"Okay...holy crap...hold on…"

Something was buzzing beneath her. She pushed Kaiba's head away and squirmed around in the backseat. Her sweater tangled around her head as she dug around beneath the driver's seat. Her phone gave another warning buzz and she spotted it. The screen was alight with an incoming call from Ryo as well as several missed messages from him. Kaiba wiped his mouth with the back of his pointer finger and asked her if there was trouble in paradise.

"Isn't there always," she said as she yanked her leggings back up her hips and flattened them around her legs. He sighed and shook his head, buckling his belt back around his waist as he did so. He was still shirtless, with his t-shirt twisted around the back of his shoulders. She could smell him everywhere.

"Ryo," she said. "Hi. What's the sitch?"

There was a pause on the other end and then a slight rustle. Then came Ryo's voice in a hoarse whisper. "What're you doing?"

"...a thing,"

"Don't call me a thing," Kaiba muttered and she put her hand over his mouth.

"A thing type thing," she said into the phone. "Where are you? I haven't seen you in days."

There was a pause, this time uncomfortably long and then Ryo said, "I'm at the karaoke bar. Can you meet me here...like, right now?"

He wasn't calling her hun or sweetie or fuckface. This was a terrible sign. She sat up and began to slip her shoes back on. "Yeah, of course. What's going on?"

"Sharks in the water," he whispered. "Clean up on aisle Major What the Fuck," his voice cracked and then the line went dead. Something about the entire situation was nerve-wracking. He had sounded like he was about to cry.

"Shit," she said. Aisle Major What the Fuck was no good. She looked at Kaiba. "Raincheck on the best night of my life."

"Bummer," he said as they slid into the front seats. He turned the key in the ignition. "And here I was about to show you the many tricks I had up my sleeve."

"Damn, we were only on the sleeves segment of things? We hadn't even gotten to the pants?" She sucked her teeth and pulled her seatbelt over her chest. "Hey, listen. Can this car go any faster than two hundred mph? I gotta friend in need."

He smiled and wriggled this gearshift. "We're about to find out."

X

They arrived at the karaoke bar in record timing. As soon as they pulled to the curb, she stumbled out and dry-heaved behind the door. He handed her a handkerchief with the black letters KC stitched into the corner and reminded her that she owed him a new one. With that, he sped off and it occurred to her that he hadn't even bothered to ask if Ryo was okay.

The jumping pink disco lights bounced across her as she wandered through the club. She spotted Ryo in the back, at the very same table where she had first seen Mizumi so many nights ago. Their resemblance was uncanny in that moment: he, too, was wearing a pair of large black sunglasses and was smoking a cigarette. His jet-black hair had been gelled into a sauve helmet around his head. But the side of it was scruffy and misshapen as if he had been laying on it. She took a seat on the vinyl bench in front of him and smiled at a waitress coming towards them with water. But Ryo was quick to wave the woman away, an uncharacteristic frown lingering around his face.

"You smell sus," he said, in opening.

"What does sus smell like?"

"Like sweat and asshat cologne and mint gum meant to mask the smell of cock-a-doodle-doo breath."

"Shit," she said and spit her gum out on a napkin.

"Am I right in thinking that you were in the middle of having a thing with Kaiba-boy that would make the tabloids lose their shit?"

"I don't wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about you and why you're wearing glasses indoors and why you sounded so upset on the phone."

"You're so stupid, you know that? Stupid, stupid, stupid."

This caught her supremely off-guard. He had playfully called her stupid many times before but she could tell that this time he wasn't joking. He was actually talking down to her for some reason. He sniffled and began to shake his head. Tears rolled out from beneath his glasses and splattered on the table.

"Why don't you listen to what the people around you say for once?" He said as he blotted a napkin beneath his glasses. "Kaiba's a player, Marie. Who knows what STD you probably caught tonight. You-"

"He's not a player! He's actually a really good person! Spreading rumors like that is beneath you, Ryo, you know that. What is going on with you? Are you high?"

