The tour of the estate lasted two hours.
Yasumasa led it with the enthusiasm of soone who had been waiting for an audience and had prepared extensively for the occasion — every room, every corridor, every courtyard presented with the particular energy of a man describing sothing he loved primarily because it was his. The forge operations, the weapons storage, the scale of the production, the contracts his father had built over decades — he moved through all of it with Sakura at his side and spoke at length and with genuine pleasure about each subject.
Mostly about himself.
The domain would pass to him when his father was gone. The wealth it represented was considerable and growing. The alliance her father had proposed was shrewd — Yasumasa’s words, delivered with the satisfied tone of soone who had arrived at a favorable assessnt of a situation that also happened to involve them. She was, he said at one point while they stood in a corridor overlooking the main forge yard, quite fortunate in how this had arranged itself.
Sakura kept her smile in place through all of it.
She was practiced at this. Years of formal dinners and diplomatic receptions and conversations with powerful n who needed to feel heard had given her the specific skill of maintaining a warm and attentive expression while the surface of her mind managed the performance and everything underneath it went sowhere quieter. She asked questions when questions were appropriate. She laughed when laughter was appropriate. She expressed admiration for the things that were being shown to her and kept the admiration at exactly the right level — genuine enough to be convincing, asured enough not to encourage more.
It was tiring work.
And Yasumasa’s hands didn’t stay still.
He was a toucher — or had decided to be one, at least with her, today, on the first day they had t. A guiding hand at the small of her back as they moved from room to room. A hand at her shoulder when he indicated sothing worth looking at. Brief, repeated contacts that individually might each have been explained away as the natural casualness of a host directing a guest, but taken together accumulated into sothing with a specific quality that Sakura’s body registered even as her expression refused to.
She told herself it was fine.
He would be her husband. This was going to be her life and this was who her life was going to be with and the sooner she adjusted to that reality the better. Her father had made the decision for reasons that mattered — their people needed the weapons, their domain needed the alliance, and she was what she was, which was the instrunt through which that need could be t. That was the shape of her duty and she had accepted the shape of her duty a long ti ago.
She was fine.
Behind them, two steps back in the corridor, Takefusa and Akiko moved like furniture — present, necessary, and addressed to almost zero by anyone in the room.
Akiko was not fine.
She walked with her hands clasped tightly in front of her and her eyes tracking Yasumasa’s hands with a fixed, burning attention that she was managing only barely. She had been doing this since the second corridor, her jaw set tighter with each casual contact.
"Takefusa-dono," she finally said, her voice dropped low enough for only him to hear. "He is very disrespectful toward the Princess."
"You shouldn’t say such things," Takefusa said, his voice equally low, his eyes forward. "Princess Sakura is promised to him. There is nothing alarming here."
"But this is the first day they have t," Akiko said. "And Sakura-hi is clearly uncomfortable."
"If Princess Sakura says nothing, neither should you." Takefusa’s voice had the final quality of soone closing a door. He didn’t look at her.
Akiko pressed her lips together and nodded. Once, reluctant, the nod of soone who had been given the correct answer and found it entirely insufficient.
She kept walking.
The dinner that followed was a formal affair in Sadamasa’s hall — long tables, careful seating, food that reflected the domain’s prosperity even if the domain’s air did not. Sadamasa himself spoke little, observing the table with the contained authority of a man who didn’t need to fill silences because silence itself answered to him. Yasumasa more than compensated, his conversation ranging across every subject connected to himself and his future and the considerable advantages of being exactly where he was.
Sakura ate and smiled and answered when answered was required.
By the ti the dinner concluded and the evening arrangents were made and Yasumasa had finally — finally — released her from his orbit with a bow and a lingering look that lasted slightly too long. Not physical exhaustion. The other kind. The kind that lived behind the eyes.
She walked to her quarters with Akiko beside her, their sandals quiet on the corridor planks, the hamr sounds coming through the walls at a lower register now — the night shift, fewer workers, but never silent. Never fully silent in this place.
The sliding door closed behind them.
Akiko turned.
"Are you all right, Hi?" The question was quiet and direct, all of the restrained worry of the past two hours sitting openly in her expression now that the audience was gone.
"I am." Sakura smiled at her. "Thank you, Akiko."
Akiko looked at her for a mont with the expression of soone who had more to say and was deciding whether to say it.
"Hi," she started carefully. "If Yasumasa-sama’s... if the way he touches you makes you uncomfortable, you shouldn’t have to — you don’t have to simply accept—"
Sakura looked at her with genuine surprise. Then the surprise softened into sothing warm.
"It’s fine," she said. "He will be my husband, Akiko."
"But he isn’t yet," Akiko said quietly.
Sakura’s expression shifted . "Please don’t say anything more about it. I’m worried about what it could bring on you."
Akiko’s hands ca together in front of her, her fingers pressing tightly. She held Sakura’s gaze for a mont with everything she wanted to say present and visible and then she nodded.
"Yes, Hi."
The door slid open.
The sound was quiet and imdiate and the silence that followed it was the particular silence of a room that has just changed entirely in character. Akiko’s face went from restrained worry to white in the space between one breath and the next.
Yasumasa stood in the doorway.
He was looking at Akiko.
"I heard quite dangerous words just now," he said. His voice had lost the warmth it had carried all afternoon . "Words like those carry a consequence. Execution, typically."
Akiko’s mouth opened. Nothing ca out. She stood with her gaze dropped, her whole body gone still her face going pale.
