Chapter 24: Is there anything I can do at all?

"Rough day?"

Yuto opened his eyes.

The man was still looking at him with that small, patient smile — the smile of someone who had been in this cell long enough that a new arrival counted as entertainment.

"I’m not in the mood to talk," Yuto said flatly.

The man considered this. Then he shrugged, settling his broad shoulders back against the wall.

"Fair enough." A beat. "What else is there to do, though?"

Yuto opened his mouth and Closed it.

He looked around the cell — at the old stone, the torchlight bleeding under the door, the rust on the bars that had probably been there since before either of them was born. Then he looked at the wall he’d been staring at, which had already demonstrated its complete uselessness as a conversational partner.

He exhaled through his nose.

The man had a point. An annoying point, delivered with an annoyingly reasonable expression, but a point nonetheless.

"Fine," Yuto said, not warmly. "Yes. Rough day."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Not particularly." He paused. "I’m in here for murder."

The man’s eyebrows went up slightly — not shocked exactly, just recalibrating.

"Whose?"

"Teki Masaru."

A short silence followed that. The man looked at him with a new kind of attention, the way you look at someone when the information you’ve just received requires you to update several things at once.

Then he grimaced — a slow, expressive thing, the grimace of a man doing arithmetic and not liking the sum.

"That’s..." He paused, searching for the word. "You’re in a bit of a pickle."

Yuto laughed. It came out shorter and more tired than he intended.

"That," he said, "is an understatement." He leaned his head back against the stone wall and stared up at the ceiling, where the torchlight didn’t quite reach. "What about you? What did you do to end up rotting in here?"

"Stole from the compound."

Yuto looked at him.

"A few things," the man added, with the careful tone of someone who had decided the specifics were not the point. "Candlesticks. A jade figurine. Small items, easy to carry. Not exactly a grand heist." He spread his hands, a gesture of mild bewilderment. "And for that they tossed me in here like I’d burned the place down. Been here three weeks."

"Three weeks for candlesticks."

"Noble property," the man said, as though that explained everything. It mostly did.

Yuto was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "At least you’ll leave eventually."

The man didn’t answer immediately.

When Yuto glanced over, the man was looking at him with an expression that was almost careful — the way a person looks when they’re deciding whether to say something true but unkind.

"What?" Yuto said.

The man exhaled slowly. "You said *little chance.* Of leaving."

"I did."

"That’s not quite right." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Yuto waited.

"When they come for you next," the man said, "it won’t be to move you to a better cell. Murder of a noble — committed by someone like—" He stopped, and something shifted in his expression. "You don’t have a little chance of leaving. You have zero."

The words landed simply, without cruelty, which somehow made them worse.

Yuto stared at him. "Someone like what?"

The man had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable. He glanced, briefly, at Yuto’s robes.

"No offense intended," he said. "Genuinely. But it’s fairly obvious."

"What is."

"The robes are nice. Good fabric, decent cut." He said it like he was reading from a list. "But you’re thin. Not lean — *thin.* Your collarbones are visible from across the cell. Your face—" He stopped again. "You didn’t grow up eating well. A man who grows up eating well doesn’t look like that, no matter what he puts on."

Yuto said nothing.

The man shrugged with something that might have been apology. "A nobody who kills a noble doesn’t get a trial. That’s just how it works."

The silence that followed was a different kind than before.

Yuto looked down at his bound wrists. At the robes he was wearing — which were, objectively, the nicest thing he had ever owned. Which he had been quietly, privately pleased about, in the way that a person is pleased about a thing they’ve wanted for a long time without admitting it. He had worn them this morning and thought, for approximately three minutes, that he looked like someone who belonged somewhere decent.

His collarbones were visible from across the cell.

He almost wanted to laugh. The man wasn’t wrong — wasn’t even being unkind, just accurate, the way a physician is accurate when they tell you something you’d already half-known. Yuto had only started eating properly a few months ago. Real meals, regular ones, enough of them. He’d been making up for lost ground slowly, putting weight back onto a frame that had spent most of its life running on not-quite-enough.

*At least I got to taste good food before I died.*

The thought arrived with a kind of grim humor, and he let himself have it for a moment — the memory of a proper meal, warm bread, something that hadn’t been stretched thin or gone slightly stale. Small things. He’d thought, when things started getting better, that they were just the beginning. The first step of a longer climb.

He had spent years at the bottom of that pit. Scrambling, scraping, holding himself and Gina together with whatever he could find. And then, slowly, incrementally, things had started to shift. He’d clawed his way up — not to comfort, not to anything a Masaru would recognize as decent living, but *up.* Out of the worst of it. Into something that had started, tentatively, to resemble a life.

*Now.* Of all the possible times for it to end, it wanted to be now.

Not when he was starving in the slums. Not when he was at his lowest, when death would have been almost a relief. But now, when he’d finally started to want things. When he’d started to believe, quietly, that wanting them wasn’t completely stupid.

Something tightened in his chest. Not fear exactly — or not only fear. Something more stubborn than that.

*I refuse.*

He turned to the man.

"Is there anything I can do?" His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Anything at all — to avoid being killed?"