old blood begin to darken the insulation of his pocket, severed finger wrapped thinly in bedsheet. Kong Si-Woo slid the jacket with its red gut silk back over his shoulders, black hole gaze on him, buttoning his front as he turned on the door.
Sleek, dark, and fucking unsalvageable.
Kong Si-Woo opened speed-dial and put his lip to his burner's mouthpiece. "You have a few trophies to collect," said after the second ring.
When the client's cleaners took the hair and bleeding organ of a prize from him, Kong Si-Woo forgot his ride and slid into the nearest steaming cart with tarp opaque overhead, the humidity gripping his cold face and metal fingers, fulfilling smoke of another kind. Heat that stuck. He could shed dead people he put his hands on like glue in here.
The old man offered him a complimentary sake cup for the weather. "Oden and the bottle," and barely given a minute earned both down in front of him, paired with pickled vegetables.
"Welcome," the old master said when a blast of cold cleared the hot air. Another sake cup tapped down by his left elbow, but was forgone. A furnace hand choked the bottle's throat, the difference in degree so strong Kong Si-Woo thought he saw blue.
"Not gonna try askin'?" said the one who probably should have died twelve times over now for that last name, a full calendar cycle in Chinese mythology, from the point of eight and beyond. Younger if they were strident about it, trialing for the error of womb, for the next animal they could leave on the mountain. Kong Si-Woo was about to get drunk enough to get a full minute in disgust.
"From what I can see you won't give up anything for free." Kong Si-Woo cracked his chopsticks apart and felt the sake start to warm the back of his throat, a sensation he cared to duplicate several times over. His bowl of oden was so hot he couldn't see the seaweed, daikon, egg, ganmodoki, hanpen, chikuwa, busy blending flotsam of flavor into his broth. "I'd rather stick to my assumptions. You care for those?"
The old master lifted a lid, sending new steam into the air. The mist twisted, alive, and gave up parts of Toji's face for the grin he lashed across his lip. His scar was shorn and pinking on his right side, growing moisturized the longer he stayed, seated loose-legged over the metal chair as Kong Si-Woo sucked down his noodles, uncaring about burning his tongue. Raze a pack of smokes after this, and then go home to bed to bet with his lungs on another carton.
"You seem good at those," said Toji, look colder than the grip he had on the glass, heating its undersides. "Pegging a guy," lifting a mouthful from the lip from where he pinched the sake bottle between two fingers. "Wouldn't want you in my kinda debt. Not unless you were a pretty woman." Kong Si-Woo looked at him from over his bowl, close to finishing now. The old master set out another bottle. Toji tongued the scar over his lip of any residual alcohol, still curved up from something too pleased to be a sneer, too ungenerous to be anything less, enunciating what his ancestors would have only wanted on a grave or less: "Kong Si-Woo."
"They abolished you young," said Kong Si-Woo, eating through the last of the tough tofu meat. The old master stepped out when it became impossible to keep his suit jacket on. "Real young. Must have an older brother with the way they dropped you. The last death in the family was your mother. Stayed news on the dark web since nobody came forward." He swallowed his shirataki, a mushroom head caught in the gums closest to his throat. "Nobody knew who took her head, but she had you, hadn't she," here set his chopsticks down, bowl emptied, belly full with heat that would be piss in an hour.
There was a black hole coring the side of his face. "And now you gut mothers on the floor after makin' sure her son's dead first. Is that right?"
He turned his face at an angle that could invite a knife to bridge the width of his neck. Smiled then. Toji looked at him with half of his face, high-rise red on his cheekbones, alcohol or some emotion showing their root, shortchanging a deadness he never had much legitimacy with.
Toji was looking at Kong Si-Woo like he was thinking about edging him on his worst knife, and also do something other than put him over ice.
Kong Si-Woo leathered his hand over the counter's old wood, bills underneath to tip the old man and cover the first drink they shared since Kong Si-Woo decided he wanted a new man in his velvet pocket and a backwards mythology to curse the world's foundations with.
"Don't do that again," he said, just words in his mouth now, no nice curl, no pretty woman but a patient man with a starved pit of a myth on his hands. "And use the gun I gave you for the next one."