"I've been his right-hand man for longer than you've been with KC. Or have you forgotten? I guess it's easy to now that Mizumi's taken my place. But I've seen things, back when I used to work shoulder-to-shoulder with him. I've seen so many girls come in and out of his office that I had to install a spring doorstop on his door. He even has his own branded condoms, did you know that?"

"Okay, you know what," she said, rearing up and shouldering her backpack. "Enough with the 'Marie's so naive' bullshit. It's always 'poor Marie' this and 'poor Marie' that. My opinions are valid too, you know. Even if I have only been here for three years. You people enjoy tearing Seto down and I'm not gonna sit around and be witness to it anymore!"

Ryo gave a large, ugly sniffle again. He toyed with his hands for a second before giving a sigh and pulling off his sunglasses. Marie gasped. The skin around both of his eyes was an ugly blackish-purple color. It was so swollen that his eyes had been narrowed to a slit. A neon light from the stage flashed across his face, highlighting the bloody bruise that had welled up across one side of his face. Someone had beaten him up, bad.

"I knew that comment about the condoms would hit a sore point," he said in a strangled voice before bursting into tears between his hands. She hurriedly knelt by his side and pulled his hands away. The wounds looked much worse up close.

"Who did this to you?!" She demanded. "Who the fuck did this to you?!"

"Just lower your voice, please-"

"-no, NO! I swear to god, I'm going to kick someone's ass," she said and kicked the table for emphasis. "I'm gonna tear their face off, I'm gonna-"

"Marie, sit down-"

"-NO!"

"Marie! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Take a seat, will you?"

The entire bar went silent and everybody looked at them. She cast an evil glance over her shoulder at the surrounding patrons before sliding back onto the bench and slamming her backpack on the floor.

"We gotta go to the cops," she said. Ryo sniffled again and shook his head.

"No. No cops. Not under any circumstances. Got it?"

"But-"

"Marie," he reached over and squeezed her hand. "If we make the wrong move, I will die. Do you understand? I will disappear and end up floating face-down and missing a couple of limbs in a river and it'll be your fault."

"My fault-"

"Yes. Unless you do...exactly what I tell you word-for-word, no holds barred. Okay?"

"Okay."

Ryo leaned back, crossed his legs, and held his cigarette upright beside his head. He thought for a moment before taking a long drag and blowing smoke in the air. The sight of his bashed face made her want to yank herself up and scream at the top of her lungs. Who the hell could have been responsible for such a thing?

"Arronaxx," he said, as if in answer to the unspoken question.

"What?"

"Arronax. Marie, promise me you won't scream. I'll explain everything just...give me a second. I'm...the mole for Arronaxx."

"No...that's not possible. Mizumi's the mole for Arronaxx-"

"Mizumi's the double agent mole. I'm not. I'm just a plain, secret-selling mole that Kaiba doesn't know about. You wanna know how Arronaxx got their hands on Version 2.5? It was me. I sold it to them."

"Ryo, no…" she shouldn't be hearing this, couldn't bear the weight of what Ryo had just put on her. He nodded, sniffled, and gave a weighty sigh.

"I've been working for Arronaxx ever Kaiba demoted me to punk shit duty. They had had their eye on me because they knew that, aside from Mokuba, I was the closest that you could get to Seto back then. And then when Mizumi came along and he essentially stripped me of my job duties, an agent for Arronaxx approached me with a deal. They knew that I was jaded. And I was still in possession of a lot of intel on Kaiba from my days spent working under him. I was the perfect catch. I took their deal. Cash for information on the down-low."

No, no, no. She wanted to jump up, run away, and pretend like she had heard none of it. But it was too late. Ryo had pulled her across a threshold that she couldn't return from. His admission made her guilty by default. There was nothing to do but listen.

"But all of Kaiba's blueprints are marked and tracked. He knows the source from which every blueprint is leaked. How come he didn't trace it back to you since you obviously had access?"

