The first thing Jasper noticed that night was how quiet the city felt.

  No, the quiet was inside him. One of those rare moments where the endless inner monologue shut up for a second and let him breathe. He was polishing glasses, leaning behind the bar at the end of another long, underpaid shift. His wrists ached and his lower back twinged when he leaned, but his hands moved on their own, circular motions, cloth dragging across cool glass.

  The place smelled like spilled beer and old wood. A trace of fryer oil. Neon from the red sign outside stuttered across the walls, making the bar look like it was bleeding light.

  Jasper Renwick had been in Tokyo for ten years and still didn’t feel like he belonged. He liked the city, the pulse of it, the way it flickered between ultramodern and ancient, how the streets wrapped around shrines like ivy around old stone. But it wasn’t home. Not really.

  Home had cracked the day his brother’s motorcycle slid under a lorry on a wet Scottish highway.

  Six months later, Jasper packed his things, dropped out of his Electrical Engineering course, and flew halfway across the world with nothing but a bartending certificate and a desire to be somewhere Liam had never been.

  Tokyo was supposed to be temporary. It turned into a decade of pouring drinks, making small talk with strangers, and always being just outside the conversation.

  He worked nights at a tucked-away expat bar in Shibuya—cheap drinks, half-decent music, and the kind of regulars who didn’t ask too many questions. The place was called “The Tilted Crown”, a leftover from some long-gone British owner, and nobody ever bothered to change the name.

  He looked up at the mirrored shelf behind the bottles and caught his own reflection. Thirty-six. Pale in a way you can’t really hide, even after ten years in a humid city. Dark hair slick back with pomade. A couple of lines around the eyes now, the kind that don’t vanish when you stop smiling. He’d been in Tokyo a decade, but he still looked like the foreigner people avoided eye contact with on the train.

  Jasper wasn’t sad, exactly. Just... tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. He reached for another glass when the bell above the door jingled.

  Unusual. That late, most nights, only drunk salary-men stumbled in. But the man who stepped in didn’t look drunk. Didn’t look drunk at all.

  Riku. Young guy. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Black jacket zipped up tight, with shoes too expensive for someone who only ever ordered one drink and tipped nothing. He always sat in the same corner booth. Watched people too closely. Twitchy, like he’d been born under a strobe light.

  Jasper kept his face neutral. “Hey.”

  Riku nodded once and slid into his usual spot. “Quiet tonight.”

  “Mm.”

  “Good.”

  Jasper didn’t ask questions. He never had, and that was part of the reason people like Riku kept showing up. But lately, Jasper had started to notice things. Tapping his phone constantly, glancing over his shoulder and only showing up when the club scene was dying down. Jasper had his suspicions. Tokyo had strict drug laws, and the police didn’t play games. The strange mix of clientele who’d come in and greet him with fast, quiet words in bathrooms or out by the dumpsters. If Riku was dealing in the clubs, he was dancing with ghosts.

  Tokyo didn’t mess around with drugs. Not here. You got caught, even with a joint, and you were gone. Months of detention. Faces pixelated on the news. Foreigners deported. Locals ruined. Jasper had seen it happen more than once. He didn’t like it.

  He poured Riku a whiskey without being asked.

  Riku nodded, took a sip, and leaned back like a man watching shadows.

  Ten minutes passed. Then twenty.

  And then the door opened again.

  Three men. All in black. Well-cut suits. Not the salaryman kind. The fabric moved differently, the way good money moves—like it’s never in a rush. Two tall, one short and wide, with a jaw like a bad decision. They didn’t speak. Just scanned the bar, locked eyes with Riku, and walked straight to him.

  Jasper felt the shift before anything was said. The air changed. Got thinner.

  “Come outside,” said the shortest one in Japanese. His voice was flat. Practiced.

  Riku smiled. Nervous. “Just having a drink, man.”

  “You know what this is about.” “Heard you’ve been selling things that aren’t yours to sell.”

  Jasper cleared his throat. “Hey, if there’s a problem, maybe take it outside...”

  The tall one turned his head, slowly, and looked at Jasper like he was furniture that had learned to talk.

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  Riku stood. But he didn’t move toward the door.

  The tallest picked up a bottle from the table. Sake. Thick glass. Probably empty.

  Jasper opened his mouth to say something. He’s still not sure what. Maybe “Don’t,” maybe “Stop,” maybe just “Hey.”

  But the bottle was already in motion.

  The crack wasn’t loud. It was... wrong. Blunt. Not like in movies.

  The bottle didn’t break.

  Riku’s head did.

  He went down like a puppet dropped from a height. A smear of red on the corner of the table. Blood blooming across the cheap vinyl. The silence that followed was worse than the sound.

  Jasper’s hands were frozen mid-reach. His brain refused to process what he’d seen.

  Blood. Too much blood.

  The tallest one dropped the bottle on the booth seat and wiped his hand on a napkin. Casual. Efficient.

  They all turned to look at Jasper.

  He froze. Not because he was brave. Not because he wanted to help. Just because shock is sticky. Time doesn’t feel real when you’re trying to decide if what you just saw was actually real.

  No one spoke.

