The knocking didn’t stop.

Yuto shoved his chair back with a sharp exhale and stood. He already knew — had known since the first rap landed, clean and deliberate and entirely too confident for this hour of the morning. Nobody else knocked like that. Nobody else had the particular audacity to show up at the door of two people who had nothing, wearing the expression of someone who had everything, just to remind them of the difference.

He crossed the apartment in a few strides and pulled the door open.

Teki Masaru stood in the doorway looking exactly as infuriating as Yuto remembered — perfectly composed, hair sitting right, that smirk already in place like he’d arranged his face before knocking. The kind of handsome that came from three generations of good nutrition and the complete absence of hardship. He looked at Yuto the way a person looks at furniture they’re considering rearranging.

Screw this guy, Yuto thought.

"Do you seriously have nothing better to do," he said, "than come torment two peasants every morning?"

Teki appeared to consider this genuinely.

"Not really," he said. "I actually cleared my schedule for it."

He said it like a joke. He meant it like a fact.

Before Yuto could respond, Teki simply walked in — not pushing past exactly, just moving forward with the calm assumption that space would be made for him, the way people who have never been told no tend to move through the world. Yuto’s jaw tightened. His fists closed at his sides.

He didn’t move.

Touching a noble — even this one, even now — wasn’t a matter of winning or losing a fight. It was a matter of what happened afterward. The Masaru family didn’t need evidence. They didn’t need a trial. They needed an excuse, and Yuto putting hands on Teki would be an extremely good one. Whatever happened to Yuto, he could survive. What they might manufacture against Gina was a different calculation entirely.

So Yuto stood still, and breathed, and watched.

Then Teki saw Gina.

She was still at the table, which meant she was still wearing his shirt — the old grey one, hanging off her shoulder, her hair not yet fully pulled together for the day. She looked comfortable. She looked like someone who lived here and belonged here, which she did, because she did. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Teki let out a low whistle.

"Well," he said, voice dropping into something lazy and deliberate. "Don’t you look good this morning."

The rage moved through Yuto fast enough that it nearly felt physical — a heat that started in his chest and reached his hands before he’d made any decision about it. He stepped between them.

"Get out," he said.

Teki’s smirk widened. He seemed genuinely pleased. This was, Yuto understood with sudden clarity, the whole point. The visit, the timing, the walking in uninvited — all of it had been pointing toward this exact moment. Teki wanted the reaction. He was enjoying it.

"Or what?" Teki said.

Yuto said nothing.

That silence seemed to amuse him even more. Teki shifted his gaze back toward Gina, stepping around Yuto with the easy confidence of someone who had never encountered a consequence he couldn’t have removed. His voice dropped lower, taking on something that made Yuto’s skin crawl.

"One of these days," Teki said, "if you don’t come with me willingly—" a pause, a smile, "—I might just have to come take you instead."

Something inside Yuto’s chest cracked cleanly in half.

He grabbed Teki by the collar and shoved him hard toward the door.

It happened fast after that.

Teki swung without hesitation — there was muscle under the noble’s clothes, Yuto registered distantly, real training, not just decoration — and the hit clipped his jaw hard enough to send a white flash across his vision. Teki laughed. An actual laugh, bright and wild, like this was the most fun he’d had in weeks.

Something in Yuto stopped calculating.

He hit back.

And then he kept hitting.

He wasn’t thinking. That was the thing he would understand later, in the part of this that came after — that at some point the part of him that weighed consequences and ran numbers and thought carefully about the Masaru family and what they could do to Gina simply went quiet. What replaced it wasn’t rage exactly. It was something older and simpler and considerably less interested in outcomes.

Teki landed another hit. Yuto barely felt it.

He rushed forward, drove Teki back into the wall, and the sound of the impact was wrong — too solid, too final — and then Yuto was hitting him again and the wall was getting darker and Teki had stopped laughing and stopped moving and Yuto’s hands were still moving because the thing that had taken over didn’t have an off switch.

A scream cut through it.

It was Gina’s.

Yuto stopped.

He stood there breathing — actually breathing, hard, in a way that meant he’d been at it for longer than he’d realized — and the room came back in pieces. The wall. His hands. The red on the wall. Teki’s body hanging in his grip, completely still, his head at an angle that Yuto’s mind refused to process for a long moment because processing it meant accepting it.

He let go.

Teki slid down.

Yuto stared at his own hands.

I killed a noble.

Not the thought he expected to have first. Not the thought a decent person probably had first. But it was the one that arrived, immediate and cold and utterly clarifying, the way certain thoughts are when they carry the specific weight of something that cannot be undone.

He had killed Teki Masaru.

He had killed a noble with his bare hands in his own apartment while Gina watched.

The fear didn’t build gradually. It landed all at once, the way a ceiling comes down — one moment the structure is there, and then it simply isn’t, and you’re standing in the rubble trying to remember what the room used to look like.

Then the door came off its hinges.

Guards. Three of them, maybe four — Yuto couldn’t count properly, couldn’t think properly, could only stand in the middle of the room with red on his hands and Teki on the floor and Gina somewhere behind him making a sound he had never heard from her before and would spend a long time trying to forget.

The guards took in the scene and their eyes widened in horror.