"Heh. Honey. That was the easiest part at the time. I knew that I was feeding Arronaxx faulty blueprints, but they didn't. For years I cashed in on the same dummy prototypes that the rest of Kaiba's goons were feeding them. But Arronaxx didn't know that they were dummies and they paid me well. By offering up different prototypes that were already in circulation, I was able to hide in plain sight. And Kaiba had no reason to distrust me, anyway. See, it's like the dollar bill analogy that he used to use. He gives some of his goonies purple dollar bills and waits for them to end up on the market. Except I get my hands on the dollar bills first and put it in circulation. Who's Kaiba going to suspect? The goonie, not me."

"You're terrible."

Ryo shrugged. "I was angry and wanted more money than I was getting from KC. But then Arronaxx started getting anxious. None of their prototypes were working and their marketability was taking a hit. They began to doubt me and all of the intel they were getting. They were hungry for something real and started to put pressure on me to find a prototype that worked. So I did the unthinkable. I snuck into Kaiba's house and got my hands on the blueprint that we now know as Version 2.5 - the backbone for what Kaiba's about to launch. It was easy. I had his home address, the keycode to the gate, and a spare key that I had printed without him knowing. I knew that Kaiba wouldn't keep something so precious lying around the office, anyway. But, that wasn't enough. They released Version 2.5 with the expectation that I would deliver the final blueprints - the master version - within the week."

"How did they know that there was another blueprint after 2.5? How did you know?"

He gave an unimpressed hiss. "I may be a glorified coffee runner, but the walls have ears, you know? I had a feeling that Version 2.5 just wasn't it - that there was something bigger in the works. In a moment of bravado I told them so and they…well, got insistent." He paused and touched his black eye gingerly. "They want that final blueprint, Marie. Look at my eyes, hun. Look at what they did to me. They have men watching my every move. If I don't deliver the final launch prints they're going to fuck me up royally. I don't have a lot of time."

"So what're you gonna do?"

"Appeal to your sensibility." The waitress returned and he waved her off, angrily this time. "It's obvious that you're now Seto's new plaything. You're closer to him than Mizumi or I have ever been. There's a key that he carries around on his neck..."

She didn't like where this was going. She gulped, at once feeling stuck to the table and wanting to run away. "Please don't do this," she whispered. "I don't know anything about any launch prints or-"

"-it's on a silver chain. You've obviously seen it during your...fumblings in the backseat of his car. There's also a safe in his room, behind his bed. I saw it when I went through his house. I'm willing to bet everything that I own that the exact blueprints that'll save my life are in that safe," he reached his hands out to hers but she snatched them away. "Marie, Marie, Marie," he cried. "If you want me to live, you'll get me what's in that safe. And if you're too scared to do it yourself then bring me the key and I'll get it. I'm in some deep shit, honeybun, and you're the only one who can get me out."

"How the fuck am I supposed to get close enough to the key or the safebox?!"

"It'll be easy for you, won't it?" He yelled. The bar went silent again. "Do what you've been doing! Play your little kitty cat routine around him! Tell him you want to fuck his brains out! Snatch the key up while you're riding his fucking dick! Bring it to me and I'll have it back in a second. I'm only asking you because you…" he paused and in the ensuing silence began to cry again. "...you can do that. I don't want to ruin things for you, honey, I just...I don't want to fucking die and get chopped up in a million pieces and put in trash bags around the city. Arronaxx will do that, that's how crazy these corporations get. You should've seen the men who beat the shit out of me today. They were smiling and laughing as they kicked me in the ribs-"

"-stop, please-"

"- and cracking jokes. And all the while all I could think about was my mom and how broken she would be if I wound up dead. Marie, I need you, sweetie. I need you so much right now."

He broke down in a fit of tears. Marie rushed around the table and wrapped him up in her arms. The sight of him bruised, broken, and crying caused a lump to form in her throat. She shushed him gently as she ran her fingers through his hair, looking around the bar hopelessly as if maybe the answer to their problem was written on one of the walls.

But there was no other option. She'd have to get the key and somehow do it under Kaiba's radar.

