ɪ ꜱᴛᴏʟᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛ, ꜱᴏ ɴᴏᴡ ɪ'ᴍ ꜱᴀᴛɪꜱꜰɪᴇᴅ || SAIOUMA

Chapter 4 - D.I.C.E

-Kokichi Pov-

I skipped out of the McDonalds, leaving my beloved Shumai sitting alone.

After a minute of walking, I found myself in a deserted alleyway.

I pulled out my phone. 17 missed calls

Reluctantly, I pressed the call back button. The phone started ringing, and seconds later, it stopped.

'Kokichi? Are you okay?'

I sighed and started walking again. 'Yes, I'm okay! You don't need to check up on me.'

A different voice came onto the phone. 'You can hardly blame us. You vanished in the middle of the night without telling us! Where were you?'

'Meeting up with someone,' I said, 'A detective.'

'A... Kokichi, why were you meeting with a detective?'

I giggled. 'Because he's hot.'

'Geez, you sound like a teenage girl,' someone different said.

'Come on Ayano, you haven't seen him! Shuichi Saihara, look him up.'

Another person spoke up. 'You can show us when you get back home. And don't you dare hang up.'

'Okay, okay, I'm walking now,' I said, walking out of the alleyway, 'I'll be back soon. Besides, what gave you the right to boss me around? I'm your leader, not the other way around.'

The Phantom Thief is known for being a lone criminal, without any associates. In reality, there's something that the media doesn't know about. That something is called D.I.C.E.

D.I.C.E is an organisation lead by none other than me. It consists of 10 members, all orphans who realised their best bets of survival was to stick together.

It started with just me and my childhood friend Itsuki when our orphanage shut down after a girl vanished mysteriously, and another died in a car crash.

We were only twelve at the time, but we somehow managed to survive off stealing from markets and pickpocketing strangers.

One day, things went wrong, and I ended up almost getting kidnapped. Ayano had seen me being carried away and had somehow managed to knock out the culprit. Ever since that day, she has been extremely protective of me, despite being a year younger.

We met Haruki, Kenshin and Taisei at McDonalds. The very same McDonalds that I'd just been in with Shumai, as a matter of fact.

By the time our group of six had met Ryuto and Sosuke, I was 14 and working two jobs. While living in an abandoned house with no legal documents, none of us had to go to school. Instead, we focused on earning enough money to feed eight teenagers.

Despite hating children, I was a reasonably good babysitter. In my whole career, I'd only lost one child!

Yeah, I got fired for that.

One day, I came home to see that Itsuki had found the sisters Natsuki and Mayumi, aged 15 and 12.

Four years later, me and the rest of the "organisation" we had called D.I.C.E are still together.

And we are closer than family.