The Mafia's Daughter

Chapter 3

"So the tiger is actually an ability?" Akutagawa asks the trembling man in front of him. He had already talked with four different informants who couldn't give him much information at all, and he was getting frustrated. He's sure that either Dazai or Nakahara had been put on the case to find the tiger, knowing that the situation was one that would have been given to the Armed Detective Agency, but he hasn't heard anything about them being on the case either making his job of informing Dazai and Nakahara that much harder. He needs to get information to them soon without tipping off Mori that he knows who the child is.

"Y-yes," the man stutters. "I was at the warehouse when the brown haired guy in the trenchcoat stopped it with his bare hands. I heard him say something about an agency, and then a bunch of others arrived and took the two kids with them."

Finally, some information he could use. Of course, he has to report what he was told to Mori. He truly hopes that revealing the fact that Dazai is part of the Armed Detective Agency doesn't ruin things for him and Nakahara. "And the leopard?"

"A small girl who looked to be the tiger's sister," the man replies. "It sounded like the guy who stopped the tiger and the short red haired guy were talking about adopting her, but they kept talking about her as if she was more than one person."

It takes everything in Akutagawa not to smack his forehead in exasperation. Of course a simple guy wouldn't understand the things he does having been trained by Dazai. The man was an enigma, most of the time identifying as a man with the occasional day of being his birth gender. He would even go so far as to wear dresses on days where he didn't feel like a girl just to annoy people by mocking offense at being misgendered and doing the same on his rare feminine days by wearing his normal get-up.

"Thank you for the information," Akutagawa tells the man before stalking out of their meeting place.

"W-what about the reward you promised?" the man asks needing money far more than he feared the dark man who was questioning him.

Akutagawa tosses a package over his shoulder towards the man. "Tell no one of our conversation, not even my boss. If you do, I will end you."

The man nods quickly at Akutagawa's back, taking the package and scuttling away as Akutagawa continues on his way to talk to Mori. He'll have to amend some of what he was told. Under no circumstances is Mori to know that Nakahara and Dazai plan to adopt the snow leopard, but he can at least tell him that Dazai captured the tiger on behalf of the Armed Detective Agency. It's been long enough, and the president of that agency should be able to protect them should it come to that. If Mori faked Sakura's death in the first place, he knows that the bastard will keep her alive, so she isn't in any immediate danger, at least, no more than she already was.

As soon as he enters the Mori Corp building, the white cat appears at his feet, something that had been a common occurrence since the day he saw Sakura. He's sure that the cat is the one who let the girl out of whatever room Mori had been keeping her in, and that it's telling him to hurry and save her. He simply ignores it, though, refusing to verbalize his plans to save the girl out loud anywhere within that building. Mori has too many ears to risk that. He continues walking to Mori's office without bothering the cat with a second glance to give him the information that he learned ready to be sent after the tiger at any moment. He'll use the tiger to get his information to Dazai no matter what.

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Dazai stretches out all the stiff joints in his back as soon as he wakes feeling more refreshed than he has in a while. He looks down at the small child on the bed that he had just stood up from with a gentle smile on his face. At first, he had planned to get the child situated in the guest room of his and Chuuya's apartment, but after weeks on the street, the child had gotten used to sleeping with their brother and insisted on sleeping in bed with Dazai, but not Chuuya. Chuuya had simply sighed and offered to sleep in the guest room instead since their shared bed was more suited to multiple people than the one in the guest room. If he wants to actually sleep with his husband, he'll have to start getting Youko accustomed to sleeping on their own.