Page 57 of The Dragon 2
Kenji
How does one catch a tiger?
I stood before the full-length mirror framed in gold.
My reflection stared back—collar open, sleeves unfastened, the final touches of my tuxedo waiting for my attendants to arrive.
The Scarlet Suite atMaison du Sang—the House of Blood—was a place for sinners who preferred silence with a view. It sat at the crown of the 8th arrondissement, in a hotel only spoken behind velvet gloves and cigar smoke.
From the outside,Maison du Sanglooked like a dormant palace.
But inside?
Inside, it pulsed with the kind of wealth that demanded worship.
My suite was soaked in sexual history. Crimson velvet walls gleamed under the Baccarat chandeliers. They say King Léon IV brought his mistress here during the winter of 1726. She was a Black courtesan from Martinique, draped in pearls and scandal. The king had declared the space his ‘private chapel.’
And it was here where he worshiped her.
That courtesan had screamed with pleasure in this suite. She had moaned against the glass, her bare brown skin fogging the window as the king took her from behind with a moonlit Paris as their witness.
She had cried out his name with each thrust.
Did she moanLéon?
Or was it,King?
We would never know what she screamed.
What she begged for.
What she surrendered.
But what historydoesremember is that the King moaned a lot over his mistress. There were multiple written accounts—scandalous notations tucked in the back of the hotel’s housekeeping journals and letters penned by startled maids. The king groaned her name over and over during his visits here, so loudly that staff recorded it like weather.
In the past year, there had been a whole protest in Paris among citizens to allow these items to be on public display, but the French government would not obey. Even now, they did their best to erase the courtesan from history. No one even knew her name anymore.
To this day, most of those entries remained in the basement archives of the Royal Textile Museum, filed under “miscellaneous domestic anecdotes.”
Apparently, there was an infamous entry from the Queen’s own lady-in-waiting, the morning she caught King Léon napping in the garden chapel, hand on his chest, mumbling the courtesan’s name in his sleep over and over.
The French are an interesting bunch, but now I finally understand the King more than I am comfortable with.
I put my view on the right and spoke to Goro across the room. "Play it again."
“Yes, sir.” Goro lifted the iPad without a word and tapped the screen.
The footage began.
A modest Tokyo apartment showed.White walls, clean lines, a faint shadow of the city skyline filtered through the rice paper window.
Everything so, unworthy of my Tiger.
Nyomi and Zo sat cross-legged on the futon—that pathetic, narrow piece of furniture that folded like origami and offended me every time I imagined her sleeping on it.
She deserved seven condos with seven beds—one draped in crushed violet velvet, another slick with black silk. One carved low into cool marble, another warmed by underfloor embers. A bed for dreaming. One for surrender. Another for when she was being worshipped by me.
She would never be bored with where she slept.