She dropped Ryo off at her apartment a few minutes later and promptly left on her bike, promising to go straight to Kaiba's apartment. The sight of Ryo wrapped in a quilt cover and sitting on her bed with a carton of raw cookie dough in his hands broke her heart. She had to leave but even as she pedaled she realized that she had no idea where she was going. She didn't want to go to Kaiba's and commit such a heinous breach of loyalty, especially under such an intimate pretense. There was no way that she'd be able to look him in the eye and let him touch her knowing all the while that the safebox that she was trying to get to lay only a few feet away. What would happen if she messed up and he found out about her plans? Ryo would get the bad end of it and Seto would lose his trust in her.

Tears gathered in her eyes as she rode along the midnight streets of Domino City. It was a Friday night and so people were out in hordes. Her indecisiveness brought her to the outdoor bazaar where she had spent many nights as a newly situated inhabitant of Japan. Christmas lights were strung back and forth across the low cement buildings and yawning tent shades. Couples walked arm in arm with plastic pink grocery bags filled to the brim with tourist trinkets and food. The smell of seasoned, sizzling meat and sweet pies filled the air as she shakily navigated through the crowd. There was laughter and merriness in the air but she felt none of it.

Eventually, she reached the end of the bazaar and pedaled into new territory. This part of the town was seedier and darker, with a luxury hotel casting its bright golden lights across a lot full of abandoned or closed down buildings. A limousine idled in front of the hotel porch. A man in a blue valet suit with large buttons stood at the passenger door with a tepid smile on his face, waiting to escort the passenger out. Marie lifted her hand to wipe the tears away from her nose just as she was about to pass. The wheels of her bike gave a warning wiggle and she veered into the side of the limousine. A woman was stepping out just at the same time and they collided with each other. Marie was tossed off her bike right as the woman's belongings went flying in the air. She landed with a pained 'oof' amongst a collection of bags and suitcases.

The smell of perfume was everywhere. Marie rubbed her butt - it had landed quite hard on the curb - and thanked her lucky stars that she had remembered to wear a helmet this time.

"Why are you always in my way," the woman said. Marie looked up and was wholly and totally dismayed to find Mizumi looking down at her from beneath a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. Mizumi glanced in the side view mirror and wiped a smudge of lipstick from the corner of her lips. She was wearing a silk wrap-around robe that barely stopped short of her thighs. There was a garter wrapped around her leg and a lacy tan slip bunched at her collar. She had either come from a Victoria's Secret fashion show or a noir novella murder.

But for once, Marie wasn't interested in sparring with Mizumi. She crawled around and retrieved the woman's bags, the contents of which were spread across the sidewalk. She grabbed a tampon, a pink set of brass knuckles in the shape of kitty ears, and a small silver key.

She wasn't sure what made her stop and survey the key. Though it was small, it was heavy and cold in her hands. It looked familiar but she wasn't sure why.

A shadow extended across Marie's body and then next thing she knew, Mizumi had ground the tip of her heel across her wrist. Marie hissed in pain and grabbed Mizumi's ankles but the other woman didn't budge.

"I'll take that," Mizumi said, reaching down. But Marie rallied her strength and snatched her wrist away. She quickly closed the key in her palm and looked up at the towering woman.

"I've seen this key before," Marie said as the valet looked between them with confusion. Mizumi had gone very still, her eyebrows creased slightly. "Wait a minute, yeah," Marie said, turning it over in her hand. "This...this is the key that Kaiba was wearing around his neck...except...that can't be right. I was just with him and he had the key on…"

"Oh, you were with him, were you? Cute." Mizumi held out her hand. "You don't know what you're talking about. Give me the key."

'No!" Marie said, backing up. "Something's not right...you...this...he would never give this key out, not even to you."

"How do you know that it's so important," Mizumi said with an uncomfortable glance at the valet.

"Well, for one," Marie said, standing up slowly. "The fact that it somehow went from his possession to yours. Eat my dust, she-devil!"