  And then the short one reached into his coat pocket.

  Jasper moved. He didn’t remember deciding to. But suddenly he was behind the bar, out of the back door locking it behind him in one move.

  He staggered into the alleyway behind the bar, one hand bracing on the damp wall, trying to remember how to breathe. Cold sweat ran down his back. The air outside wasn’t fresh—it was electric with neon and exhaust and the faint hum of a city pretending to be asleep. Tokyo after midnight: wet pavement, humming transformers, the scent of cheap ramen and cheap decisions. He started running into the night.

  What the hell just happened?

  His legs kept moving before his brain caught up. He turned left without thinking, heading deeper into a narrow alley lined with locked doors and humming AC units dripping condensation. His footsteps echoed too loud.

  Riku was dead.

  That was blood. That sound was real.

  And they’d looked at him.

  Not as a witness. As a loose end.

  He stopped under a flickering security light and pressed both palms to the wall, trying to ground himself. The concrete was rough and cold.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. This kind of thing didn’t happen. Not to him. Not really. He was a bartender. A guy who made decent old-fashioneds and remembered regulars' names. He was not the guy in a crime story. He didn’t run from murder scenes.

  Except now, he was.

  Jasper looked down and realized he still had the bar rag in his hand. He tossed it like it might incriminate him, and it hit the pavement with a wet slap. Then he continued to run.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  He considered calling the police. But what would he even say? That three men walked into his workplace, killed someone, and he ran? That he suspected the guy was a dealer but never said anything? That he’d been hit in the face with a bottle once, in Glasgow, and now every time glass clinked, he flinched a little?

  No. The police weren’t going to help him.

  And if those men were yakuza—and that’s what it felt like, even if he didn’t want to admit it—then there was a whole different set of rules now. A set he didn’t understand. Foreigners didn’t get warnings. They got blamed. Or disappeared.

  He could not even call anybody. He’d left everything behind. Phone. Wallet. Keys. His jacket.

  Jasper took a deep breath and kept running. Away from the bar. Away from anything familiar.

  The city was quieter here—residential blocks with shuttered shops and vending machines that buzzed like insects. He passed a row of silent pachinko parlors. Their signs still lit, trying to lure ghosts.

  His legs hurt. The adrenaline was starting to crash, and in its place came the creeping edge of pain from where he’d knocked his shoulder in the doorway. But he didn’t stop.

  The streets were cold and wet.

  Not in the cinematic way—no dramatic neon reflections or pounding synth beats—just wet. Just Tokyo at 2:07 in the morning, still humming with life but quiet, like it had turned away from the drama inside that bar. He ducked into a side street, then another. His breath clouded the air.

  And Riku.

  Dead. Or dying. Jasper wasn’t a doctor. He hadn’t stayed long enough to know.

  He tried to think.

  But there was nothing to think. Only images. Riku’s head snapping sideways. The dead weight of his body. The sound—God, the sound.

  What the hell just happened?

  A man was murdered. In your bar. With you standing there.

  You ran.

  Should he have stayed? Called someone?

  No.

  He couldn’t.

  This wasn’t Scotland. This wasn’t the UK, where maybe you could call the cops and explain. This was Japan. And Japan didn’t mess around. No drugs. No association. No looking the wrong way at the wrong people.

  And the men who’d come in. Jasper had heard enough to know what suits like that meant.

  Organized. Connected. Dangerous.

  If they saw him as a witness—if they hadn’t already pegged him as part of it...

  He shivered.

  There was no one to call. No friends.

  He was alone.

  And he had to get out of the city.

  Anywhere. Just not here.

  Not Shibuya. Not this blinking, labyrinthine maze of alleys and storefronts that all looked the same when you were panicking. The sakura season was still two months away, but a few early petals clung to branches above him—ghostly and pale in the glow of a flickering streetlamp.

  Jasper stumbled forward, one foot in front of the other, as if the act of moving might keep him from cracking in half.

  Somewhere behind him, in a puddle-stained alleyway, the Tilted Crown sat dark and quiet, as if none of it had ever happened.

  Jasper walked until his feet stopped hurting.

  It wasn’t a conscious decision. His body simply surrendered. Somewhere in Minato. He wasn’t sure anymore. The streets had unspooled around him like film off a reel—flickering, disjointed, all noise and shadow.

  It was past three now. The city had dipped into its half-sleep. The crowds were gone, the trains were quiet, and even the ramen shops had pulled down their shutters. This wasn’t the Tokyo that made it into Instagram reels—the glittering, hyper-alive metropolis. This was its forgotten twin, haunted by fluorescent ghosts and the occasional stray cat.

  He found a quiet alley behind a FamilyMart and slumped against a stack of crates.

  His hands were shaking again.

  He lit a cigarette. A bad idea, probably, but so was everything else.

  You should call someone.

  He couldn’t.

  Not the police. Not the embassy. He didn’t even know if Riku was really dead.

  He stared at the ember at the tip of his smoke until it blurred.

  “Just breathe,” he muttered, barely audible.

  The rain had stopped. A streetlamp nearby fizzled and blinked. He looked up, then down the alley—and froze.

  There was a door at the end of it.