The cage door swung open and Yuto stepped out stiffly, wrists still bound, blinking in the morning light.

The Masaru estate was enormous.

That was the first and most immediate impression — the sheer scale of it, the way it sat on its plot of land with the comfortable permanence of something that had never needed to justify its existence. Polished stone everywhere he looked. Dark expensive wood on the framing and the gates and the doors. Windows that were actually clean. A courtyard wider than the entire block he and Gina lived on, paved evenly with fitted stone rather than the packed dirt and repaired gaps he was used to navigating every morning.

Yuto had known, intellectually, that nobles lived differently. He had simply never stood inside the difference before.

He kept moving.

A guard directed him alongside Gina across the courtyard and through a side entrance, into a wide hall that smelled like clean stone and something faintly floral — dried arrangements on a shelf somewhere, or whatever wealthy people put in hallways to make them smell like money. They were left there without ceremony, two guards posted nearby and more moving back and forth through the corridor beyond.

Yuto stayed close to Gina.

He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t either be overheard or sound hollow, and Yuto had never been good at hollow. He stood close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching and watched the guards move and listened.

Fragments reached him. The older man in the corridor — grey at the temples, face partially turned away — was speaking in the low deliberate tone of someone managing a situation rather than reacting to it. The guards responded in short sentences. Nothing Yuto caught gave him anything useful.

Then the sound came from outside.

It started as murmuring — the particular murmur of people moving in a group toward something — and within moments it grew into something else entirely. Servants and family members spilling into the courtyard to see the carriage. The body being moved. And then the crying started, and it was genuine, the way crying always is when it comes from people who have just understood that someone they loved is not coming back.

Women sobbing. A child somewhere asking a question to an adult who couldn’t answer it. The sounds layered on top of each other and drifted through the hall walls with the muffled clarity of grief that doesn’t bother containing itself.

Yuto watched the solemn scene happening before him.

Then he clicked his tongue, very quietly, almost to himself.

Look at them mourning him like he wasn’t a complete scumbag.

The thought arrived before he could stop it, sharp and uncharitable, and he knew it was cruel the moment it landed — he could see them out there, the genuine devastation on their faces, the way the older women held each other and the younger ones pressed their hands to their mouths like Gina had that morning. They were real. Their grief was real. Teki had been a son and a cousin and a family member to people who were not Yuto, and those people were now standing in a courtyard finding out he was dead.

He knew all of that.

And he also knew what Teki had been every morning for the past months, standing in their doorway wearing that smirk, speaking to Gina in that tone, making that specific threat this morning like it was a casual thing to say. Like she was something that could simply be taken.

’Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Several more minutes passed. Then a guard approached — different one, older, with the clipped manner of someone who gave instructions for a living and expected them to be followed.

"You. Move."

Yuto’s feet didn’t shift.

"Gina," he said immediately. "Where is she going?"

"She stays."

"That’s not what I asked."

The guard looked at him with the flat patience of a man who had already decided how much he cared about this conversation.

"The head of the Masaru family hasn’t returned yet. Until he does, you’ll be held in the male dungeon. The girl stays under house arrest. She’ll be given a room."

Yuto held the guard’s gaze for another second. Then he exhaled.

A room. Not a cell. House arrest, not a cage. She would be warm. She would be off the ground. Whatever came next, she wasn’t being put in a dungeon, which was more than Yuto had allowed himself to hope for in the last hour.

He looked at Gina.

She was watching him with that expression she got sometimes — the one that looked calm from a distance and was doing a great deal of quiet work up close. He couldn’t say anything useful. He settled for looking at her in a way that he hoped communicated *you’re going to be fine* rather than *I am deeply uncertain about everything.*

She gave him a small nod.

He followed the guard.

-----

The dungeon was exactly what a dungeon should be.

Yuto had not spent a great deal of time imagining dungeons, but if he had, it would have looked more or less like this — old stone, old damp, rusted iron on the bars that suggested the rust was historical rather than neglected. Torches in the corridor casting the kind of light that was technically sufficient and spiritually miserable. The smell of a place that had been underground for a long time and had made peace with it.

He was shown to a cell, the door was opened, and he was shoved inside without particular ceremony.

He registered, in the moment the door swung shut, that the cell was not empty.

The man was large. That was the first thing — not tall exactly, but broad in the way that suggested his frame had been built up over years of actual physical work rather than anything recreational. Weathered face, the kind that came from time outdoors rather than age. He was sitting against the far wall with his back straight and his hands loose on his knees, looking at nothing in particular, with the particular patience of someone who had been in this cell long enough to have made some arrangement with the wait.

He looked at Yuto when Yuto came in.

Yuto looked back.

Then Yuto crossed to the opposite corner — the one furthest from the man, which was not very far, because the cell was not large — and sat down against the wall. He pulled his knees up, rested his bound wrists on them, and stared at the middle distance.

He did not want to talk.

He wanted, in fact, the precise opposite of talking. He wanted the particular silence of being left alone with something too large to think about properly, the kind of silence where the thinking doesn’t have to be organized or useful or productive, just — present. Just existing alongside the weight of it until some part of him figured out where to put it.

He stared at the wall across from him.

The wall had nothing useful to contribute.

Silence stretched between them — five seconds, ten, long enough that Yuto had begun to cautiously believe his corner preference was going to be respected.

Then the man smiled. It was a small smile, not unkind, the smile of someone who has seen a particular expression on a particular kind of face enough times to recognize it.

"Rough day?"

Yuto closed his eyes and groaned inwardly.