Marie began to run as fast as her legs could carry her, leaving her bike behind. Mizumi gave an enraged roar and began to run after her. But there was no way that she'd be able to keep up in her heels. The valet cried out from behind them, wondering just what the hell he was supposed to do with all of the shit on the ground, but they were gone.

A single high heel flew past her shoulder and she laughed. She turned a corner into an alley, hoping to climb the fence at the end before Mizumi could reach her but she was too late. A set of razor-sharp talons tore through her shirt and yanked her backward before she could even get a foot on the fence. Mizumi swung her to the ground and began to stomp around her body with her remaining heel.

"You...ruin...everything," Mizumi growled as Marie ducked and rolled away from her flashing heel. "Why can't you just be a good little girl and stay in your office where you belong?!"

"Mizumi, stop-"

"Give me the key-"

"No-"

"I said give me the key-"

"NO! Mizumi, wait, I need this, I-"

Mizumi picked her up by her collar and threw her against the wall. All of the breath was knocked out of her as she slid to the ground. Her nose had begun to bleed, she could see the hazy droplets splattering the ground. "Let me guess," she said with a mirthless chuckle. "The key around Kaiba's neck is a fake?"

"Correct," Mizumi said. She lifted Marie up with a grunt and pinned her to the wall. Marie was reminded of the internet meme where a tall woman with orange hair held a shorter woman against a wall. It might have been from a porn shoot. "We had a little scuffle the other day and I switched it out."

This must have been the scuffle in the conference room that Kaiba had mentioned. Mizumi dug her nails into Marie's armpits and she squeaked.

"I knew the general shape of it well enough to make a convincing fake but I needed the key itself. In the business world, we call that a fake-out, you know."

Mizumi's breath smelled like anchovies and cocktails and Marie hated it. She closed one eye and tried to hold her breath. "Why go after the real key? I thought your job was to sell Arronaxx fake information."

"It was until Kaiba pissed me off with that distrusting business. I'm all about principles and teaching people a lesson. We're similar in that way, Seto and I. But speaking of teaching people a lesson-"

She dropped Marie and reached in her pocket. Before Marie could move she was hit with a bolt of electricity that made her teeth rattle in her head. Mizumi's taser made an electric popping noise as Marie quivered beneath its lines. It was the most painful thing that she had ever experienced in her life.

"Christ, stop, Mizumi! You're gonna kill me!"

"I was getting around to that. But that was only to serve as a warning." She slipped the taser back in her pocket and this time retrieved the brass knuckles. Marie watched in fear as she slipped them over her fingers. "Let me show you how a real woman gets her hands dirty."

Marie screamed and ducked as Mizumi sprang towards her. Her armed fist hit the wall and then she spun around. Her sunglasses scattered to the ground and for the first time, Marie looked into her eyes. What she saw there was an untrammeled madness that had no end. Mizumi raised her fist and then punched the ground, right between Marie's legs.

"I will ruin you," Mizumi howled as she threw punch after punch at Marie. "I will destroy everything that you've ever loved if you don't give me that key right now!"

Marie turned and caught a fistful of spiky brass in her right shoulder. The pain sent a jolt through her body that made her dizzy. She wasn't going to win this fight. Mizumi had gone insane in her desperation. There was simply no reasoning with her at this point. Mizumi swung again and caught Marie square in the ribs.

"Little girl, I will make you wish that you were never born. Give…" she punched Marie again, "...it…" and again, "...to me!" One more time and Marie flew backward with blood gushing out of her nose. There was a sound like rubber skidding across cement behind her and she turned around.

"Need a hand, sweetheart?"

Someone held their hand out to her and she grabbed it blindly. She was yanked off of the ground and intuitively threw her leg around the back of the person's bike. Mizumi shouted something that Marie couldn't hear as she was whisked away on the back of the stranger's bike. She wrapped her arms around the stranger's waist and buried her nose between their shoulders as they sped around cars and pedestrians alike. Whoever it was, they were used to pulling high speeds through the city streets.

