Tokyo Ink

*Also available as part of the Courtesans of the Apocalypse collection*

Shimizu - the once-glittering glass pyramid in the middle of Tokyo Bay that housed a million people - is now a crumbling super-prison owned by Iyashii Corporation. Tetsu Hogosha's mother was caught in the city's conversion. In a criminal system where the care and feeding of a child adds time to the mother's crime, she signed him away to be an Iyashii bond employee as her only chance at freedom.

Now Tetsu is a free man and head of Iyashii's security forces for the country. But he has a secret sideline that might one day break Iyashii's hold on Shimizu. For months, he has watched the male dancer serving Iyashii's executive tea room. Tetsu knows every flawless movement the male geisha will make, from tea ceremony, to fan dance, to the slow revelation of his naked, tattooed flesh before he takes the executives, alone or in pairs, into the bedroom suite adjoining the tea room to satisfy their every desire.

For just as long, Tetsu has tried to convince himself he watches his unwitting accomplice only to record the secret messages embedded in the tattoos. But when Iyashii sends its top assassin after the male geisha, Tetsu is faced with the cold hard choice of protecting the message and its secret language at all costs or rescuing the one man capable of challenging his loyalties.