"Please." Sakura was already moving, already bowing her head, her voice coming out quickly and clearly. "I beg you — please. She was only worried for . There was no ill intention, Yasumasa-sama, none at all. She spoke out of devotion. Please don’t punish her for it, I beg you."
Yasumasa looked at the top of her head for a mont.
"I will consider it," he said. "But you’ll need to convince ." He stepped back from the doorway. "Co with . Alone."
The last word landed with its full weight.
Akiko’s eyes went to Sakura’s face — wide, the fear for herself already secondary to the fear of sothing else — but she couldn’t speak. The word execution was still sitting in the room with all its specific implications.
Sakura raised her head. Her expression was composed. Whatever was happening behind it was entirely invisible.
She nodded quickly and stepped out of the room, falling into step beside Yasumasa as the corridor received them, the sliding door drawing the lamplight of the room behind her until the distance turned it to nothing.
Yasumasa walked beside her, unhurried.
"You disliked touching you that much?" he asked. His voice had recovered so of its earlier pleasantness.
"N...Not at all," Sakura said.
Sakura followed him with steps that didn’t feel entirely like her own.
The corridor moved around her — the lamplight along the walls, the hamr sounds coming through the stone at a low persistent vibration, the smoke sll that lived in every part of this castle — and she moved through it with her eyes on Yasumasa’s back and her hands pressed together in front of her to keep them still.
"Do you care that much about a simple servant?" Yasumasa asked without turning.
"Yes," Sakura said. Simply, directly. Whatever else was happening she was not going to pretend otherwise.
"Then we shall see precisely how much you care," he said.
He said it pleasantly.
They stopped in front of a door.
His room. Sakura knew it without being told — the placent, the slight difference in the door’s quality, the guard who had been standing further down the corridor and had now conveniently disappeared.
Yasumasa slid the door open.
"Go inside."
Sakura looked at the open door. Then at him. His eyes were entirely cold — the warmth only in his voice, never reaching his expression, the two things operating independently of each other in a way that was more frightening than simple anger would have been.
"Do you want the girl to live or not?"
Sakura’s whole body trembled once — a single involuntary movent from her shoulders down — and then she stepped inside.
Her steps were unsteady. She could feel each one separately in a way that walking normally didn’t produce, her body registering the threshold as sothing significant even as she crossed it.
Yasumasa followed her in and slid the door closed behind him.
The room was large and well-appointed — the best room in the castle, the lacquered furniture and the quality of the lamp placent confirming it. Under other circumstances it would have been a beautiful room.
He turned to face her.
"Don’t be afraid," he said. "You are going to be my wife. It was always going to happen. I have simply decided I want to take you now rather than later."
"...Perhaps later," Sakura managed. Her voice ca out smaller than she intended — a squeezed, frightened sound that she imdiately regretted producing because she heard it herself and knew he heard it too.
"Later?" He tilted his head. "Then perhaps I should go back and have that servant killed after all."
"No—!" The word ca out sharp and imdiate, and with it the tears arrived — not slowly but all at once, running down her cheeks before she had made any decision about them, her body announcing the fear her composure had been holding at the surface. "No, please, please don’t—"
Yasumasa stopped.
He looked at her tears with the expression of soone who had been handed sothing unexpected and found it more interesting than the thing they had been expecting. His tongue touched his lower lip once.
"So frightened," he said softly, stepping toward her. "Of this? Of ?" His hand reached out and found her hair — the cherry blossom pink, long, falling over her shoulder — and his fingers moved through it. "Such beautiful hair. Such a beautiful face." He looked at her with the satisfied expression of soone taking inventory. "I am quite lucky. And I will enjoy this."
He pushed her.
Not violently — with the flat, casual force of soone who didn’t need to exert themselves, the push landing at her shoulders and sending her backward onto the bed behind her.
"Kya—!"
She slumped against it, her hair spreading around her, one hand bracing against the surface. The lamp on the far wall threw her shadow long across the floor.
Yasumasa moved toward her imdiately, loosening the front of his kimono, his eyes moving over her from head to toe.
"Please." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Please — not now. I am not ready. Please, I am not ready—"
He reached her. His hands found her shoulders — and in one smooth motion pulled the outer kimono down and away, the fabric sliding from her in a whisper, leaving only the thinner underlayer and the pale, unmarked skin visible at her collar and shoulders in the lamplight.
He looked at what the lamplight showed him. His expression said everything about what he intended next.
"If you don’t want that servant to die," he said, his voice dropping lower, "then obey."
Sakura’s lips trembled. Her eyes were full. She looked at his face and found nothing there that was going to change and the hands that had been raised to push him away lowered slowly, the fight going out of them as the reality of her situation replaced it.
"Good," Yasumasa said. He reached toward her again, his voice recovering its pleasant register. "Don’t worry. You will feel—"
The sound that ca next was not a knock.
It was a single clean cut — steel moving through wood with the particular sharp silence of a blade that did not need to announce itself before it arrived, the whisper of an edge so fine that the resistance it encountered was more a formality than an obstacle.
The sliding door did not open.
It ceased.
The wood separated cleanly along the cut line, the pieces falling away from each other and landing on the corridor floor in the quiet specific way that things fell when they had been removed rather than destroyed, and where the door had been there was now simply an open space.
And in the open space, a man.
Dark kimono. Black hair. Black eyes that moved across the room’s contents in one sweep and arrived at their relevant points with unhurried precision.
Kyōi was in his hand sheathed.
Sakura blinked through her tears.
She stared at the figure in the doorway shocked.
The na arrived before the thought did.
"R..Ryo-sama..."
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