She had no idea where they were going. She was just glad to be out of range of Mizumi's wrath. Her ribs screamed in pain and her shoulder throbbed incessantly. It might have been broken. It sure felt like it.

Finally, about ten minutes later, the stranger rolled to a stop and put their foot down on the curb. She climbed off the back of their bike and stood shivering all over. The man reached in his pocket and brought out a wad of crumpled fast-food napkins which she pressed against her bleeding nose.

"Thanks," she said as the man shook his blond hair away from his face.

"No problem," he said, smiling genially. He had a heavy Brooklyn accent and kind, pretty eyes that beamed out at her from beneath his bangs. His jeans were rumpled along with the white and blue shirt that he wore beneath his blue mock-leather jacket. "You looked like you had it pretty rough back there. There was no way I wasn't gonna give you a hand. What'dya do, steal the big lady's lunch money?"

"Worse. I stole her man."

"Sheesh," he said. "Must be one heck of a guy to get caught up between the likes of you two."

"You have no idea," she said distractedly, looking at the blood on the napkins. "Ever heard of Seto Kaiba?"

"Aw man, now way!" He whistled. "You work for KaibaCorps, don't you? Yeah, that's right. I've seen you before! You're the one who does all their posts on Instagram, right? Like the one for Entertainment Emporium? Aw man, that one was funny! You know, if you guys ever need a new mascot then I'm your guy! This face could sell millions of KaibaCorps products," he began to flex his arms in a way that made her laugh. "Of course, I'll do it only if I get a small discount. Or a big one, it doesn't matter."

"You don't wanna work for KaibaCorps. Trust me, it's a shitshow. What's your name, superstar?"

"Me? I'm Joey, Joey Wheeler."

She liked the sound of his name. Joey. Joey Wheel-lah. "Well..thanks for the ride, Mr. Wheeler. I owe you one."

"Eh? You can drop the 'mister' stuff. I'm just your average Domino City hotshot. Oh, and you don't have to pay me back for the whole bike thing. I'm just happy I can help. But hey. My friends and I are getting together for a little dueling practice later on this week. You're welcome to join. You look like you need a break from KaibaCorps."

"Thanks but I-" -I'm currently holding the key to a safe, the contents of which can bring down an entire multi-billion dollar corporation.

"Here, take my number." He put his tongue between his teeth and scrawled out a cell phone number on the back of an old receipt. He handed it to her and she quickly stuffed it in her pocket. "And hey, give Kaiba-boy a good ol' kick in the balls for me, will ya? I used to go to school with that asshole and never got the chance. See ya later, cutie."

Take my numbah, see ya lay-tah.

Good lord, she thought to herself as she shuffled down the street, now I have a crush on a boy from Brooklyn.

The dueling practice with his friends sounded like a lot of fun. She was a severely sub-par duelist but she enjoyed get-togethers. A girl her age should have been doing something like that anyway, not walking through the darkened streets trying to figure out what to do with the world's biggest secret. She pulled the key out of her pocket and stared down at it with disgust. Such a tiny, inconsequential thing! And yet everybody was willing to die or kill for it. It wasn't about the access to the duel disk blueprints themselves, she realized, it was all about power: who had what and what they were willing to do with it. She wanted to take the key and fling it far, far away. But then what would happen to Ryo? What would Mizumi do to her if she didn't get it back? There was violence and chaos everywhere that she looked.

Blood in the water, sharks in the water. That had always been KaibaCorps moto.

"You look like you could use a bowl of sweet and sour dumpling soup," someone said. She looked up and saw a pleasantly plump woman sitting with her hands folded beneath a purple tarp. Tantalizing smells were wafting from the cozy kitchen behind her. It looked like her shop had been built out of a small warehouse, one of many that lined the quiet street.

"I'll give it to you half price off, how does that sound, dearie? Poor thing, you look absolutely miserable. Is that blood around your nose?"

She wiped the ring of crust from her nostrils. "It is. And yes I am abso-fucking-lutely miserable. Here, can you just-" she thrust the key out in front of her and looked away. "Can you just hold this for two seconds? I...I can't...I just…I need to go make a call."

The woman hesitated. Then she wrapped her large, red fingers around the key and slipped it in her cleavage. There wasn't much real estate there and the key promptly disappeared.

"Safer here than anywhere else," the woman set, patting her breasts. "Go on and make your call, dearie, and then we'll see about getting you a bowl of soup."

Marie turned on her heel as the woman waved and walked towards a nearby phone booth. She had no idea where her cell phone was. Somewhere between making out with Kaiba and comforting Ryo and getting the lights punched out of her by Mizumi, it had gotten lost. She dialed the only number that she knew by heart and waited as the operator put the call through.

"Hey, Mimi. What's up? Wait, hold on-"

She listened as her eldest brother said a few words to her fussy niece and felt a pang of homesickness the likes of which she thought would never come back. He returned to the phone breathless and asked her again what was up.

"I miss you," she said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes. "And nana and Rick and mom and Mona. I just...miss you guys so fucking bad."

"Aww, we miss you too, Mimi. It's crazy over here. Especially now that Rick's business is really taking off. I've never seen so many investors in my life. Hold on….hey, Mona, don't eat the paint, muffin. Daddy will feed you in a second."

She smiled, imagining her niece's chubby cheeks spattered with blue paint.

"Is something wrong?" Her brother asked and she realized that she had been quiet for quite a while.

"No...yes...I dunno...I can't really talk about it. I just think...that I fucked up. Like, for realsies this time no turning back. Real hot water."

"KaibaCorps got you stressed?"

"Mm-hm," she couldn't help it. The tears began to flow down her face again. She moved the phone away from her cheek and began to sob into her hand. She heard her brother calling her on the line and she quickly put the phone to her ear.

"-Mimi, did you hear me? I said 'maybe it's time to come back.' Like I said, Rick's business is really moving now. We can make a place for you, get you back your old position. I told you that you should never have left to join KaibaCorps. It was just too soon and everyone knows that KaibaCorps is controversial. I was never happy to see you go."

"It's not that. I can handle my job. It's just that something happened and I got thrown into the middle of it and I can't get out and everybody's depending on me to make the right choice and-"

"It's a confidential matter, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is."

Her brother sighed. "Mimi, what are you, the Social Media Manager, right? And you're still young. You have no business handling the confidential matters of KaibaCorporations."

"I know that, Aaron. Jeez, I know! I didn't ask for any of this!"

"So tell me in a riddle what's wrong."

"I'm in possession of something that everybody wants. I got tased and beat up for it. And if I don't play my cards right, my friend might be killed over it."

"What the fu...what the fudge is this, Marie? The mafia?! You need to get rid of whatever you have in your possession and come back home now."

"I can't! I can't run away! There's too much at stake! If for whatever reason you don't hear from me after this, I want you to tell everybody that I love them so much and-"

The phone booth was blasted with light. She shielded her eyes and looked out the glass. Several large helicopters were circling above her with their lights trained on the booth. She heard staticky male voices making gruff demands over an intercom. Wind was picked up from the thumping wings. She fell back into the booth and pressed the phone against her ear. She had seen the KC insignia on every single one of the helicopters.

"Aaron?!"

"Wise move, telling your family that you love them," came Seto's staticky voice. "You're right. You may never see them again."

She looked at the phone in alarm and then pressed it to her ear again. Of course, she should have known. Seto probably had every damn phone in the city tapped. "Seto," she said over the sound of the helicopters. "What the hell is this?"

"You have something that belongs to me."

"I don't know what you're talking abou-"

Several men in suits burst into the telephone booth and grabbed her by both arms. They wrestled her to the ground and slapped a pair of handcuffs over her wrists. A bag was thrown over her head and she was forcefully marched out of the booth.

"Locked and ready," one of the men said into his radio. Something was hooked onto her back and she was yanked into the air towards a waiting helicopter.